the articulate chicano

I recently bought myself a lovely Thinkpad T61p laptop. As an ex-IBMer, I came to love the rock solid design of the Thinkpads they issued us, and every laptop I’ve bought myself has been a Thinkpad.

I am happy to report that the T61p, now made by Lenovo, of course, is no exception. I love this thing. My particular machine has the Core2 Duo processors, a beautiful wide screen driven by an Nvidia graphics card, 3 GB of RAM, DVD burner, and 200 GB of hard disk space. The everything about this machine is right on the mark and nearly perfect, except for the fact that my AT&T wireless network card doesn’t pop out of the PC Card slot when I punch the ejection button. Other than that very minor detail, I can highly recommend the T61p to anyone looking for a powerful but portable workstation.

The Thinkpad came preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate. I had read all of the negative press about Vista, and had some experience dealing with it on relative’s laptops. I almost went ahead and bought XP instead, but I figured I may as well give Vista a fair shot. This is a decision I now regret somewhat.

I say “somewhat” only because I don’t use Vista in my day to day work. I purchased another hard drive for my T61p and use it for running the best Linux distro ever, Slackware. Even so, I spent quite a bit of time setting up the only two apps I need which are currently impossible (at least for me) to run in Linux: iTunes and the software for my Sony eReader.

I don’t know what was more annoying, the extreme SLOOOOOOOOWNESS of the bloated Vista OS, or the constant permission boxes that pop up every time you need to do most anything. One of the things that was wonderful about XP was the rapid boot up time, and that seems to have been forgotten by the builders of Vista. There’s a lot of pretty eye candy with the Aero interface, but that is overwhelmed by the slowness of the system in general and the overly complex security restrictions.

Vista became somewhat more useable when I went back to the “Windows Classic” look and turned off the annoying “need permission to continue” popups by turning off “User Account Control”.

Even so, that didn’t help yet another issue I had with Vista: It would not talk to my networked printer at home! No matter what I did, the drivers in Vista simply would not allow it to talk to my printer.

As I said, I don’t use Vista every day. On I second hard drive, I installed Slackware Linux and have been doing very well with it so far. I am running the latest stable kernel (2.6.24.4), and pretty much everything works well. I went ahead and used the proprietary Nvidia driver for my video card, and it works perfectly with X. I also had to download and install the Atheros wireless chip driver from madwifi.org to get the wireless card working. After spending some time custom configuring my kernel, I installed it, the madwifi driver, and the Nvidia driver, and am happy to report that everything works well. The only thing I have not had time to figure out yet is how to activate the Thinkpad volume control keys on the keyboard.

Overally, I give the Thinkpad T61p an “A+” for design, function and looks. I give Windows Vista a “D+”. I truly hope that Microsoft decides to ditch this abomination, as they did with Windows ME.

Happy New Year! I generally do not do the “new year resolutions” thing, but this year I really do need to focus on one aspect of my personality that has caused me much heartburn: being a procrastinator.

Googling for “procrastination” tells me that this is a common problem, one that the Internet doesn’t do much to help with. I can’t tell you how many hours I have idled away just playing with StumbleUpon.

Most of the procrastination resources on the Internet seem to point to the same solution to the problem: Just do it. There is really little in the way of underlying explanations for why we procrastinate. But there is a lot of advice out there simply telling the procrastinator to get over it, stick to a plan, and make things happen.

In my case, I procrastinate most when it comes to writing. I am working on a couple of writing projects, and they have been stalled for a year now, simply because I am either too tired or unmotivated to write. The plethora of advice on the Net for unmotivated, procrastinating authors all boils down to trying to find the right set of tools and techniques to just do it, to just write.

Such advice has been very unhelpful to me, probably because I don’t like being told what to do, and just want to do things my way. That in and of itself is a problem, of course, one that I need to get over.

