Graham Glass, etc.

New Venture, Part 9

This is part 9 of the series; part 8 is here.

As anyone who's started a business will know, it's the last 10% that seems to take forever. That's the way it's been feeling recently, but finally there is light at the end of the tunnel.

In less than two weeks, I'll be making a private beta available to get some initial feedback. A public beta will be released 1-2 months after that, at which point the real fun begins!

The tagline for my new company is:

Free Community Education for School and Home

It represents the logical intersection between education and web 2.0, an inevitable convergence that I aim to be part of. If you're interested in giving the private beta a spin, please email me.

Part 10 of this series is here.

Overly sanitized environments may lead to illness

This article describes some interesting studies regarding the correlation between overly clean environments and overly-sensitive immune systems. The idea is that immune systems learn by responding to foreign bodies in the environment, and overly clean environments stunt the immune system by preventing it from learning properly.

This is something that I have believed for a long time, because animals in the wild survive perfectly well surrounded by all kinds of dirt and bacteria.

In many respects, I think the metaphor also applies to political correctness. The more society attempts to sanitize speech and the press, the more over-reactive its citizens become to relatively tame events. It's quite common to hear about people being "shocked and appalled" by things that are pretty innocuous in my opinion .

Perhaps society itself is suffering from an overly reactive immune system?

Infoworld: Open Source Education

Jon Udell at Infoworld wrote a nice article about Open Source Education and what I've been up to on my education project. So far, I've been extremely pleased with my decision to use Ruby and Rails; not only is the core language and platform easy to use, but the selection of 3rd party libraries is good and growing fast.

RailsConf 2006

I'm looking forward to the RailsConf 2006 in Chicago next week. If anyone would like to meet up, please send me an email. I'm especially interested in demoing the latest version of my education software, which of course was built using Ruby on Rails!

A New Constitution, Part 4

This is part 4 of the series; part 3 is here.

In the last part of this series, I added a new guiding principle related to use of force. The constitution is now comprised of two rights:

The right for each person to live according to their own values.

The right to live free of physical force, both real and threatened.

According to these guiding principles, here’s how law, sanctions and reason can be used to address conflicts:

LAW: A law cannot be passed that violates a guiding principle, so only behaviors that involve real or threatened force can be criminalized.

SANCTIONS: If a person does something that another person does not approve of, the disapproving party may react in whatever manner they wish as long as it does not involve the use or threat of force. In other words, sanctions are a peaceful way for people to protest against values they do not share.

REASON: I think this is the best way to affect long-lasting change, because unlike sanctions, use of reason attempts to change the underlying values that give rise to behaviors. Since free speech and free press follow automatically from the guiding principles, anyone can use reason as a means of influence.

In the next part, I'll discuss the controversial aspects of this approach to addressing conflict.

Thought provoking article about School

This thought provoking article challenges the goals of public education. It's written by John Gatto, a New York State and New York City teacher of the year award winner.

I really like his conclusion; that schools should aim to teach children to be leaders and adventurers, not employees and consumers. In addition, the comments on Digg are interesting to read.

I hope that the product I'm working on contributes in some small way towards John's vision of a more enlightened education system.

First Demo at Ruby Meetup

My education product will go into private beta later this month, and I'm demoing it for the first time tomorrow evening at the San Francisco Ruby meetup. It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction it gets!

An Inconvenient Truth

I just saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's movie about global warming. He did a great job of convincing me that not only is global warming definitely occuring, but it's happening at a far greater rate than most people imagine.

One of the most shocking parts of the movie is where he presents strong evidence of the polar melting that, if not slowed, will cause sea level to rise about 20 feet in 50 years or less. 20 feet doesn't sound like much until you see maps of what regions like Beijing, Shanghai, Florida and the Netherlands would look like after the melting; vast amounts of land disappear and approximately 100 million people would be displaced.

By the end of the movie, I was appalled by how long the evidence has been dismissed by governments in an attempt to appease industries that would be harmed by environmentally sound policies. Fortunately, many countries and individual states are waking up to the real and present danger, so there is hope that this crisis can be averted.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, I highly recommend it.

Follow up: This article is an interesting rebuttal to Al Gore's arguments. It is indeed a tough thing for an observer of this debate to get to the heart of the matter. My stance is that regardless of the confusion, reduction of pollution is a good thing, and the sooner we deal with it, the better. When the stakes are this high, there's no time for screwing around.

Another follow up: This thread on Slashdot discusses the movie and the rebuttal I mentioned above. After reading the thread, I'm more convinced than ever that Gore's argument holds water.

A New Constitution, Part 3

This is part 3 of the series; part 2 is here.

In the last part of this series, I introduced the first guiding principle of a new constitution:

The right for each person to live according to their own values.

The second guiding principle is related to conflict resolution. If one person does not like another person's values, how should they be allowed to respond? Possible responses lie on a spectrum that ranges from use of physical force to pure reason:

1. Physical force.
2. Threat of physical force.
3. Introduce a law whose violation typically involves a fine and/or jail sentence.
4. Sanctions.
5. Reasoned argument.

I think that (1) and (2) are thoroughly unpleasant and have undesirable side-effects, so the second guiding principle is:

The right to live free of physical force, both real and threatened.

Physical force would be only allowed when dealing with people who are violating the second principle.

In the next part of this series, I'll discuss (3) thru (5).