Prestadigitalization

Prestadigitalization

Sleight of Mind Using the Magic Computer Box

The other day, I was reading a blog that had an entry saying that the anthrax attacks in 2001 were predicted by a computer system of a DARPA-linked company named Cycorp six months before they occurred. Some of the people were pondering the idea - wondering how a computer system could make such a prediction. I won't bore you with the details, but I was a wet blanket in the crowd saying that computers can't make predictions like that. They can only report back what somebody programmed into them. Somebody obviously put in 'anthrax attack' as an entry in the response tables (knowledge base) for a decision support system (Artificial Intelligence). At a simple level, the program is a logic tree that consists of questions with yes/no responses - and the path the system follows depends the responses to the yes/no questions. If I had given more thought to it, I would have said that the computer reporting back that anthrax attacks were likely would be highly suspect because the variables that would lead to that conclusion would make it statistically highly improbable. Those variables would be: controlled nature of the research; the relatively few people with the knowledge, capability and access; and the sophistication of the equipment and facilities to make the material, etc.

The best way to characterize Cycorp's Artificial Intelligence system for non-technical people is to recall Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Bergen was a ventriloquist and Charlie McCarthy was his dummy. Charlie would say outrageous things for which Bergen would scold him. Cycorp is Bergen and the AI system is Charlie.

Garbage In / Garbage Out

Garbage In / Garbage Out was a useful slogan in the 60's and 70's when computer systems for business were being written but it's less useful today. The slogan that is more appropriate for today is 'fraudulent data in' / 'fraudulent data out' because people need to understand that computer systems are only as honest as the people who program them - and the people who manage the systems.

I've known for several years that the government is using models instead of actual data because of a little research project I did concerning social security data. I got sick and tired of hearing at the national level how the economy was booming while the things I was reading in local market media indicated that there were massive layoffs of both white and blue collar workers, record foreclosures, record bankruptcies, record trade deficit, etc. So I went searching for the annual reports of social security receipts - assuming that they would have actual numbers. To my amazement, I found that in the annual reports, the numbers they are reporting are obviously bogus.

Social Security - Fabricated Statistics

For the rest of this, I'm just going to post my notes regarding the history of Wassily Leontief and his InPut / OutPut tables which were used to model the U.S. economy - and which are now serving as the basis for the model of the world economy and the primrose path of global insanity we are being led down.

The best place to start is with the Club of Rome connection because when you see that, all the other pieces fall into place (at least for me they did). It connects the global supply chain model, sustainable development, trade policy, etc.

My first search was on 'Leontief' and the 'Club of Rome'.

That got me this paper:

http://policy.rutgers.edu/cupr/iioa/Fontela_Leontief.pdf

It mentioned ' UN Project 2000 ' so obviously, I couldn't pass that one up.

Leontief and the Future of the World Economy

Abstract

The world model was designed by Leontief as a tool for exploring the future of the world economy. This paper reviews the process of design and calibration of this model, and the main simulation runs that were performed in the early 1970s looking towards 2000. The results of that scenario are compared with observed developments during the period. An agenda is provided for further research in this area with models incorporating input–output tables and the new scenario’s methodologies.

Keywords: world modelling, scenario, long-term exploration, alternative futures

Scientific culture, science education and the risk society

Abstract. There is enough data giving evidence that the current economical system is in collision route with nature’s capacity of tolerance. Our planet does not have natural resources to keep current consumption pattern in the future. If this model is not modified, we will drain the resources of the planet, risking our survival. To protect against the risks of production and consumption the citizen should be identified with the scientific culture. That identity depends on permanent education, starting from the acquisition of the first letters, essential for the human being to assume his/her actor’s role within the scenario of global events. It is necessary to educate the youths scientifically as if there was a ‘planetary emergency’. It is also an urgent task to develop in service and training courses for our teachers via revolutionary curricular updating that will prepare them to discuss the risk society at both levels: local and global, imbedded in their scientific culture. Key words: scientific education – global and local risks – social individual participation – public social responsibility– teacher education and continuous education.

Leontief - Aiken - Mark I - UN

Wassily Leontief
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1973
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1973/leontief-autobio.html

"Having come to the conclusion that so-called partial analysis cannot provide a sufficiently broad basis for fundamental understanding of the structure and operation of economic systems, I set out in 1931 to formulate a general equilibrium theory capable of empirical implementation. Received a research grant for compilation of the first input-output tables of the American economy (for the years 1919 and 1929) in 1932. Began to make use of a large scale mechanical computing machine in 1935 and Mark I (the first large-scale electronic computer) in 1943."

