The Lessons We Don't Learn

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 6

In my Twitter stream today, Sylvia Martinez (@smartinez) retweeted a link to Seymour Papert's 1980 paper written for a Presidential commission that proposed that we provide a computer for every child in America. Long before One Laptop Per Child, Papert saw that computers should not be an "auxiliary" aid to learning but "fundamental" to changing how we learn. He understood that the computer by changing education could change our culture for the better.

I believe that the computer could be used as a powerful weapon to break down barriers related to gender, ethnic culture, class origin, and even genetic differences.

By no means do I believe that computers are the only thing needed to improve education but Papert was so right nearly thirty years ago in recognizing the potential for computers (and networks) to break down all kinds of barriers, and to open doors to opportunity.

On this same day, I heard from a physics teacher in California that he can't access the Makezine.com site. He was trying to download a project plan for the Wooden Mini Yacht in Volume 20 of Make to use in his class. His school district uses software to block access to any sites that have a "blog." The teacher said he calls up regularly to request access but even when he gets it, the change only lasts a few days and then the site is blocked again. It's a second such comment made by a teacher in recent weeks so I don't believe it's unique to this school. This is a high school teacher seeking free resources on the Web to use with students in the classroom. It's too bad that it's so hard for him to do what he wants. It is just one example of how our educational system fails to grasp the fundamental uses of technology.

After thirty years, Papert's call for action is still fresh today:

I believe that one of the most urgent national needs for the 1980s is to find ways to increase the technological sophistication of the education community, to create contexts in which educators can probe the potential effects of fundamental uses of computers.

It doesn't feel like we've seen much progress in education. Pappert made these strong recommendations but there was little urgency to act on them. Is that the pattern -- gather up the good ideas and then decide not to do anything with them? I was reminded of Taylor Marsh's recent article on a day-long Washington DC conference on the Innovation Economy. It was another talkfest about "what we should do" to improve the future of American competitiveness. One of the participants, Senator Mark Warner, said that we need "radical rethinking of high school and college. Does high school need to be 4 years, does college?"

After listening to a laundry list of such recommendations, Taylor concluded:

An innovation economy may be able to save our nation, but not with the current crop of political leaders, regardless of party, who don't seem to be able to take any good idea and move it forward. Small thinkers, vested interests, no political will to move forward together, with the upper crust stifling so many Americans who just never get a chance. [Can the Innovation Economy Save the U.S.? (HuffPost)]

Papert's paper ended with a warning: "Unless we do this, tomorrow will continue to be the prisoner of the primitivity of yesterday." Tomorrow is here and educators are still being held prisoners of the past. I just wonder if it's truly possible to move forward.

George Dyson's "Among the Machines" in Mountain View

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 3

Science historian, author and Make columnist George Dyson will give a lecture tonight on the "Evolution of Technology: Darwin Among the Machines." The talk will be at 7 p.m. at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Mountain View. The talk is part of a series hosted by NASA Ames centered around the concept of evolution in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species."

In his 1997 book, Darwin Among the Machines, Dyson wrote that in his life and work, he has attempted "to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines." So the evolution of technology was a natural subject for him.

Dyson notes that a digital universe (bounded by two singularities, one at T = 0 and one at T = ∞) consists of two species of bits: differences in space and differences in time. Digital computers are devices that translate between these two forms of information -- structure and sequence -- according to definite rules. The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same. Turing's question was whether machines would begin to think. Von Neumann's question was whether machines would begin to reproduce. In 1953, when the structure of DNA was first elucidated, there were 53 kilobytes of random-access memory on planet earth. Biology and technology were already on a collision course. Species have survived in a noisy, analog environment by passing themselves, once a generation, through a digital, error-correcting phase, the same way repeater stations are used to convey intelligible messages over submarine cables where noise is being introduced. With the transition from digital once a generation to all digital all the time, the era of strictly Darwinian evolution is drawing to a close.

Dyson's talks are fascinatingly rich yet accessible to a broad audience. He illustrates them with primary source materials, many of which he has uncovered himself in his research. He is endlessly curious and continuously recombining the work of the past to explore new approaches to our future.

A More Public Role for Public Broadcasting: Education

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 17

Imagine a broadcast network in America that was dedicated to education, where the best educators had the opportunity to produce its programming, and where individuals as well as institutions could develop a new genre of wide-ranging educational programs? Educational programming could elevate the role of teaching in our culture and promote the value of lifelong learning. This blog post explores why education is a more important role for public broadcasting in America, a new role that would re-align PBS with its original mission as an educational network.

