Hoy se cumplen 20 años del nacimiento de las World Wide Web. Las cosas no son tan sencillas, ni hay un momento cero en que todo se puso a andar. Es muy recomendable leer el libro de Tim Berners-Lee, su inventor, Weaving the Web, en español Tejiendo la red. Un invento que surge de la necesidad de organizar la información. Una epopeya que es en el fondo la historia de la humanidad, desde la Biblioteca de Alejandría, los monjes copistas en la Edad Media o los enciclopedistas hasta esta inabarcable red de información que se distribuye por todo el mundo en millones de servidores. La Web permitió hacer Internet universal, accesible al gran público, parte de nuestro día a día. Desde el Memex de Vannevar Bush a los primeros servidores mantenidos por Berners-Lee.
El País le dedica un breve artículo. Quizá, pese al poco tiempo que ha pasado, nos parece que la Web siempre ha estado ahí, como la electricidad.
Ya hay una campaña en marcha para pedir el premio Nobel para Tim Berners-Lee. Me uno con todas mis fuerzas.
January 23, 2009By: Administrator Category: Finance
This is a really funny, but also very meaningfull, article about the advantages of using the Tiger Bears and Bulls Index to predict financial markets’ performance.
What is this? you may wonder. This is a model that has accurately predicted the stock market over the past 15 years. This model tracks Tiger Woods’ performance (tournament placement) against the Dow Industrials.
The lesson we can take is that, Jeff Stibel said, “predicting the future is really not something human beings are very good at. Other than Tiger Woods, of course.”
My own experiments in this regard led to the creation the World Simulation, now the centerpiece of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University. As the name implies, the world simulation is an activity in which we try to simulate the world. Of course, in order to simulate the world, we need to know everything we can about it. So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture–economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions–are integrated in a cultural system.
In the final weeks of the course we explore how different cultures around the world are interconnected and how they relate to one another. Students continue to harness and leverage the new media environment to learn more about these interconnections, and use the wiki to work together to create the “rules” for our simulation. They face the daunting task of creating a way to simulate colonization, revolution, the emergence of a global economy, war and diplomacy, and environmental challenges. Along the way, they are exploring some of the most important challenges now facing humanity.
The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final “world history” video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
January 11, 2009By: Administrator Category: Agenda
Back to my academic, professional, blog. This time in English. A challenging attempt to keep in touch with the international teaching, academic, researching community that could find interesting the ideas I will periodically publish. Sorry for the language mistakes. Comments are also open for this kind of corrections if anybody is patient enough.