However, somewhere in that affective state of wanting to do things my way, lies the answer to my problem. Somehow, I’ve always wanted time to sort of magically alter itself for me, so that I could write whenever I felt like it. But the reality is that I need to do my writing around my day job, and around my obligations as a husband and father of two young kids. What I really resent, then, are the impositions of Life Itself, the demands of work and family life. I resent how those impositions seemingly block my ability to write.

Time for a reality check. Reality is what we make it, and life experiences are entirely based upon how we choose to react. The reality is, if I did not spend so much time goofing off on the Internet, I could probably spend at least 30 minutes a day writing, and probably more. Thirty minutes a day adds up to 182 hours a year, or 22.75 workdays! While I could probably not finish a book in 22.75 workdays, I could at the very least get a very, very good start on it. And that is just working 30 minutes per day!

Thinking further, I guesstimate I would need about 320 work hours total to finish one of my books. That works out to just under one hour per day. If I really want to write this book, then I simply need to focus one hour per day on writing, instead of doing all of the other time-wasting things I do.

Overall, I think that most of the advice to “just do it” with regards to procrastination are correct. What is missing is that each of us needs to go through a process of understanding the reasons why we procrastinate, and understanding how much the procrastination is costing. Those reasons are probably as varied as human experience itself, hence the dearth of information on how to deal with the underlying reasons for procrastination.

Now that the Democratic Party has control of the Congress, one of the many things they’re focusing on is the predatory nature of the big credit card companies in the US. In particular, they’re looking at the ridiculous interest rates, ridiculous fees, and other complexities that credit card companies employ to suck as much money as they can from consumers. It has been said that people who are in debt to these companies have no one to blame but themselves, and that may be true to a certain extent. But the vast majority of the blame should lie squarely at the feet of companies like Citi and Capitol One, for granting credit cards to millions of people who shouldn’t be given a credit card, and then by punishing these very same people with confusing rules, criminally-high interest rates, and absurd fees. I do not think that much will change, simply because these companies are too powerful.

In the meantime, there are many out there who are in a lot of debt. My wife and I have been climbing out of debt for the past four years or so, and we will hopefully be completely out of debt in a year or so, praise God.

What’s the best way to get out of debt? That depends very much on your own individual situation. In my opinion, if your total amount of credit card debt is five percent or less of your total family gross income, then you’re OK. So, if you and your spouse earn a combined $75,000 per year, you are probably OK if your combined credit card debt is equal to or less than $3,750 at any given time.

If your credit card debt is more than five percent of your gross annual wages, then, in my opinion, you may have a problem. If your combined credit card debt is between six and twenty percent of your gross annual wages, then you really should think about engaging immediately in a debt reduction strategy. Thus, if a couple who earns a total of $75,000 gross per year has a combined credit card debt of more than $3,750 but less than $15,000, then they should start working to lower that debt as soon as possible. Why? Interest rates. The higher your debt, the “riskier” you are to your creditors. As a result, they will jack up your interest rate, even if you have a perfect payment history, only because of the fact that the more debt you accumulate, the greater the risk to them of losing that money should you decide you don’t want to repay them.

If you are one of these people whose debt load is greater than five percent of your gross annual wages but less than 20 percent, you can reduce your debt load on your own, without any outside assistance. Dave Ramsey (http://www.daveramsey.com) has an excellent debt reduction strategy that works well for many people, and you really should consider adopting it or one like it, as soon as possible.

At one time, my wife and I had a credit card load that was much more than 20 percent of our gross annual salaries. Indeed, it was more than 50 percent of our gross annual salary! For folks like us, I would very strongly recommend sticking to the Dave Ramsey approach. Another option would be going to a non-profit consumer credit counseling service, similar to the approach we ultimately took. The Dave Ramsey approach would have worked for us (it works for everyone), but it would have taken us a very long time to get out of debt at that rate. To me, the hit we took on our credit rating was worth the time we saved by taking the same approach that consumer credit counselors take. It is a personal choice of course.

