Software Wars is a 70 minute documentary about the ongoing battle between proprietary versus free and open-source software. The more we share scientific information, the faster we can solve the challenges of the future. It also discusses biology and the space elevator.
Here is the feature trailer:
For now, you can watch the movie for free or download it via BitTorrent here: https://video.detroitquaranteam.com/videos/watch/07696431…ac9c7d22b1
The U.S. space agency National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon May 30–31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the global Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge, participants from around the world will create virtual teams that – during a 48-hour period – will use Earth observation data to propose solutions to COVID-19-related challenges ranging from studying the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and its spread to the impact the disease is having on the Earth system. Registration for this challenge opens in mid-May.
“There’s a tremendous need for our collective ingenuity right now,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “I can’t imagine a more worthy focus than COVID-19 on which to direct the energy and enthusiasm from around the world with the Space Apps Challenge that always generates such amazing solutions.”
MANILA, Philippines — A dengue case forecasting system using space data made by Philippine developers won the 2019 National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s International Space Apps Challenge. Over 29,000 participating globally in 71 countries, this solution made it as one of the six winners in the best use of data, the solution that best makes space data accessible, or leverages it to a unique application.
Dengue fever is a viral, infectious tropical disease spread primarily by Aedes aegypti female mosquitoes. With 271,480 cases resulting in 1,107 deaths reported from January 1 to August 31, 2019 by the World Health Organization, Dominic Vincent D. Ligot, Mark Toledo, Frances Claire Tayco, and Jansen Dumaliang Lopez from CirroLytix developed a forecasting model of dengue cases using climate and digital data, and pinpointing possible hotspots from satellite data.
Reader, Tamia Boyden asks this question:
In the 90s, how could we access the internet without WiFi?
This post began as an answer to that question at Quora. In the process of answering, I compiled this history of public, residential Internet access. Whether you lived through this fascinating social and technical upheaval or simply want to explore the roots of a booming social phenomenon, I hope you will find the timeline and evolution as interesting as I do.
I have included my answer to Tamia’s question, below. But first, let’s get a quick snapshot of the highlights. This short bullet-list focuses on technical milestones, but the history below, explains the context, social phenomenon and implications.
The power of somebody believing in you and your ideas is unbelievable. It gives me exceptional strength. I will wake up 6am and crash 1am, working relentlessly in between. Just recently, the mere fact of somebody becoming a PumpkinDB sponsor gave me a lot of confidence in our success and continuing inspiration to dedicate big chunks of my spare time to this work.
In the grand scheme of things, the amount of money the project receives so far is rather insignificant, it just covers some of our associated expenses. So why is it that important?
Well, words are cheap. Many people said they like what we are working on, but the shelf life of the inspiration coming from this kind of feedback is rather short. Having somebody continuously use your work is the best type of validation.
But in the absence of something immediately useful (as it is often the case with any new, non-trivial project), there are two things that rock: contributions (as in “sweat” or “pull requests”) and money. Both time and money are painful to part with, so when somebody parts with either, you know you’re onto something.
About a month ago I read Nadia Eghbal’s post where she was offering a few $5,000 grants, with no strings attached. Since then, I was obsessed with this idea. The basic idea is beautiful in its simplicity (simplified & paraphrased):
You have a project that you really care about, but funding isn’t readily available for it. If I really like your project, I will give you US$5,000 to pursue it. No strings attached.
The moment I finished reading her post, I knew I wanted to do something very, very similar. I know I can invest $5,000 into my own project, but the idea of being able to give the power of scarcely available validation to somebody else is overwhelmingly more exciting. Thank you, Nadia.
So, here it is: I am offering a $5,000 grant to one project of my choice. No strings attached.
You can apply here. Please note that applications are due by June 1, 2017 12am PST and I am expecting to make a decision on which project to fund during the month of June (2–4 weeks) and be ready to send the first installment some time around July 1, 2017
What kind of project am I going to fund?