I'd never heard of Mark I so I looked it up. Turns out it was built at Harvard.

http://csilluminated.jbpub.com/3e/didyouknow_chapter.cfm?chapter=5

The Harvard Mark I also stands out in computer history as a critical development. Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken designed the five ton Mark I in the early 1940s at Harvard University.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/History_of_computing

Harvard Mark I (1944)

For decades after World War II, it was widely believed that the IBM Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator(ASCC) (completed in 1944 and later called the Mark I) was the first electromechanical general-purpose computer^[15]. The idea for the Harvard Mark I automatic digital calcuator was conceived by Howard H. Aiken, then a graduate student from Harvard University with a Ph. D. in theoretical physics. The machine was a hybrid of mechanical and electronic technology, performing calculations through a series of small gears, electro-mechanical counter wheels, and switches. Input occurred via punched cards, paper tape or through manually set switches to indicate the values to be processed. The output was generated by an electric typewriter or punched into additional cards. The successor to the Mark I, the Mark II, would still used relays, but also featured an electrical memory and a system of 'constant' values that were referenced during run-time.^[16]

This page has a picture of it:

http://www.maxmon.com/1939ad.htm

Timeline

http://www.laynetworks.com/history2.htm

Somewhere in all these pages, they mentioned the name Vannevar Bush. Naturally I thought he must be related to the Bush Crime Family - but no. Even better than that. Vannevar Bush was the key guy in establishing the military-industrial complex for defense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush

Wartime Advances

http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/TheCompMusRep/TCMR-V12.html

The work on the calculator had progressed far enough that the first problem was run on it in January 1943, but ii was not until December of that year that the calculator was demonstrated at Endicott to President Conant. The urgency of the war effort caused thing to move quickly. In February 1944, the ASCC was disassembled at Endicoti and shipped to Harvard. Aiken was transferred from the Mine School to Harvard to run the calculator for the Navy. Lake and several other IBM engineers reassembled the machine in the basement of the Research Laboratory of Physics. Meanwhile, Aiken assembled a contingent of Naval personel to operate the Mark I. Among these were Lieutenant Grace M. Hopper, later instrumental in the development of the computing language COBOL, and Ensign Robert V.D. Campbell, who had been the national chess champion in his age- group as a youngster. By May 1944, the calculator was complete and beginning to turn out results for the Navy's Bureau of Ships. Its first project was the computation of tables of values for Bessel functions-a family of mathematical functions crucial to applied physics problems encountered in designing ships.

Friction

Amid great hoopla, IBM formally presented Harvard with the ASCC on August 14, 1944. Whether through a misunderstanding or a conflict in their strong personalities, Watson and Aiken had a falling out over this event which was never repaired. One story has it that Aiken leaked word of the dedication to the press before IBM's media blitz. Consequently it was Harvard that got most of the publicity, after IBM had spent half a million dollars building the machine. President Conant visited Watson in his hotel room in Boston to cajole him into attending the ceremony. Although Watson put on a happy face for the press, emotions were still very strained. As Thomas J. Watson Jr. later recalled, it was a tense scene in which "[i]f Aiken and my father had had revolvers they would both have been dead." Time did not soothe this wound. Twenty-five years later, at an exhibition on computing history T. V. Learson, then chairman of IBM, had only one comment to make about the two-thousand years of history spread before him. He paused briefly in front of a photo of Howard Aiken and muttered "the sonofabitch."

Despite the conflict, both Conant and Watson hailed it as the beginning of a new era of cooperation between the two institutions and between science and industry in general. The press marveled at what it called a "giant electric brain." Speculation ran rampant as to how machines such as this might affect the world. Science had overcome its biggest hurdle, they claimed-it had created a thinking machine.

Original Applications

After the War, at Aiken's insistence, the Mark I was used on several very original projects. Among these were programs for translating languages, and analyzing econometric models. This latter work, developed by Harvard Professor of Economics Wassily Leontief, simulated the effects of economic currents upon national economies, and eventually led to a Nobel Prize in Economics. Leontief's was the first application of a computer to a problem in the social sciences. Aiken also urged a friend to perform his research on Newton's Principia on the computer. In 1947 and 1949, the Harvard Computation Laboratories sponsored two symposia on "Largescale Digital Calculating Machines." High on the agenda of both these conferences were discussions of new applications of computers, particularly in unconventional fields such as physiology.