Our public broadcasting system should re-invent itself as a network for educational programming. Moreover, it should specifically focus on increasing public interest and engagement in science and civics. This is a vital public mission -- promoting science and technology literacy and creating a greater understanding of our own system of government.

Even in an age of YouTube, broadcast television has the ability to reach even those people who don't have ready access to the Internet. Television is a lowest common denominator, technologically speaking, and so it serves nearly everyone. That's why we should still care that some portion of broadcasting be allocated to serving a public good.

With digital TV, PBS stations now have four channels, which mostly run traditional programs at different times. The new capacity is not being effectively utilized for new programming. One if not two of these new channels should be dedicated to serving a public educational mission. And there are lessons to be learned from the Internet in how to produce new educational programming for these channels.

PBS is a network of independent affiliates, who are much more independent than their commercial counterparts. This somewhat fragmented network structure can be positive, if it strikes a healthy balance between national and local or regional programming. It's important that a good portion of this educational programming be locally targeted, perhaps in conjunction with local colleges and other educational institutions.

Educational Broadcasting in America

Our nation's founders recognized that an educated public was crucial to the sustainability of American democracy, which led to public funding of education. Today, education happens in the media as well as in school. It is important that we use the media of television, in combination with new media, to support educational goals. There is even greater opportunity to combine a public broadcasting network and the interactive capabilities of the Internet to create a new hybrid framework for lifelong education.

The American public broadcasting system began when President John Kennedy authorized the first funding for the build-out of a national educational broadcasting network in 1962. Then in 1967 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which authorized the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), he said the bill would give a "stronger voice to educational public radio and television." He added:

So today we rededicate a part of the airwaves--which belong to all the people--and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people.

Johnson made the analogy to land-grant universities and the setting aside of land for public use. It is the notion of a commons, not controlled by commercial interests, that is available to serve the broader goal of educating the public. In its early days, statewide educational networks broadcast lectures into schools across the state. (I remember taking a math class in 7th grade in Kentucky in which the instructor came to us via a TV monitor.)

It's time to re-invent public broadcasting system as a plaform for innovation (to borrow Tim O'Reilly's framing of Government 2.0). It needs to be an open platform that encourages varied uses by the greater community, ones that frankly we can't even imagine today. It should also be a platform that integrates the Internet and takes advantage of community-building that is possible online.

Re-defining the Educational Network

The public broadcasting service can provide the forum for educating Americans of all ages and backgrounds. There are many sources of content for programming. Here are some ideas for this educational network:

1. Identify great high school teachers and give them a new forum for reaching a broader audience. Let us see what good teacher do and let more people learn from them.
2. Work with universities, many of whom are already providing open courseware. How can broadcast television increase usage of open courses?
3. Adapt presentations from conferences and public forums where speakers present on a range of important topics -- a scientific summit on climate change, for instance.
4. Use television to present short excerpts of educational content that can be explored in full online.
5. Explore new tools for presenting complex information such as Al Gore used in his Inconvenient Truth presentation.
6. Create a "live" national forum that showcases invited speakers on a wide range of subjects of national interest.
7. Encourage the audience to participate via Twitter, perhaps even displaying a stream of the tweets live on the broadcast.
8. Do more with less. Choose lightweight production methods and produce more content rather than placing big bets on large-budget productions.
9. Promote in-person learning opportunities in the local community as well as those online.
10. Shine a light on education itself, and examine in detail various programs and initiatives.

Science Programming

Science is a national priority and it deserves greater coverage on public broadcasting. (We don't need heavily produced video magazines on science.) Science is not just a subject but a way of thinking, which can be learned and applied by anyone. This is the goal of science literacy -- understanding how to apply evidence-based thinking across a wide range of subjects. An educational network should explore important societal issues from a scientific perspective. Economics, neuroscience, medical and health issues, and energy are some of the topics that could be covered regularly.

Civics Programming

Civics is about educating citizens. According to Wikipedia, civics is "the study of government with attention to the role of citizens in the operation and oversight of government." The educational network could help us understand our system of governance, which is not the same as politics. As a rule, the educational network should avoid standard political fare, particularly the coverage of elections. Is there another view of government, which is not covered in the news? Is there an opportunity to go beyond journalism in covering government? I'd like to hear more directly from a variety of government officials who might discuss their priorities and explain the decisions they are making and how they reached those decisions.

