Citizens in the Dayton area who want to impact how the state should be divided into congressional districts can attend a meeting organized by The Ohio Apportionment Board on Thursday, August 25, at the old NCR building at 1700 South Patterson Rd.  The meeting starts at 10:00 AM and is scheduled to dismiss at 12:00 noon.

Jennifer Brunner’s web-site, Courage Pac, is urging voters to become “citizen legislators” and attend these regional meetings — eleven are scheduled this week (Aug. 22 – 26) across the state.  The web-site is urging:

Act now and push for these things for a fair process in redrawing the state’s district lines:

* Advance publishing of maps.  The Apportionment Board (and the Legislature when they consider congressional maps) should publish proposed maps on the Internet at least two weeks before they are voted on, to allow for public input, taking the process out of political seclusion.
* Take out the politics.  Maps can and should be drawn based on nonpartisan criteria such as preserving county boundaries and creating compact districts that are politically balanced avoiding favoring one party over another when balanced districts can be created.
* Competitive districts require legislators to be accountable to the public.  Nearly 2/3 of Ohio’s current house, senate, and congressional districts favor one political party or another by over 15%, thus practically ensuring who will be elected long before the election.
* Let the voters decide who will be elected.  61 of Ohio’s 99 state house districts favor Republicans, largely because Republican elected officials drew the districts.  When Democrats drew the districts, they also distorted the lines so that a majority of districts favored the Democrats. How about creating districts not designed with bias toward one party or the other, or if it can’t be avoided, creating as equal numbers of opposing political leaning districts as possible?
* Stop gridlock.  An artificially high number of one sided districts promotes far left or far right leaning legislators and that can promote gridlock with a battle of extreme views getting nowhere.
* Adopt a map generated from the public competition. Draw the Line Ohio is the only place where the public can draw maps that will be scored based on objective, nonpartisan criteria. Winners for the state legislative districts will be announced this week. Drawing can also be done at ReshapeOhio.org with no scoring.

Harvard professor of history, Alexander Keyssar, writes in the Washington Post, “The real grand bargain, coming undone,” that the agenda of today’s conservatives “looks like a bizarre effort to return to the Gilded Age, an era with little regulation of business, no social insurance and no legal protections for workers.”

He says the conservative agenda are calls for the “destruction or weakening of institutions without acknowledging (or perhaps understanding) why they came into being.”

Keyssar says that this agenda forgets that over 100 years ago, in response to the excess of the Gilded Age, America made a grand bargain  — “a balance between private interests and public welfare, workers and employers, the wealthy and the poor” — and that conservatives efforts to destroy this grand bargain is a big mistake.

A century ago, Keyssar explains,“most, Americans were convinced that capitalism had to be replaced with some form of cooperative commonwealth … In the presidential election of 1912, 75 percent of the vote went to candidates who called themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist.’ … The political pressure from anti-capitalists, anti-monopolists, populists, progressives, working-class activists and socialists led, over time, to a truly grand bargain.”

1. First came the regulation of business and banking to protect consumers, limit the power of individual corporations and prevent anti-competitive practices. The principle underlying measures such as the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) — which insured bank deposits and separated investment from commercial banking — was that government was responsible for protecting society against the shortcomings of a market economy. The profit motive could not always be counted on to serve the public’s welfare.
2. The second prong of reform was guaranteeing workers’ right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. The core premise of the 1914 Clayton Act and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — born of decades of experience — was that individual workers lacked the power to protect their interests when dealing with large employers. For the most poorly paid, the federal government mandated a minimum wage and maximum hours.
3. The third ingredient was social insurance. Unemployment insurance (1935), Social Security (1935), and, later, Medicaid and Medicare (1965) were grounded in the recognition that citizens could not always be self-sufficient and that it was the role of government to aid those unable to fend for themselves.

Keyssar says that this “grand bargain” is coming undone

• Regulatory laws (including antitrust laws) are weakly enforced or vitiated
• Private-sector employers’ fierce attacks on unions since the 1970s
• The social safety net has frayed … The real value of the minimum wage is lower than it was in the 1970s.

Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that “The Singularity Is Near” was given a new jolt of credibility this week, when IBM revealed it has developed a new “cognitive computing chip” designed to mimic the functions of the human brain.

Kurzeil is a futurist who notes that the amount of computing power that can be bought for $1000 double every 11 months. Kurzweil predicts this  exponential explosion of computing power will continue and that eventually machines will become billions of times more intelligent than humans.  Kurzweil predicts this “singularity” will occur in 2045.

IBM’s new chip is a radical change in the current 40 year old computer technology that relies on stored programs. IBM reports that this new generation of chip are, “designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition.”

From the news release:

In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.

Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.

To do this, IBM is combining principles from nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing as part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative. The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.

The goal of SyNAPSE  is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment – all while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low power usage. The IBM team has already successfully completed Phases 0 and 1.

“This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century,” said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. “Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government.”

The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.”

Previous posts:

• As The Singularity Approaches — The Aim Of Education Must Be — Awake, Find Oil For Your Lamp, Get Ready
• When Computers Are Billions Of Times More Intelligent Than Humans — What Should Be The Aims Of Education?