While I am obviously very inclined to fund an open source software project (that’s where my expertise and passion is, after all), I am explicitly using this offer as an opportunity to learn more about other areas, and if there’s something that will really excite me, I will fund it.
It is important for me to learn why you’re doing this project and why do you think it’s important, so please take your time to answer this question in the application form.
Projects should have a rough scope and a reasonable timeline. Given the amount of money I am providing, it should rather be short (few months or to a year).
If nothing particularly interesting, or something I can relate to, will come my way (though I hope this will not happen!), I reserve a right to choose no project and fund nothing.
Can anybody apply?
As long as I can transfer the money to you in a reasonable and legal way (PayPal, bank transfer, Bitcoin, etc.), there are no restrictions. You can be a citizen of any country, or stateless. Any gender. Any age. Any way you’re wired. Any profession. Any system of beliefs. Anybody.
Can multiple projects be submitted?
Yes, please submit them as separate applications. That said, the less projects you have, the more I will be inclined to believe in your dedication to those.
What does “no strings attached” mean?
You don’t need to pay the money back. I will send you 50% of the amount in the beginning of the project. The rest will come roughly half way through the project, at which point I will check in with you to see how things are going. Upon completion, I’d like to learn how did the project go overall. You can contact me during or after the project if you feel like sharing any updates, thoughts (or questions) with me.
Other questions
Leave a comment here and I’ll do my best to address it. If you want to contact me privately, please email me at yrashk@gmail.com
by Tatiana Moroz
The most moving thing to me about music is it’s ability to change. It changes the mood, the atmosphere, and it fills us with emotion. It can unify mankind in the power of good and triumph over evil regimes. What most struck me was when we saw this in the 60’s and 70’s folk songs that became anthems for the civil rights, equality, and antiwar movements. Even as a little girl, I knew that this core drive and expression for freedom was critical to the success of humanity as we marched ever closer to the nightmarish visions painted in 1984 and Brave New World.
This is a heavy and serious purpose, but one I took to heart as I created songs of hope, sadness, life, beauty and love. I noticed that the music industry seemed averse to this type of meaning based songwriting, and the radio waves were filling with more vapid nonsense by the minute. However, I kept my head down and tried to educate myself on the ways we could organize society for the better.
I joined the Ron Paul movement in late 2011 after I learned about the Federal Reserve system of central banking. I saw that it was one of the biggest obstacles to true liberty. I used storytelling in my music to illustrate the solutions I was finding, but I think we all hit a wall with politics at one point (which is probably how we all know each other in a way as seekers of the truth).
If you told me 6 years ago that I would be involved with “fintech” or technology in general, I would have laughed you out of the room. As soon as I start reading a manual, I disengage, my eyes glaze over, and within 6–8 words, I am daydreaming about something else. Even though my friends teaching me about Bitcoin were able to illustrate the benefits, something didn’t click. I gave them $500 anyway (which was a lot of money to me!) and they bought me some Bitcoins at $11. Eventually as the price went up and I learned more, I became enthusiastic about the possibilities. If my goal was to help “save the world” (for lack of a better term), then there were few inventions in the history of man that could compete with Bitcoin and blockchain technology.
I created the Bitcoin Jingle and became immersed in the community. I soon befriended Adam B. Levine of Let’s Talk Bitcoin, one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts that also acted as a network home to over a dozen other shows. As content creators, we were the first to experiment with artist tokens and markets based around music, podcasts, and other media that removed the middleman and were secured through the power of the blockchain. In 2014 we created TATIANACOIN, the 1st ever artist cryptocurrency, but creating the coin was just the beginning. Upon launch, we soon realized we had to build the ecosystem for the coin to thrive.
Think of artist coins as a type of token that you can hold in a digital wallet, like store credit. These coins can be sold to your fans that want to support your work, similar to a crowdfund or patronage type platform, but they get back TATIANACOIN that they can spend however they want. It can be redeemed for backstage access, music, merchandise, held onto for future rewards, and the coins can even be traded or sold with other music fans. They allow an artist to gather support from their community through long-term fundraising that gives back real value and engagement. Imagine, as a fan, becoming that much more entwined with the careers of your favorite musicians, visual artists, and other content creators! Artist coins also allow for direct messaging, streaming, and support functions between artists and fans. We see this as a more enriching experience than just your average social media platform.
