Kent Bye

somewhat unsettling knowing my absentee ballot might not really be counted. Isn’t a deal breaker for Obama in MD, but still dampens my faith 2 days ago

thinking an Obama victory would be an emotional cathardic realease from the collective Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from 8 years of Bush 1 day ago

I love the smell of blowout in the morning… tastes like victory. God I hope McCain doesn’t steal this one. Or if they do, they get caught 1 day ago

The collective consciousness has now officially eaten my focus factor. I’m experiencing an excited anticipation not felt since Christmas ‘86 about 15 hours ago

Stuck in a traffic jam listening to NPR & reading election tweets. NH & Pennsylvania! Come on Hoosiers! Don’t disappoint me about 14 hours ago

This is the first election that I’ve voted for the Presidential winner. We’ll be going to Obama’s inauguration speech to celebrate. about 11 hours ago

I really hope Indiana goes for Obama. It’ll feel so much nicer to go home to a Blue state. Saw a tweet that the gap is down to 12000 votes. about 11 hours ago

Wow. Two people in my twitter stream are going to be on CNN talking about citizen journalism in 30-60 min. @stevegarfield & @ chuckumentary about 11 hours ago

Sen Al Franken? Hilarious Hologram tweets. PBS’ Leher “Mathematics is not really our strong suit.” Flip. CA called — 275! about 11 hours ago

Ray Suarez got a tip “Watch out for Sarah Palin.” Collective sigh. And is Jim Lehrer like high, drunk or just totally exhausted? about 10 hours ago

Sounds like McCain has been practicing his concession speech. The crowd looks a bit shell shocked while yelling their ackward bitter boos about 10 hours ago

Two things make me sad tonight. The fact that the popular vote was as close as it was & that Obama’s grandmother passed before seeing this. about 10 hours ago

Elder CBC reporter saying that spontaneous demonstrations at the White House organized by “text message machines” And MD voted in slots :p about 10 hours ago

Transcendent. Look forward to more reality-based Obama speeches filled with nuance & an open-hearted spirit of collaboration. Tears flowing. about 9 hours ago

Obama is like Craig Newmark in that he leads from behind and doesn’t let his ego get in the way. He was somewhat subdued to build bridges. about 9 hours ago

Waking up excited, happy, optimistic & inspired because of national politics. Wow, I’ve never been able to say that. Feels like a dream. :) about 2 hours ago

We posted an Obama video back on Feb 18, 2007 after giving him money. Quite amazing how much of his vision was actualized http://is.gd/6pdf less than a minute ago

Photo by David Orban

The Singularity Institute held a Singularity Summit in San Francisco on September 8th & 9th that brought together some of the leading thinkers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The basic premise is that technology is already accelerating at an exponential rate and drastically changing our lives and culture. Technology is already augmenting our lives in many different ways -- from Google search, social networks, recommendation systems, cell phones and beyond. The vision is that at some point these technologies will start to have an even more generalizable intelligence that will help us in even more ways than they are now.

And when these AGI's are able to iteratively improve themselves and evolve and improve over time, then at some point they may become as smart as -- or smarter than humans. This is the point that is commonly referred to as "The Singularity," because our models of the world start to break down when we have entities that are smarter than humans.

Photo by gi

This immediately brings up all sorts of dystopian visions that Hollywood and science fiction writers have been fleshing out for many years. There are indeed a lot of risks and power that will come from these technologies, but there are also a lot of benefit that can come from them as well.

So this weekend explored a range of the possible empowering breakthroughs of human potential as well as doomsday perils of a highly evolved artificial general intelligence. There was a wide variety of different perspectives over the weekend, and the discussion resolved much of my initial, gut-level Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about this issue -- yet I still have a number of concerns for how some of the many open questions will play out.