Civics programming can tell the story of how American governs itself -- at local, state, regional and federal levels. More people need to be involved in telling that story and it's a story that deserves a larger audience. The Internet can be used to encourage more participation.

A program schedule could feature extended coverage on issues like foreign policy, defense, transportation, defense, health care and social service. Sadly, we know more about sports teams than we do the State Department. We catch glimpses of a war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Public affairs programming on TV has diminished in America and some of it was so uninspired that it deserved to go. Yet isn't public affairs worth doing on TV and can't we come up with new ways to do it well?

In View of All Citizens

In his speech introducing the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson said:

At its best, public television would help make our Nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens. But in weak or even in irresponsible hands, it could generate controversy without understanding; it could mislead as well as teach; it could appeal to passions rather than to reason.

Can we reinvent our public broadcasting service and bring education into the media marketplace, in view of all citizens? I believe a public broadcasting service can help make education an even higher national priority and contribute to creating a more educated and engaged public.

Maker Faire Opens Saturday

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 1

Maker Faire is here again, our fourth annual event in the Bay Area. Once again, you just won't believe how much there is to see and do at Maker Faire.

Makers were busy today setting up on Friday. In the morning, we had 400 kids visit the fairgrounds for a backstage tour and a chance to spend time with dozens of makers. By the end of the day over most of the makers had arrived. Over 750 came together for beer and a paella dinner outside -- and countless conversations.

This time lapse recording of the day gives you some sense of how all the magic comes together on Friday -- with a view of the rides on the midway rising up from the grass.

I hope to see many of you tomorrow. Bring the whole family. Remember to check makerfaire.com for information on parking and public transit options. We're open 10 am to 8 pm on Saturday and 10 am to 6 pm on Sunday.

The Sizzling Sound of Music

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 77

Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most?

Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, CA on Saturday. Berger's presentation had a slide titled: "Live, Memorex or MP3." He mentioned that Thomas Edison promoted his phonograph by demonstrating that a person could not tell whether behind a curtain was an opera singer or one of Edison's cylinders playing a recording of the singer. More recently, the famous Memorex ad challenged us to determine whether it was a live performance of Ella Fitzgerald or a recorded one.

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

Our perception changes and we become attuned to what we like -- some like the sizzle and others like the crackle. I wonder if this isn't also something akin to thinking that hot dogs taste better at the ball park. The hot dog is identical to what you'd buy at a grocery store and there aren't many restaurants that serve hot dogs. A hot dog is not that special, except in the right setting. The context changes our perception, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it's more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. It's that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception. All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.

On a related note, a friend commented recently that she doesn't understand why people put up with such poor sound quality for phone calls on cell phones, and particularly iPhones. "I can hardly hear the person talking to me," she said. "I don't think smart phones are making any improvement to the quality of the phone call," she added. "Is it not important anymore?" She wondered why people accepted such poor quality, and so did Jonathan Berger, but a lot of people just don't hear it the same way.

Capturing the Knowledge of Mill-Wrights

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 6

Driving through Napa over the weekend, I saw a roadsign that said "Milling Today" at the Old Bale Grist Mill. I had to stop and take a look. The restored mill has a 36' "overshot" waterwheel so called because water pours on top of the wheel, directed there by a long "flume" that brings water from a nearby pond. The Bale Mill operated in the late 1840s into the 1860s, spanning a period of time when Napa was part of a Mexican province to its becoming part of the Bear Flag Republic and finally the State of California. This mill was grinding wheat grown in the Napa Valley long before there were any vineyards, and the flour was supplied to miners heading out to the gold fields in 1848.

Inside the mill are two different sets of millstones, one enclosed in a box for safety. A docent demonstrated the operation of the mill, setting the waterwheel in motion, which turned the gears underneath the millstones, and caused the wooden floorboards to rumble. Eventually, as the momentum picked up, the millstones themselves began to spin. Out came a steady flow of wheat flour. The docent said that the phrase "nose to the grindstone" comes from the constant attention required of the miller who has to smell the wheat to check for ozone, which is caused when the two large pieces of quartzstone are rubbing against each other.

After the demonstration, the docent held out a book published in 1795 called "The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide" by Oliver Evans, an early American user manual for builders, inventors and operators. Check out a scan of fifteenth edition of the guide from 1860 on Google Books.