We did not actually employ a consumer credit counseling service. Rather, what I did was to negotiate with each of our creditors to have them lower our interest rates so that we could pay off our balances. I would very strongly recommend anyone to NOT do this. It was about five months of sheer hell, of dealing with incompetant people working at credit card companies, and of having agreements made and broken time and time again. The credit card companies are actually set up better to deal with non-profit consumer credit counselors, rather than with debtors one-on-one.

Having said that, let’s say your debt load is equal to more than 20 percent of your gross annual income, and you want to lower it. What do you do?

The first thing I would do would be to very seriously consider if you can use the Dave Ramsey method to lower your debt. The reason for this is that if you do decide to go the non-profit credit counselor route, your credit rating will take a hit. According to Dave Ramsey’s web site, people who have gone through a non-profit debt management program are treated just like Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers when they try and get a home loan.

But if you sit down with your spouse, the bills, and a calculator, and decide it would just take way too long to pay off your bills the Dave Ramsey way, and that you can stand to take the hit on your credit rating, the next thing I would do would be to seriously consider what will happen to you while you are being managed by a non-profit consumer credit counselor. Here is a little snapshot of what happened to us when I called up all our creditors to tell them we needed to lower our interest rates:

1. All of the credit cards that are to be managed by the non-profit agency will be closed. And when you finish repaying them, they won’t be reopened. They’re basically gone forever.

2. Any cards you have that are NOT managed by the non-profit agency will either be closed, or the interest rates will go even higher. This part really got us, and it sucks. My platinum AMEX card, which I had for 10 years and had never even been late with a payment, was immediately closed, and I found out about it when I was trying to use it to pay for a parking garage on a trip, and the card was declined. AMEX is pure evil, I will never do business with them again.

4. During the time that your credit cards are being managed by the non-profit agency, you will be unable to obtain ANY new credit. This means no new car, new home, new credit cards, nothing. If you do, it constitutes a break of your agreement with the card issuers, and they will come after you for all the interest you should have paid them, in addition to jacking up your interest rate back up to it’s astronomically high level.

5. Your credit report will reflect the fact that you had to get your interest rates lowered to repay your debt. The report will say things like “NOT PAID AS AGREED” or some such crap, and this will result in a lowering of your credit score. One of the few pleasant surprises is that our credit score did not go down as badly as we thought it would. It certainly would have been a lot worse had we decided to go for debt renegotiation (where you repay them pennies on the dollar) or even bankruptcy.

So, now you know what you might face if you decide to go the non-profit agency route. And you decide to go for it, to bear it out, to go ahead and live on a cash-only basis for the entire time that your debt is being managed for you. What next?

The next thing you need to do is to gather together all of the latest credit card bills for each of the cards you want to have manged by the non-profit agency. Do NOT include student loans. It turns out that student loans cannot be managed by such agencies, but many of the more unscrupulous non-profit credit counselors will tell you to include them, only so they can increase the fee they charge you.

Get your bills together and contact a reputable consumer credit counseling agency. I have had many people recommend to me Consolidated Credit Counseling (http://www.consolidatedcredit.org). Of all the companies they seem to be above board, and competant.

If you decide to go with another credit counselor, be sure to look for the following:

1. Make sure they don’t charge you an exorbitant fee. Consolidated Credit only charges about 30 or 40 dollars a month. Any company that charges you more, or that charges you a lot based upon your balance is ripping you off.

2. Make sure they are competant. They will sound very competant at the outset, when you are dealing with the sales people. But once your account gets turned over to the folks in the back room, things can change a lot. Checks, faxes, bills all get easily lost, and I even know of one case where an employee was stealing people’s payments.

The issue of competance is sometimes hard to judge up front, but spend a little time Googling for each company you are considering, just to see if you can find instances of other people getting ripped off. It does happen.

Once you do make an agreement with a non-profit agency, three things will begin:

1. Your interest rates will be lowered, sometimes drastically. We did not have any fees or late charges on any of our accounts, but I understand that if you do, those will be removed as well.