But so what? We built a platform. What does this have to do with artists and a message? Well, currently artists are paid very little. If your song is played on a streaming platform a million times, you are then paid a measly $1000. When you get a record deal, you are getting, in essence, a bad loan from the record company. Most likely, you have to pay it back over the course of your entire career and you have given control over your music to the record company. There is no transparency, it is inefficient, and rife with human error that slows things down dramatically.
But that’s just one side of the problem. The more glaringly wrong side is the homogenous nature of music we now encounter. Corporations want profit and since the repeat of the same old party music can be more secure and lucrative than an edgy performance, that’s what gets made. But humanity and culture suffer, while a select few accumulate more power over our minds and bodies.
To highlight this, I decided to use a drawing of me made by political prisoner Ross Ulbricht of the Silk Road as my album cover. The drug war is an abysmal failure, and the precedent set by this case effects us all. If I was on a major label, I wouldn’t be able to side with Ross and bring attention to the devastation being wrought worldwide by the US governments overzealous prosecution of non-violent offenders. It’s immoral and as an artist, I have an obligation to stand up and say no more.
Artist coins at their core are about the same thing Bitcoin is about: autonomy and freedom. If we do not have control over our money (in the arts and otherwise), we will have a harder time moving toward more prosperity and enlightenment. We now have the tools to take back our most precious means of communication and create communities based around cryptocurrency and P2P. I believe artistic creativity is essential to mankind’s progress, and I hope others will join me in this pursuit to free the art.
To find out more about Tatiana Coin and to support my new album Keep the Faith out March 31, 2017, please go to www.TatianaMoroz.com
When we as a global community confront the truly difficult question of considering what is really worth devoting our limited time and resources to in an era marked by such global catastrophe, I always find my mind returning to what the Internet hasn’t really been used for yet—and what was rumored from its inception that it should ultimately provide—an utterly and entirely free education for all the world’s people.
In regard to such a concept, Bill Gates said in 2010, “On the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world […] It will be better than any single university […] No matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.”
That may sound like an idealistic stretch to the uninitiated, but the fact of the matter is universities like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, The European Graduate School, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, and other international institutions have been regularly uploading entire courses onto YouTube and iTunes U for years. All of them are entirely free. Open Culture, Khan Academy, Wikiversity, and many other centers for online learning also exist. Other online resources have small fees attached to some courses, as you’ll find on edX and Coursea. In fact, here is a list of over 100 places online where you can receive high quality educational material. The 2015 Survey of Online Learning revealed a “Multi-year trend [that] shows growth in online enrollments continues to outpace overall higher ed enrollments.” I. Elaine Allen, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group points out that “The study’s findings highlight a thirteenth consecutive year of growth in the number of students taking courses at a distance.” Furthermore, “More than one in four students (28%) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 5,828,826 students, a year‐to‐year increase of 217,275).” There are so many online courses, libraries of recorded courses, pirate libraries, Massive Open Online Courses, and online centers for learning with no complete database thereof that in 2010 I found myself dumping all the websites and master lists I could find onto a simple Tumblr archive I put together called Educating Earth. I then quickly opened a Facebook Group to try and encourage others to share and discuss courses too.
The volume of high quality educational material already available online is staggering. Despite this, there has yet to be a central search hub for all this wonderful and unique content. No robust community has been built around it with major success. Furthermore, the social and philosophical meaning of this new practice has not been strongly advocated enough yet in a popular forum.