Oliver Evans was an inventor himself, and Wikipedia says that "his most important invention was an automated grist mill which operated continuously through the use of bulk material handling devices including bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and Archimedean screws." His book played an important role in the spread of mills in American, explaining the design, construction and operation of mills, even pointing out areas where new inventions were needed. The docent believed the book was used in the construction of the Old Bale Mill, which was probably built by people who had no previous experience building a mill.

The docent showed us the detailed diagrams in the book.

Then he identified an unusual feature found in the first edition. At the back of the book, there was a section that listed the subscribers for the book, and at the top of list were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In those times, to publish a book meant getting readers to commit in advance to buying it. An enterprising publisher/author would try to cover his costs before incurring them. I understood that much about the subscription model. What I didn't realize was something that the docent pointed out. He said printing a list of subscribers was an early form of a social network -- the list identified others who were interested in the same subject and whom you might wish to consult for a variety of reasons. If you were studying Evans's plans, you might want to correspond with someone else who was doing the same thing. Pretty cool.

The preface to the fifteenth edition of Evans's book says this about his fame and fortune:

The improvements in the flour mill, like the invention of the cotton gin, apply to one of the great staples of our country; and although nearly forty years have elapsed since Mr. Evans first made his improvements known to the world in the present work, the general superiority of American mills to those even of Great Britain, is still a subject of remark by intelligent travellers. Mr. Evans, however, experienced the fate of most other meritorious inventors; the combined powers of prejudice and of interest deprived him of all benefit from his labours, and, like Whitney, he was compelled to depend upon other pursuits for the means of establishing himself in the world. His reward, as an inventor, was a long-continued course of ruinous litigation, and the eventual success of the powerful phalanx which was in league against him.

Still, I think about how this old user manual and this old mill have endured.

Big Mo' and The Bears

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 3

If you watch sports, as many will do this with the Super Bowl on Sunday, you know that games can change direction. Something happens and momentum changes quite suddenly. A team that was piling up scores suddenly becomes tentative and defensive, as was the case with the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship game, even though they held on to win the game. A team that is getting badly beaten inexplicably begins doing good things again.

An alert game announcer notices these changes, and comments on them often in advance of the results having changed significantly. Usually in football, it's a turnover, such as a fumble or interception, that opens the door for the other team to change the outcome. Sometimes it's a dumb penalty that incites the other team to action and gets their collective head back in the game.

You can probably guess that I'm really thinking in terms of our dreadful economy. We're on a team that's worse than the Arizona Cardinals ever were. We're up against the Bears, which is unfortunately not just a team from Chicago. The Bears are overpowering and we're really getting beat. Nobody's cheering and a turnaround seems impossible. It's hopeless until we see a sign that things could change. If you're a fan, you watch for these things and hope they'll happen. If you're a player, you've got to make them happen or you're defeated.

An essay by Paulette Miniter in the Christian Science Monitor cautioned people not to panic about their 401ks because stocks will recover before jobs do. She wrote:

Our retirement funds probably aren't too far away from getting back to work. Stocks are down 40 percent from their last peak, putting us deep in the bear den. But since investors can exectute trades much faster than corporations can start hiring en masse again after a recession, stock prices will likely rise before the economic recovery is official.

I don't know if Miniter's right but she's got a hunch that things might change and she tells us where to look. The essay got me thinking about what signs to look for that momentum might be changing. The stock market index seems inadequate as a scoreboard for the economy; it's a reflection of how gamblers think about the game in advance rather than what's actually happening on the field. I wish there was a better way to keep score. However, maybe it's not the score we should be looking at. It's the series of actions -- in the case of football, it's a sustained drive -- that lead to changing the score.

Tim O'Reilly and I saw Web 2.0 coming because we spotted fundamental changes in the way the game was starting to be played and believed that these were signs that momentum had shifted. The Web was making a comeback, executing with a new playbook, like the West Coast offense of Bill Walsh. The Internet/Web space of late 1990's shifted from teams with me-too plans easily getting funding to teams in 2002 that were organized around plans that nobody was funding. The remarkable thing was the determination of these startups despite little or no prospects for success. That is, they had few people believing in them, except eventually their fans -- people who began using services like Blogger, Flickr and Etsy in greater numbers. It's like a team that re-discovers why they're playing the game, and they see that their effort and exertion are causing the cheering in the stands, which only makes them work harder. They stop worrying about losing and focus on playing harder, and on each subsequent play they are playing harder than their opponent. That's why the score eventually changes.