Below are my notes from the weekend's event in a pretty raw form:
[NOTE: I'll be adding in some more of these slides from Flickr as time permits]

DAY ONE

* Rodney Brooks: Singularity is a period not an event
* Eliezer Yudkowsky: Introducing the "Singularity": Three Major Schools of Thought
* Barney Pell: Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence; Architecture, Development, and Funding
* Sam Adams: Superstition and Forgetfulness are Critical Components of AGI
* Wendell Wallach: The Road to Singularity: Comedic Complexity, Technological Thresholds, and Bioethical Broad Jumps
* Marcos Guillen: Visualizing the Neurological Correlates with CCortex
* Jamais Cascio: Metaverse Singularity
* Stephen Omohundro: The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence
* Peter Voss: Increased Intelligence, Improved Life
* Neil Jacobstein: Innovative Applications of Early Stage AI
* Ben Goertzel: Nine Years To a Positive Singularity -- If We Really, Really Try
* Paul Saffo: Machines of Loving Grace: Envisioning Advanced AI

DAY TWO

* Peter Norvig: The History and Future of Technological Change
* J. Storrs Hall: Asimov's Laws of Robotics -- Revised
* Peter Thiel: Financial Markets and the Singularity
* Charles L. Harper, Jr.: Superintelligence, the Dilemma of Power, and the Transformation of Desire
* Special XPrize Presentation
* Steve Jurvetson: Dichotomy of Designed and Evolutionary Paths to AI Futures
* Christine Peterson: Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security
* James Hughes: Waiting for the Great Leap...Forward?
* Eliezer Yudkowsky: The Challenge of Friendly AI
* Ray Kurzweil: Accelerating Change Q & A

* Post-BarCamp Block Wrap-Up: About [32] twitters will follow w/ random insights, thoughts & quotes that I've jotted down, but not posted yet

* Interesting facts: BarCampBlock raised $26k in two weeks. There were 23 rooms in 11 locations w/ 6 time slots = 138 possible 30 min sessions

* BarCampBlock works well as a 1-block concept, but not a 3-square block one. I only went to a far away space once. Better to concentrate geo

* Open Source Geek Toolkit was brainstorming a CMS that aggregates all of their social media under one roof: http://tinyurl.com/2jqpth

* GTD session was very catalyzing. Very Handy GTD workflow cheat sheet: http://tinyurl.com/2peoc9 * My session notes http://tinyurl.com/2nf2tf

* GTD is all about clearing your psychic RAM to be present. I think twitter does a great job of clearing our insight/emotional/ephemeral RAM

* Someone in the GTD session was reading the 4-hr Workweek book, which is a pretty intriguing concept. He only checks his e-mail once a week

* Lots of people were interested in the Open Source Visualization session, which mostly demoed Graphviz. I'll have to put notes online soon.

* Just posted a photoset of graph visualizations from a nifty text-to-flowchart maker called Graphviz 4BarCamp talk: http://tinyurl.com/24xvop

* Random UI idea: Make a graph out of quantitative connections/data w/ GraphViz & hyperlink directly to wiki page to hash out qualitative info

* Christian Crumlish did a great presentation about Design Patterns & we had a Social Media Pattern Brainstorm here: http://tinyurl.com/3xbh3k

* I wonder if there are design patterns for making an engaging barcamp session. Brainstorming, conflict, have fascinating topics -- What else?

* BradFitz, DaveMan692 & jsmarr ran a tightly controlled session on Open Social Graph. Kept on topic & lots of dense info. Some fireworks too.

* One session I wish I took more detailed notes was "Opening the Social Graph." Amazing hacking & lots of promise for less annoying social web

* Most exciting innovation today was opening up the social graph. NO MORE ADDING FRIENDS on every new social site. Declare it once & your done

* BarCamp is like open source in that contributions back to the community are valued. There's a lot of room for documentation improvements

* Having specific IRC transcription rooms could help people jump from session to session - or watch remotely. They also need online schedules

* e.g. Liz Henry & I did a live transcription of EFF Privacy discussion & we complemented each other pretty well: http://tinyurl.com/2a3axl

* Danny O'Brien: True Radical Transparency is Viral i.e. no man is an island & publishing everything re: your life auto opts in your friends

* Aggregating friend info can be revealing & so Tantek pollutes the system w/ "social network chaff" by friending totally random ppl.

* Someone re: Tantek's flooding: "I'm sorry you're not my real friend. You're just my social network chaff." heh.