There are usually a few arguments against this brand of internet-based education. One of the most common arguments being that learning online will never be learning in a physical classroom setting. I will grant that. However, I’ll counter it with the obvious: You don’t need to learn everything there is to learn strictly in a classroom setting. That is absurd. Not everything is surgery. Furthermore, not everyone has access to a classroom, which is really in a large way what this whole issue is all about. Finally, you cannot learn everything you may want to learn from one single teacher in one single location.
Another argument pertains to cost, that a donation-based free education project would be an expensive venture. All I can think to respond to that is: How much in personal debt does the average student in the United States end up in after four years of college? What if that money was used to pay for a robust online educational platform? How many more people the world over could learn from a single four-year tuition alone? These are serious questions worth considering.
Here are just a few major philosophical points for such a project. Illiteracy has been a historic tool used to oppress people. According to the US Census Bureau an average of one billion more people are born about every 15 years since 1953. In 2012 our global population was estimated at 7 billion people. Many of these individuals will be lucky to ever see the inside of a classroom. Today nearly 500 million women on this planet are denied the basic freedom to learn how to read and write. Women make up two-thirds of total population of the world’s illiterate adults. It is a global crime perpetuated against women, pure and simple.
Here is another really simple point: If the world has so many problems on both a local and a global scale, doesn’t it make sense to have more problem solvers available to collaborate and tackle them? Consider all these young people devising ingenious ways to clean the ocean, or detect cancer, or power their community by building windmills; don’t you want many orders of magnitude more of all that going on in the world? More people freely learning and sharing what they discover simply translates to a higher likelihood of breakthroughs and general social benefit. This is good for everyone. Is this not obvious?
Here is one last point: In terms of moral, social, and philosophical uprightness, isn’t it striking to have the technology to provide a free education to all the world’s people (i.e. the internet and cheap computers) and not do it? Isn’t it classist and backward to have the ability to teach the world yet still deny millions of people that opportunity due to location and finances? Isn’t that immoral? Isn’t it patently unjust? Should it not be a universal human goal to enable everyone to learn whatever they want, as much as they want, whenever they want, entirely for free if our technology permits it? These questions become particularly deep if we consider teaching, learning, and education to be sacred enterprises.
Anyone who has heard of Bitcoin knows that it is built on a mechanism called The Blockchain. Most of us who follow the topic are also aware that Bitcoin and the blockchain were unveiled—together—in a whitepaper by a mysterious developer, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
That was eight years ago. Bitcoin is still the granddaddy of all blockchain-based networks, and most of the others deal with alternate payment coins of one type or another. Since Bitcoin is king, the others are collectively referred to as ‘Altcoins’.
But the blockchain can power so much more than coins and payments. And so—as you might expect—investors are paying lots of attention to blockchain startups or blockchain integration into existing services. Not just for payments, but for everything under the sun.
Think of Bitcoin as a product and the blockchain as a clever network architecture that enables Bitcoin and a great many future products and institutions to do more things—or to do these things better, cheaper, more robust and more 
secure than products and institutions built upon legacy architectures.
When blockchain developers talk about permissionless, peer-to-peer ledgers, or decentralized trust, or mining and “the halving event”, eyes glaze over. That’s not surprising. These things refer to advantages and minutiae in abstract ways, using a lexicon of the art. But—for many—they don’t sum up the benefits or provide a simple listing of products that can be improved, and how they will be better.
I am often asked “What can the Blockchain be used for—other than digital currency?” It may surprise some readers to learn that the blockchain is already redefining the way we do banking and accounting, voting, land deeds and property registration, health care proxies, genetic research, copyright & patents, ticket sales, and many proof-of-work platforms. All of these things existed in the past, but they are about to serve society better because of the blockchain. And this impromptu list barely scratches the surface.
I address the question of non-coin blockchain applications in other articles. But today, I will focus on a subtle but important tangent. I call it “A blockchain in name only”…
Question: Can a blockchain be a blockchain if it is controlled by the issuing authority? That is, can we admire the purpose and utility, if it was released in a fashion that is not is open-source, fully distributed—and permissionless to all users and data originators?