2. Some agreed-upon amount of money will be taken out of your checking account every month by the non-profit agency. They will take this money, then distribute the payments to each of your creditors that they are managing for you.

3. Of course, you also need to be ready for your credit to take a dive, as described above, and to live on a cash-only basis. It generally happens within a month of signing your agreement with the non-profit agency.

You will continue to get your monthly statements in the mail. Look over these statements EXTREMELY carefully. Make sure that 1) your creditors are actually getting the payments from the non-profit, and 2) that your interest rates remain as agreed. I understand that if you have your account managed by a non-profit agency, the interest rates won’t change. But for us the rates go back up on random accounts at random intervals, and I have to back and call them up each time.

Track your debt carefully, and make sure that it is going down each month.

I hope this helps. There is nothing like the feeling of being out of credit card hell!

I have been actively looking for a different job for the past few months, with no luck. Right now I work at a job where I have to travel 100 percent. But with a young family at home, that has become rather difficult, so I’ve decided to start looking around for a job local to where I live (San Antonio).

I of course have come across hundreds of jobs on monster.com and careerbuilder.com that I know I could do, and do well. The problem, of course, is that I never seem to have the perfect set of qualifications for each job. One thing I’ve learned over the last few months is that if you do not have precisely the right qualifications specified in a job ad, then your application for employment will simply be ignored. I guess that the reason for that is because recruiters nowadays are innundated with applications, thanks to sites like monster.com. So they need to toss away the obvious rejects and focus on those applications who may show promise. While I don’t agree with this approach, I can understand it. Unfortunately, it leaves people like me in a bind, because I have done so many things in my career and have learned so many fundamental principles that I am quite confident that I could in fact do any number of jobs out there. But since I’ve no direct experience with certain job qualifications, I get cut.

Like I said, I know the reasons for this, but that sure doesn’t do much to give me hope as a trek away from home week after week.

Read good poems. If you really want to get away from the ugliness that life is, read some good poems.

This is a lesson that I’ve recently learned. I am one of those people who have always had trouble understanding poems, or even seeing the point of writing and reading poetry. To me, poetry involved some set of skills and abilities that other people had. These other people were less important, to me, than folks who did really important things like science and engineering. For the most part, I ignored poetry and poets because I did not think that anything from that world concerned me and my life.

Boy, was I wrong. I have been reading a lot of poetry lately, in a simple attempt to improve myself. And one of the things I’ve learned is that poetry matters, a lot. It matters because it opens us up to a world that is full of images of beauty, of love. Poems make you think about your true values, of those concepts and things that really matter in your life. When you find a poem that you like, it resonates with you because it hits at some underlying value that you have, and makes you instantly aware of how your values shape who you are. Do that again and again, and you connect with a part of yourself that has always been there, but that you’ve ignored. Once you “see” that part of yourself, it may make you happy, or depressed, or angry, or confused. But it’s a part of yourself that you need to get to know, if only so that you’ll be able to understand how it affects you as a person.

So don’t be shy, pick up some good poems and get to reading them. You won’t understand them all, but some of them may resonate with you in ways you did not expect. I know that I have been very pleasantly surprised. Here is a list of what I have been told are “good” poets to start with:

• Alan Ginsburg
• Yeats
• Octavio Paz
• Robert Frost
• T.S. Eliot
• Pablo Neruda
• William Blake
• Rainer M. Rilke
• Billy Collins
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Adrienne Rich
• Sharon Olds
• Leonard Cohen
• Robert Burns
• Anne Sexton

If you need a jumpstart, pick up a copy of Garrison Keillor’s book Good Poems. There you will find a large selection of poems that are not only good but easy to read and think about.

In his latest blog post, James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, challenges his critics who cast him as a “doom and gloom” soothsayer with no concrete solutions to his pessimistic scenarios of life in the post-peak-oil era. If any of these critics had ever taken the time to read his books and articles, they would know how wrong they are.