* TechMeme editor had "conflict" as his tag b/c so many headlines are due to some type of conflict. So true. We usually learn from conflict

* Many intense discussions had an element of opposition. EFF lawyer pushed back a lot in Open Social Graph talk Re: http://tinyurl.com/29jxpv

* Overheard: Adblock extension makes sites faster, which in turn means that IE users end up subsidizing the Firefox users on many sites. Hmmmm

* I learned a lot at Agile Devel 101 session: Story, Use Case, Priority, Code, Daily Checkups, Iterate, Test, Eval: http://tinyurl.com/2c4bpx

* A main tenet of Agile development is to "Fail soon & Fail often." Set short iteration cycles & get something working ASAP & expand from that

* Difference between real architecture & software dev is you can't build the roof before the walls. Need the essential foundation built first

* I need to become a lot more agile & process a backlog of brain crack -- like how Ze Frank describes in this video: http://tinyurl.com/yo8hq8

* It was disappointing to see so many sessions on Facebook apps, but refreshing to see a lot of effort & energy put into future of open web

* Chris Messina doesn't like the trend of proprietary tech like AIR / Silverlight & pushed back on Mozilla folks at http://tinyurl.com/2fyppz

* Messina also had ppl tell what they learned, didn't expect or suggestions at the end. It be nice to have all insights in a twitter stream

* Overall, BarCampBlock was very catalyzing & rewarding for me. Lots of new mental connections, synthesis, synergy, learning & networking.

via http://www.twitter.com/kentbye_tech (my alter ego for http://www.twitter.com/kentbye)
(photo credit: BarCamp Attendee)

Great job Dave Berlind wrote up a pretty interesting piece about how Twitter fits into the media ecosystem called Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media, and there were some insightful comments that inspired me to leave a comment, which is listed down below. Berlind documents his track record of being a pretty good detector of the latest trends in the article, and I think he's right about where twitter may fit in -- in additional to other uses that he didn't think of -- as well as others that no one else has thought of either.

Here are my five thoughts that came up while reading this piece:

Just got an e-mail from Jay Rosen about helping out with some video editing for the '08 Iowa coverage for Off-the-Bus. He's got a pretty sweet connection with the HuffingtonPost, which could be some great exposure. And an opportunity for me to be more directly involved in the '08 elections. Time is the only consideration, and so I brainstormed a number of ideas that would make the process more collaborative, and make my life a lot easier.

15.) SiCKO doesn't pull any punches when it comes to Emotional Impact.
Moore lets people tell their personal stories and we can collective empathize with the traumas and horror stories of dealing w/ profit-driven health care. I cried more than once during the film, and I didn't feel like I was manipulated into it. I was authentically moved and outraged. I don't know what the best solution to healthcare will be, but my takeaway from Moore's film is that I'm convinced something needs to happen about it.

14.) SiCKO felt like a real journey of exploration and learning.
Health care is a complicated and depressing topic. Moore manages to get you to challenge your own assumptions about the way things are and they way things could be. It didn't feel pre-planned or scripted, but a real serendipitous unfolding of the story. He let the stories find him rather than him trying to manufacture them with stunts (minus the trip to Cuba of course).

13.) Moore provided a lot of historical, economic and political context in SiCKO
Moore inspires a sense of curiosity about health care and how Americans got ourselves into this current health care mess. Nixon's support of the privatization of health care sold as a improvement when they knew they were gutting it was a brilliant find. There were also some other archival gems with the AMA footage bashing government healthcare, Socialist propaganda clips, and tons of other ephemeral and campy archival b-roll. Moore also follows the money, which usually goes straight to the seeds of political and corporate corruption. Uncovering all of the connections between the monied interests and the policy makers is always worthwhile since it is one of the best explanations of past and future behavior.

12.) Moore showed us, and didn't just tell us.
Moore has a history of getting on his soap box and preaching, but here he just let the facts and stories tell the story. No need to embellish the personal horror stories with a flashy arsenal of tricks and stunts. Text and audio can only go so far as communication mediums. I learned a lot more about the state of Health insurance by watching SiCKO than I have from consuming any other type of media about it. The first-person testimonials of former HMOs employees describing their profit strategies through denying coverage really puts into perspective where their priorities are.

