Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Nathan
Ken is advising that the PowerPoint presentation, attached, be given to the potential Angel investor on Friday. It is a 8 week project with a budget of 120K.
Of course, our group needs a minimum of 600K
http://www.bcngroup.org/investment/hearing/
to bring balance to the planning process for the National Project.
However, based on what we have already accomplished, if we can get the Readware Provenance (TM) product on the market we will have a proof of concept and proof of product.
The fact is that an investment of 120K is very low because of the work already done and our ability to get immediately to the tasks outlined in the PowerPoint (towards the back). Without your help on this, 120K would not be enough. I cannot code the system and develop the notation at the same time, it just requires two different parts of my single brain.
Pubic awareness is growing.
My sense is that a growing public exposure has developed over the principles we have stated as HIP (Human-centric Information Production) and as the Conjecture on Stratification. Marketing Readware Provenance ™ may be the tipping point needed to bring the inhibition of HIP and stratification forward as an issue in the Presidential campaign. The Presidential campaign is one reason why we have focused Orb + Readware integration on the web harvest of political weblogs.
It is also true that the entrenchment in the academy and in government IT procurement is being exposed in the Congress; I certainly have worked hard to do this over the past three years.
DARPA may, rightly should, be forced to investment in the work being done by our group. I am even hopeful that Hicks and Associates might recognize an opportunity to make money the honest way, in contrast to past behaviors that have been observed by more than four of our group.
The DC Think Tanks will follow the funding, and I WISH that this was not true - but perhaps the funding mechanism is necessary to cause a revolution in science. Economic success may be the only way that HIP and stratification theory will become accepted science. A theoretical framework for considering how function and process are related is being developed (see Battelle’s paper discussed below).
We suggest that 1/6 of the total sum given by the federal government in direct aid to computer science departments should be re-programmed. The 300 million that is freed up this way might be used to support the creation of the K-12 curriculum in the science of knowledge systems and some first academic departments for knowledge science.
Clearly this re-programming would create a different type of environment for hundreds of knowledge scientists to work within.
The case has to be made in the White House, that the 1.3 billion in direct funding of work in computer science is not justified by the objective evaluation of the results. The historical arguments by Penrose, Rosen have been made. These arguments will not go way. The arguments are grounded in a natural science and can withstand the objective criterion of science communities, but not if the alternative is so heavily funded and the funded community so unfairly biased.
The consumer markets consume an additional two trillion in direct expenditures on hardware and software (figure from the Wall Street Journal). Why should the government and the public continue to put up with this level of expenditure on something that is made dysfunctional so that next year’s revenues equal or surpass this year’s. It is like having someone paint your house everyday for years. When have we paid enough for a reasonable information technology infrastructure? Why can we not make an principled argument for something like the CoreSystem, that has been prototyped by Klausner and his group?
I am ccing those who have made recent communications into the bead games, and someone new, Dr John Battelle, a professor at Lehigh University.
I will be writing about Battelle’s (1996) paper on "Function, Anticipation and Representation" over the next few days, and posting this discussion
http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/funcanticiprep.html
Perhaps John Sowa and Richard Ballard ... and anyone else who has time, will make some comments on this paper.
I feel that the language that Professor Battelle is using could be improved, and that we as a community need to work on how we use language, but I am also aware of how hard it has been for anyone working with stratified theory over the past several decades.