Nevertheless, Kunstler has put forth a concrete set of goals in his latest blog posting. What I’d like to do here is to go one step further and use Kunstler’s goals to generate a set of specific tasks. I hope that these tasks are ones that you can incorporate into your own to-do lists, and help yourself and others prepare for the end of the age of oil.

• Visit the website for your local transit authority and learn how to ride the trains and busses
• Find one local organization to support public transportation, or check out http://www.publictransportation.org
• Write a letter to your congressional representative and senators asking them to start funding the rebuilding of our railroad infrastructure
• Find your local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group and buy your food from them.
• Start a garden, preferably with other neighbors.
• Learn a new cooking skill, such as how to bake bread, grind wheat into flour, making beer.
• Find one local organization or other people who would support changes to local zoning laws to allow mixed-use neighborhoods.
• Write a letter to your city government representative asking them to fight against urban sprawl by allowing mixed use zoning laws
• Support local businesses by patronizing them and avoiding the big box stores and chain restaurants.
• Start a new hobby by learning how to build a simple structure like a small home.
• Learn how to play a musical instrument
• Volunteer to work for a local theatre group
• Read and learn about poetry
• Learn how to teach the new skills and knowledge you are acquiring
• Attend a meeting of a local home-schooling group and begin to help them out and network
• Learn basic first aid, how to use basic medicines, and the use of medicinal herbs.
• Get a copy of Horses for Dummies and learn about horses
• Join a church or other local civic organization to expand your support network.

A recently published study by researchers at Johns Hopkins described the psychoactive effects of psilocybin, as well as the “mystical” experiences it can cause. The thing that was most striking about this study was that it was not new news. In fact, this is stuff that was studied intensively a generation ago.

The sad part of this is that this is not an isolated incident. Over the last five years or so, there have been more and more research papers published that purport to describe some “new” effect or discovery, mostly in the areas of medicine and particularly neuroscience. For example, functional MRI imaging allow researchers to look into the intact human brain in almost real time. Most of the recent MRI studies are nothing more than re-hashed work that was done by experimental psychologists and neuropsychologists a generation or more ago. While MRI imaging and other forms of non-invasive brain visualization techniques are the new thing, one would think that these expensive new toys would be used to produce studies that build upon the older ones, rather than simply confirming existing knowledge. It’s important, of course, to confirm existing knowledge. But it may make more sense to do this type of confirmation work as a part of more original work, and to report the confirmatory work along with the new work.

The question remains as to why this is happening. It is likely that modern researchers (particularly those in neuroscience) are simply not referencing older studies. There is a huge body of literature from physiological psychology, neuropsychology, and animal learning that most modern researchers are ignoring. Some of this may be due to the fact that most neuroscientists today may regard the work of the previous generation as crude. However, a more likely explanation may be that most easily-accessible, web-based literature reference tools simply do not contain content prior to 1995 or so. If they do, it would seem that most researchers nowadays are unwilling to go back that far.

Another reason that scientists may be recreating existing knowledge is that many of the members of the generation that performed the original studies are retiring from their postions at universities and research institutes. This exodus of intellectual capital would obviously result in university departments and thesis commitees paying less and less attention to older research.

The arrogance of most biomedical researchers precludes them from paying more than lip service to this problem. It may be incumbent upon funding agencies to better police the researchers they fund, by forcing them to explore and cite research findings that were produced 20,30, even 50 years ago. This would not be a waste of time. In fact, it would probably help to make researchers more careful about how they spend the tax dollars some of them use to fund their work.

A young scientist nowadays could probably make a good career for him/herself by taking time to study the work of the past one or two generations. By doing so, s/he would jump far ahead of his/her peers, playing with their expensive toys and discovering things that were discovered long ago.

Right now I am attending the Collaboration Best Practices conference at IBM Somers. One of the key messages arising from the presentations I’ve heard thus far has to do with the central importance of collaboration with regard to successful teams, projects, etc. Slowly but surely, it is becoming apparent that collaboration matters, a lot.