11.) Moore is a master of finding Visual Metaphors
Moore displayed a panoply of medical nightmares with everything from getting fingers chopped off to other potentially preventable outcomes like losing a baby, losing a spouse, dying of a terminal illnesses, and losing your home due to medical bills. Moore also showed US "enemy" & communist Cuba giving health care to 9/11 rescue workers, and it strikes a deep nerve because it represents so much more than just what we're seeing on screen. Moore is a master of capturing boiling complex issues down to these powerful visual metaphors that are seamlessly integrated into the film.

10.) Moore continues to bring documentaries into the Mainstream
Whatever you think of Michael Moore, you can't deny that he's helped shepherd documentary filmmaking from the isolated desserts of film festivals, PBS stations and university libraries into a profitable, mainstream enterprise. He has a very distinct blend of humor, commentary, stunts and facts that make hard truths a lot easier to swallow. In the same way that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have re-invented political commentary, Moore has redesigned and innovated a powerful form of socially conscious media -- one that is able to communicate an amazing amount of information into a film in way that is very efficiently compressed. The fact that documentaries can be shown next to summer blockbusters shows me that documentaries have come a long way in the last 5-10 years.

9.) Moore has a strong Point-Of-View and he communicates it with a passion
Some of the best journalistic work comes from having strong opinions and perspectives on an issue -- especially if it is a contrarian one in a sea of status quo. Moore has certainly pushed the boundaries of documentary filmmaking in the sense that he's more of an editorialist rather than investigative journalist. He certainly borrows from both styles, but at the core Moore is trying to persuade his audience of a particular political solution -- in this case Universal Health Care. So is his approach perfect? No. Moore is still a polarizing figure and the language of film is itself incomplete since information has to be edited and put into a narrative form where distortions will inevitably happen. I personally think interactive multimedia has the potential to fill some of these gaps, and that the Internet medium is much better suited to conveying the fractal-like landscape of truth. But on the whole, I think Moore is able to communicate a lot of essential truths even with all the tricks and artistry that linear documentary films provide for. Many of his critics continue to deconstruct his technical and stylistic flaws while minimizing the gestalt of his arguments. I'd love to see more of a focus on the common ground and cooperation towards common solutions.

8.) SiCKO inspires a sense of hope amidst the current dismal state of the health care system
American health care is a f'd up -- rotten to the core. Other countries have gotten it right, and we can get it right too with the right political leadership and a real bi-partisan and cooperative effort. It's going to take the destruction of a number of entrenched business models, but profiting on death is pretty bad karma and a poor design for running a society. Being able to see how what type of treatment people receive with socialized health care from everywhere from Canada to Britain to France to Cuba really shows what's possible beyond what we have here in the states.

7.) I don't agree with all of the solutions suggested in SiCKO, but I'm ecstatic that he's started a National dialogue about it.
I don't think that any one government heath care systems featured in Moore's film has found all of the answers for how to heal people in an integral fashion. I personally believe that a key component to healing is taking the personal responsibility to eat proper nutrition, exercise, and do as much preventative health practices as possible. Having government institutions that can support this is definitely worthwhile. But having socialized medicine on top of a Fast Food nation where instant gratification is of utmost importance will not result in any type of Utopian society any time soon. There are some reductionistic assumptions to our Western medical model which may be fundamentally flawed, and some of these flaws are going to obviously trickle into some of Moore's health care arguments. However, I think that the film is an incredibly effective launching point for discussing and debating this issue further, which can a lot of amazingly positive ripple effects. I wholeheartedly agree that removing the profit-motive from health care should be the first prong in a multi-pronged strategy. I don't know the best way to get from A to B (i.e. whether Universal Health Care is a first step), but I totally agree that we need to move away from A.

6.) Moore draws out a lot of candid non-verbal reactions from interviewees
One thing not to be overlooked is how Moore's line of questioning is often designed to evoke certain emotional and body language reactions from the interviewees. Moore is great at following a line of questioning as if he has the intelligence of a child. The questions are downright inane in some cases because you know that he already knows the answer. That doesn't matter though. The whole point is that he's able to evoke some interesting and surprising reactions from his interview subjects -- both verbal and non-verbal. So the lesson is to not always be so logical in your line of questioning because there's nothing like a WTF? reaction to illuminate the absurdity of a group think premise.