After the War, Aiken traveled widely assessing computing progress across the globe. Convinced of the value of the results of calculations to all people, Aiken pushed for the establishment of an International Computing Laboratory under the auspices of the United Nations. These aspirations proved politically unfeasible, and Aiken later wrote to a friend that the complications of an international bureaucracy proved insurmountable.

Leontief And the Bureau Of Labor Statistics

This explains a lot in terms of the government's bogus unemployment statistics:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/06/art3full.pdf

Wassily Leontief's obituary in the New York Times:
http://www.wright.edu/~tran.dung/obit-leontief.htm

His analytic methods, as the Nobel committee observed, were adopted and became a permanent part of production planning and forecasting in scores of industrialized nations and in private corporations all over the world.

Following the model of his so-called input-output analysis, General Electric, for example, was able to load data from 184 sectors of the economy -- such as energy, home construction and transportation -- into a mammoth computer to help it predict how the energy crisis brought on by the Arab oil boycott in 1973 would affect public demand for its products and services, from light bulbs to turbines.

...

During the war, he helped the United States Government with planning for industrial production, worked as a consultant to the Office of Strategic Services and supervised compilation of a 92-economic-sector table for the Department of Labor. In 1948, Leontief set up the Harvard Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy with the aid of large grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Air Force to expand and refine his input-output models. Soon he had a staff of 20 -- and a 650-punch-card computer from I.B.M., then the state-of-the art.

He did not, however, keep the Air Force grant long once the Eisenhower Administration came to power; some of its officials were critical of his input-output theory as smacking too much of a planned economy. That was precisely what he thought it should smack of.

One of his goals in studying the nature of changes in industrial production was to enable nations to plan in ways that would be economically beneficial and help them avoid periods of economic hardship. But to some economists the idea of national economic planning was ill advised: not only would it not work, they said, but it might make matters worse and also might open the door to excessive Government control. They maintained it would be better to let the private sector and the free market determine the course of future economic events.

To Leontief, it seemed short-sighted for nations to devote little or no thought to the analysis of the future of the overall economy, especially after what he regarded as the effective work of modern economists in devising projections that are mathematically and statistically sound. He spoke out often on the subject in the 1970's and 80's.

He and Leonard Woodcock, then president of the United Auto Workers, proposed that the Federal Government establish an Office of National Economic Planning to help coordinate economic projects and make recommendations on policies they said could avert unnecessary unemployment, inflation, failures in health care, shortages in affordable housing, energy, public transportation and other requirements of a civilized society.

With all the info on Leontief and his work on input-output and economic planning, his connections, read this webpage again:

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_cooper2a.htm

Energy

Energy is recognized as the key to all activity on earth. Natural science is the study of the sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of the sources and control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems: mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science. And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.

All science is merely a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end is control. Beyond this remains only one issue: Who will be the beneficiary?

In 1954 this was the issue of primary concern. Although the so-called "moral issues" were raised, in view of the law of natural selection it was agreed that a nation or world of people who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals who do not have intelligence. Such people are beasts of burden and steaks on the table by choice and consent.

Consequently, in the interest of future world order, peace, and tranquility, it was decided to privately wage a quiet war against the American public with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy (wealth) of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few.

In order to implement this objective, it was necessary to create, secure, and apply new weapons which, as it turned out, were a class of weapons so subtle and sophisticated in their principle of operation and public appearance as to earn for themselves the name "silent weapons."

In conclusion, the objective of economic research, as conducted by the magnates of capital (banking) and the industries of commodities (goods) and services, is the establishment of an economy which is totally predictable and manipulatable.

In order to achieve a totally predictable economy, the low-class elements of society must be brought under total control, i.e., must be housebroken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very early age, before they have an opportunity to question the propriety of the matter. In order to achieve such conformity, the lower-class family unit must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of government-operated day-care centers for the occupationally orphaned children.

The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life. This form of slavery is essential to maintain some measure of social order, peace, and tranquility for the ruling upper class.

Energy is the beating heart of an economy. That's why the globalists are trying to cut off our supply under the heading of "global warming" and "climate change". It has always been my opinion that global warming was symbolic of the political agenda of the globalists - a threat to 'transform or else'. The transformation is to a purely socialist country with a planned economy - and I have a lot of evidence to support that statement on my website.