Underlying the notion of collaboration, of course, is the notion of relationships between people. You can’t have effective collaboration without having positive relationships with the folks you’re collaborating with. This idea of positive relationships has been written about from a variety of perspectives. From the social networking perspective, I’ve done social network analyses that reveal not only what types of work relationships people have with each other, but also what types of non-work-related social relationships they have with each other as well. In my experience, groups that have extensive extra-work relationships with each other tend to be higher performing in terms of collaborative efforts. This is not earth-shattering news, of course. People who genuinely like each other and consider each other friends will want to spend more time together, and will generally work together more effectively. In my observations, I have noted that there is an extremely strong correlation between inter-group friendships and the collaborative output of the group. Supporting this observation, a couple of speakers at this years CBP conference have shown that groups of people who have been together for a long time are generally better at collaboration.

Given this, it may be important to try and define the quality of intra-group friendships. Most social network analysis tools do just this. However, most real-world interpretations of social network analyses do not allow for a full discussion of friendships and relationships, because it is not deemed to be directly related to particular business goals. Nothing could be further from the truth. The data presented at this years CBP are just the beginning of what is sure to be more and more data showing how important it is to take advantages of our natural propensity to form friendships and other strong social bonds.

My own experience with social network analysis has demosntrated that this is true, and I’ve coined a phrase to desribe the nature of intra-group friendships: a social lattice.

A social lattice is a group of individuals who share mutual trust and empathy among themselves. Trust is manifested as greater self-disclosure among individuals, and social psychologists have shown that self-disclosure is the key to the formation of trusting relationships. Similarly, empathy for other members of a particular group also defines a social lattice. Empathy manifests itself as concern for the other, most importantly as the exchange of information related to health and well-being. The experience of most individuals tends to support the idea that working in a mutually trusting and empathetic environment is preferable to working in an environment of distrust and apathy.

A social lattice is at once a physical thing (the collection of persons in the lattice) and a psychological construct (the degrees to which individuals trust and empathize with others). I use the term “lattice” to not only define this physical/psychological construct, but also to denote the resiliency of the relationships and of the lattice itself.

Social lattices can and often do cut across time and space. The relationships one develops in a social lattice can persist even after an individual has physically moved to another location, and can also persist for a lifetime. I think this is the key notion about social lattices. They are entities that can exist independently of organizational structures. As a result, social lattices may form an important entry point for social networking interventions intended to foster collaboration and innovation.

As we get more and more data relating to the importance of collaboration, I think it would be beneficial to develop tools and methods to better define social lattices in addition to work-related social networks. Social lattices may allow us to better quantify and understand the currently intangible effects of trusting friendships in the workplace.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled Blink was on the bestseller list for a long time, and for good reason. It was amazing to most people that humans can do so much decision-making wholly outside the realm of consciousness, and outside the realm of what we usually think of as “reason.” Yet, these quick decisions, these types of “thin slicing”, to use Gladwell’s term, make up a considerable amount of the daily information processing that humans engage in. Not only that, but there’s the fact that these types of decisions are more often than not the correct ones to be made in any given situation.

Gladwell’s work is important because it shows us that humans are able to make very rational and very correct decisions without engaging in any form of conscious reasoning. Gladwell’s work is in an area of experimental psychology called “social cognition.” It is likely that social cognition in general, and thin slicing in particular, might play important roles in helping humans to think the way we do. Indeed, I would argue that this type of reasoning is a most fundamental component of our reasoning ability, and would further argue that it should be a fundamental component of any AI system, whether that system seeks to model human thinking, or derive the most rational answer to a problem.