Answer: Unmask the Charlatans
Many of the blockchains gaining attention from users and investors are “blockchains” in name only. So, what makes a blockchain a blockchain?
Everyone knows that it entails distributed storage of a transaction ledger. But this fact alone could be handled by a geographically redundant, cloud storage service. The really beneficial magic relies on other traits. Each one applies to Bitcoin, which is the original blockchain implementation:
▪Open-source
▪Fully distributed among all users.
▪ Any user can also be a node to the ledger
▪Permissionless to all users and data originators
▪Access from anywhere data is generated or analyzed
A blockchain designed and used within Santander Bank, the US Post Office, or even MasterCard might be a nifty tool to increase internal redundancy or immunity from hackers. These potential benefits over the legacy mechanism are barely worth mentioning. But if a blockchain pretender lacks the golden facets listed above, then it lacks the critical and noteworthy benefits that make it a hot topic at the dinner table and in the boardroom of VCs that understand what they are investing in.
Some venture financiers realize this, of course. But, I wonder how many Wall Street pundits stay laser-focused on what makes a blockchain special, and know how to ascertain which ventures have a leg up in their implementations.
Perhaps more interesting and insipid is that even for users and investors who are versed in this radical and significant new methodology—and even for me—there is a subtle bias to assume a need for some overseer; a nexus; a trusted party. 
After all, doesn’t there have to be someone who authenticates a transaction, guarantees redemption, or at least someone who enforces a level playing field?
That bias comes from our tendency to revert to a comfort zone. We are comfortable with certain trusted institutions and we feel assured when they validate or guarantee a process that involves value or financial risk, especially when we deal with strangers. A reputable intermediary is one solution to the problem of trust. It’s natural to look for one.
So, back to the question. True or False?…
In a complex value exchange with strangers and at a distance, there must be someone or some institution who authenticates a transaction, guarantees redemption, or at least enforces the rules of engagement (a contract arbiter).
Absolutely False!
No one sits at the middle of a blockchain transaction, nor does any institution guarantee the value exchange. Instead, trust is conveyed by math and by the number of eyeballs. Each transaction is personal and validation is crowd-sourced. More importantly, with a dispersed, permissionless and popular blockchain, transactions are more provably accurate, more robust, and more immune from hacking or government interference.
What about the protections that are commonly associated with a bank-brokered transaction? (For example: right of rescission, right to return a product and get a refund, a shipping guaranty, etc). These can be built into a blockchain transaction. That’s what the Cryptocurrency Standards Association is working on right now. Their standards and practices are completely voluntary. Any missing protection that might be expected by one party or the other is easily revealed during the exchange set up.
For complex or high value transactions, some of the added protections involve a trusted authority. 
But not the transaction itself. (Ah-hah!). These outside authorities only become involved (and only tax the system), when there is a dispute.
Sure! The architecture must be continuously tested and verified—and Yes: Mechanisms facilitating updates and scalability need organizational protocol—perhaps even a hierarchy. Bitcoin is a great example of this. With ongoing growing pains, we are still figuring out how to manage disputes among the small percentage of users who seek to guide network evolution.
But, without a network that is fully distributed among its users as well as permissionless, open-source and readily accessible, a blockchain becomes a blockchain in name only. It bestows few benefits to its creator, none to its users—certainly none of the dramatic perks that have generated media buzz from the day Satoshi hit the headlines.
Related:
Philip Raymond is co-chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards Association,
host & MC for The Bitcoin Event and editor at A Wild Duck.
“This January, Alejandro Aravena received architecture’s highest honor. This week, the Chilean architect announced that his studio, Elemental, will open-source four of its affordable housing designs. The projects can be downloaded, for free, from Elemental’s website (here).”
““Our trust in complex systems stems mostly from understanding their predictability, whether it is nuclear reactors, lathe machines, or 18-wheelers; or of course, AI. If complex systems are not open to be used, extended, and learned about, they end up becoming yet another mysterious thing for us, ones that we end up praying to and mythifying. The more open we make AI, the better.””