5.) Moore shines a Spotlight on Our Collective Shadow
Moore is able to bring light to the darkness of our society. Whether it's how we medically treat the lower working class and poorest of the poor or how power and greed continues to corrupt our economic and political system. Moore serves as a mirror of our society. Sometimes we don't want to look at certain parts of our collective body. But we're all interconnected and so it's vitally important to bear witness to the imbalances in our ecosystem and that we restore harmony where we can.

4.) Moore isn't afraid to speak truth to power
It is awfully damn refreshing feeling to hear truth spoken to power. Those truths resonate through my body, and rekindles the fire in my own belly to "Serve the Truth" and "Defy the Lie" -- as the Dharma Punx sticker on my laptop reminds me. Moore is going after some of the bedrocks of our American economy, and he serves as a canary in the coal mine trying to bring some attention to the fundamental flaws in our society's foundation. Where are our priorities at when we're spending trillions of dollars on wars in contrast to Cuba which invests so much of their limited resources to the health and well-being of their citizens?

3.) Moore is able to chip away at years of government propaganda
Moore tackles taboo topics like socialized medicine, the demonization of Cuba, and inherent skepticism about everything from France's work benefit culture to government-run healthcare. Moore is deconstructing the Matrix of half-truths that our government has propagated for so many years. The best propaganda always has some grains of truth to it, and Moore doesn't always remind us of the totalitarian dark sides of socialism and communism -- but at the same time he is able to humanize the French, Cubans and government doctors who are working within socialized health care systems that are functional.

2.) Tony Benn's insights for maintaining control over a democracy.
Some of the more poignant moments of the film from the interviews with British politician Tony Benn. His comments about controlling societies through fear and demoralization were particularly insightful. This illuminated potentially sinister motive for why politicians may be indifferent towards empowering citizens with the structural resources that they need to become healthy and active citizens. It is a lot easier to control a population when they're enslaved by their own debts and fears of living through a medical nightmare without health insurance.

1.) There are a number of powerful contemplative moments within the film.
There is a point in the film where Moore asks, "Who are we?" and "What have we become?" He makes us question who we are and where our priorities lay. When we live in the Bubble of American culture, then sometimes we forget that other countries have different worldviews and values. What hit me hard was seeing how much vacation the French were allotted each year. I myself tend to get sucked into a workaholic American culture, and learning to take time to relax, have fun and enjoy life is so vitally important.

So in conclusion, SiCKO changed me. It moved something in me like An Inconvenient Truth did. Solutions to this problem are worth finding, and I have a feeling that Jen and I will be exploring some of these solutions in a number of different ways with our life's work. People deserve to have the resources available to heal themselves -- whatever those resources may be and whatever that may look like -- it's a fundamental human right that I'm grateful to Michael Moore for shining a huge spotlight onto it. He's broken a huge taboo, and now lets see where we can take it from here.

Just got back from playing 3 hours of table tennis at the CircleCenter. First night of "game night" there was 9 people who showed up. I'm the type of player to dive after balls while playing -- just so you know.

I started KentBye.com sometime back in 1999. I used to have over 200 pages of content on located here from my Film Festival travels, film projects and more.

There is even some Archive.org evidence of me "blogging" from June 18, 2000 to September 5th, 2000 -- although it wasn't called blogging back then. It was me editing a static HTML page every day with updates on how my editing was going on my first-ever documentary Handicamp.

Skimming through this "post-production log," I was struck by how conversational I was about my Reality TV addiction that I had at the time, but also what an intense time period of my life that was. I basically edited an entire feature film in 13 weeks, while also working a full-time engineering job. Needless to say, I wanted to document how much of a social life I didn't have at that time in my life.

So I deleted much of the original content from KentBye.com a couple of months ago while I was testing some Drupal stuff for the Echo Chamber Project. And it is just now that I want to revitalize KentBye.com for a centralized home that aggregates all of the different digital work that I'm doing underneath one umbrella -- or at least points people in the right direction for where that content is stored.