Even our highest forms of thinking, such as theoretical physics, are driven by an aesthetic component that is beyond our ability to articulate cleanly. Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate and professor of physics and cosmology at The University of Texas, developed most of the current paradigm of theoretical physics, the so-called “standard model.” Dr. Weinberg has written extensively about the search for better theories to explain our physical world. According to Weinberg, the most important aspect of any physical theory is that it be “beautiful” and “elegant”. But what constitutes beauty and elegance? Weinberg doesn’t know, but he knows it when he sees it, as do all other theoretical physicists. This notion of beauty and elegance in a world as complex as theoretical physics speaks volumes about the importance of our abilities to thin slice, to pick out those cues that are most important, and the importance of those mechanisms that underlie thin slicing.

Gladwell’s thin slicing may become an important area of AI research in coming years. If it does, there will be a need to define some type of mechanism by which thin slicing can occur. Thin slicing may be mediated by a process called latent inhibition. This process has been studied by experimental psychologists for a very long time, going back as far as William James. Briefly, latent inhibition is that process by which we learn the features or characteristics of any given thing that are LEAST important to helping us reach some sort of decision about that thing. For example, in Gladwell’s book, he writes about the abilities of antiquities experts to discern between real antiquities (such as a Greek statue) and well-made fakes. These experts have honed their knowledge over many, many years of looking at and talking about antiquities. If the process of latent inhibition underlies their abilities to instantly thin slice a real statue from a fake one, then we may hypothesize that their many exposures to real antiquities and fake antiquities have taught them the ability to ignore those features that have nothing to do with telling a real from a fake.

We suspect that latent inhibition underlies this ability because it has been studied extensively by experimental psychologists. In one landmark study, Japanese “chicken sexers” were studied to understand their ability to tell the difference between recently hatched male and female chicks. This is a very difficult thing to do. If a non-trained person were to pick up a baby chick and hold it the way the chicken sexers do, and try and guess what the sex of the chick is, they would do no better than chance. But Japanese chicken sexers are able to tell, very quickly, whether or not a given chick is a male or female. The way they are trained is relatively straightforward. They simply look at lots of baby chicks, under the guidance of an experienced chicken sexer. Over time they acquire the skill necessary to tell the difference between male and female chicks. The process of latent inhibition works by actively inhibiting the learning of those cues which do NOT matter in telling one thing from another. In the case of chicken sexers, latent inhibition works by inhibiting the association of specific cues that have little or nothing to do with telling the difference between male and female chicks.

The particulars of how latent inhibition works are still being researched. At present, there is no doubt that our brains possess a system specialized for extracting cues that are relevant for making subtle distinctions, and for suppressing those cues that are irrelevant. It is likely that this system underlies our ability to do Gladwellian style thin slicing.

Thin slicing is an extremely powerful tool. It enables us to make very accurate decisions very quickly. If the process of latent inhibition underlies this process, it is possible that latent inhibition may prove to be a fruitful avenue of research in AI. AI research in feature detection and pattern recognition already employs tools and techniques that look like latent inhibition, but other fields such as automated reasoning and machine learning may gain much by not only building systems that focus on what to learn, but also focus on what not to learn.

What’s up with Peak Oil?

“Peak oil” is a topic that is slowly starting to make it’s way into the common consciousness of the American public. Briefly, peak oil is all about the idea that the world is quickly depleting it’s most easily accesible supplies of crude oil. The term “peak” comes from the fact that the supply of easily accessible crude oil (whether from a single oil field or the supply of the entire earth) may be graphed as a bell curve. Much oil is supplied as the peak of the curve is approached, and less and less oil is supplied post-peak.

There is no doubt that crude oil is a finite resource. And there is no question that at some point in time we will run out of oil. The big questions are 1) When is all of this going to happen, and 2) What exactly with the depletion of oil resources look like?

With regard to the first question, there are generally two large schools of thought. The first tells us that peak oil has already happened. We’re already hit the peak of the bell curve and are starting to see the depletion of several key oil sites (e.g., the North Sea). If we had the truth from the Saudis, we’d know that they are also running out of oil as well. According to these folks, all of planet earth is already post-peak, and in a matter of years we’re going to see increased global competion for the few remaining resources we have left. All of this I view as the more “pessimistic” of the peak oil prophesies.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the more optimistic view, which tell us that the peak oil curve is anywhere from 25 to 50 years into the future. These peak oil prophets don’t deny the reality of finite oil resources. Rather, they think that the oil supply will dwindle in a slow and predictable fashion, such that we’ll have time to make arrangements to run our world on other sources of energy.

In summary, we have an optimistic and pessimistic view of when peak oil will occur. What about the next question, regarding what will happen?

Again, we have an optimistic and a pessimistic view. From the optimistic viewpoint, the bottom line seems to be that technology and markets will come to the rescue. These people tend to believe quite strongly in the power of the free market and human ingenuity. They argue that as oil supplies dwindle, the price of oil and oil by-products will greatly increase. This increase will necessarily make other forms of energy more marketable, and thus great amounts of capital will be spent on the development and deployment of new energy sources, all in time to thwart the effects of a dwindling oil supplu.

On the other side, of course, are the pessimists. Their main line of argument is that since peak oil has already started, we’ve already lost much precious time needed to develop new energy sources. Even if we were to start today with a “Manhattan Project”-style program aimed at developing new replacements for crude oil, we would never have everything developed and deployed in time to aid us in dealing with the effects of peak oil Furthermore, we have the added complication regarding the incredible versatility of crude oil. It is used not only as a primary energy source, but also used to create an extremely wide variety of things, from plastics to agricultural chemicals. The most dire pessimists warn us that the “carrying capacity” (i.e., the number of people that can be sustained) of the planet earth has been artificially inflated by the use of oil to power modern economies and feed untold billions of people. When oil goes away, we will experience a massive “die off,” the likes of which have never been seen in human history.

To summarize, we again have two contrasting views of what will happen to us when peak oil hits. On the one side we’ll be resued by free markets and technology. On the other side, we’re too late to do anything about the problem. We have run out of time and resources needed to avert a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Of course the big question is, “Who’s right?” If you go searching for information on peak oil, you come away with a mishmash of viewpoints, from the pessimistic views of people like Jim Kunstler (who is an excellent writer) and Matt Savinar, to the propaganda spread about by the oil multinationals. Over the last year or so I’ve spent a considerable amount of time studying all of these sources and have come to the conclusion that is similar to one that we see again and again everytime we’re dealing with an extremely complex topic: The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

Thus, with regard to the idea of when peak oil is likely to occur, my best guess is that we are something like 10 to 15 years away from the world-wide oil peak. This means that around the year 2018, give or take a few years, we’ll hit peak oil, and almost immediately will begin to see the effects of hitting that bleak milestone.

I believe further that the effects of peak oil will be somewhere in the middle of the optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints. This middle ground will likely resemble a worldwide economic depression, with greatly reduced economic production, massive unemployment, food shortages, perhaps even large numbers of deaths in third world countries. I also think it possible that we’ll see some wars break out, with the US and other global powers fighting for remaining resources.

The real wild card in this scenario isn’t really the what and when of peak oil. In my opinion the real wild card has to do with global warming and it’s effects. Will global warming alter the climate so much that we’ll face severe droughts and water shortages? If so, then we’ll have the concurrent catastrophes of peak oil, no water, and no food. While there seem to be clearly optimistic versus pessimistic viewpoints in the world of peak oil, there are no such clear-cut views with regard to the ultimate effects of global warming.

In sum, the end of the oil age will likely bring about an economic depression and hardship for the world’s poor. It will mean the end of much of the American lifestyle. But I don’t think it will mean a massive die-off of the world’s population, and do belive that the economic depression will force the world to alter it’s lifestyle and force both governments and free markets to come up with viable alternatives to the use of crude oil. This is all likely to happen about 15 years from now. The only question mark in all of this, and the thing we should be equally worried about, is global warming. By itself, peak oil would probably be a difficult but manageable problem. But if global warming ultimately causes a global reduction in the supply of fresh water and food, we’re in for a rough ride, perhaps an apocalypse of unprecendented proportions.