I don't know what signs will show that things are turning around but I know we need to be looking. The signs might be incidental or accidental, but they will get you to start wondering if change is coming. They'll be early-warning signs that the Bears can be moved back a little and maybe scored on. It will get you believing that the Bears can be beaten, and this belief will occur to you as it occurs to others who will begin playing harder, too. Suddenly Big Mo' changes sides.

Admiring Bill Gates

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 35

Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why.

This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a shift in focus, moving from defining strategy for Microsoft to a broader strategy for improving the lives of the world's poor. Bill Gates exemplifies what Tim O'Reilly is talking about when he says that those of us in the tech industry should increasingly "focus on stuff that matters."

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

These thoughts about Gates were sparked by watching Charlie Rose's interview with Bill Gates this week. What comes through in this interview is the optimism of Bill Gates and his belief that technology is a kind of magic. Good magic. Powerful magic. Software is magic that allows people to do things they dream of doing. What's most telling is Gates's belief that the best is yet to come, that we're still in the early stages of realizing what can be done with this technology.

The second half of the interview is the best part, when Gates is talking about his life after Microsoft and his interest in the work of the Foundation. (Many will find the first half of the interview about Microsoft's past and present product strategy and Gates's belief that they can compete with Google in search uninteresting or irrelevant.) The primary focus of the Gates Foundation has been to explore ways to reduce common diseases such as malaria and rotavirus that affect the world's poor. Here's a section from a letter from Bill and Melinda Gates.

More than a decade ago, the two of us read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that were long ago eliminated in this country. One disease we had never even heard of—rotavirus—was killing literally half a million kids each year. We thought: That's got to be a typo. If a single disease were killing that many kids, we would have heard about it, because it would have been front-page news. But it wasn’t a typo.

We couldn't escape the brutal conclusion that—in our world today—some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

In the interview, you can't miss how committed Gates is to the efforts of the Foundation. He realizes that he's in a special position to see problems like the one above and formulate a plan backed by resources to do something about it. Yet he doesn't come across as a do-gooder. What excites him about the non-profit world is similar to what he enjoyed at Microsoft -- finding and working with smart people who are really engaged in issues and problems.

As much as I appreciate the goals of the Foundation, I found myself admiring Bill Gates as a person during the course of the interview. The truth is that while he was busy developing software, he's also worked on developing himself. He is the self-made American who has matured into a role model and leader. He is thoughtful and tactful where a younger version would have been brash and impetuous. Like Windows, improvement for Gates has required multiple iterations but the insistence on getting it right won out eventually. The newest release of Bill Gates is the best yet.

When he talks about improving education, he's not just analytical. He appears to be moved while describing his interaction with highly motivated teachers who see their profession "as a higher calling." Gates also tells us that he's watching courses on DVD while he exercises. He highly recommends "Big History" a series of lectures by David Christian, available through "The Teaching Company." I found it inspiring that he was "watching three hours on Modern Economics" over the course of a weekend while on a treadmill. That's lifelong learning in action. I just wonder how many present or former CEOs are that inquisitive.

Gates gives me hope at a time when I've grown tired of reading how the short-sighted schemes of Wall Street's top brass and other American executives have brought ruin to American business and our economy. They aren't leaders worth following. Gates is different. He deserves genuine admiration, in my view. He's more than a technologist. He's both a realist and an optimist. He's become a world leader worth listening to.

Clever Emoticarolers App

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 1

Open the door and smiley-face carolers sing a song that you can customize and send to others. That's the emoticarolers concept, worked up by Jason Striegel, our Hackszine editor, who leads the development side of things for Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis. The team created this clever holiday "text-to-sing" promotion for Yahoo Messenger at emoticarolers.com. A custom Make carol is here. (Reminds me of the Smileys book by David Sanderson that I developed many years ago.)

I asked Jason how they built the app and here's what he said:

The front end interface is written in Flash/AS3. It talks to a PHP backend, which uses the Festival text-to-speech software and some other Unix audio tools to render each of the four voices. Those all get compiled back into a single mp3 and sent back to flash, along with an xml file that tells the app how to animate the emoticons and custom lyrics. Aside from some of the animated bits, this could work as-is with an HTML/CSS/JS front end as well.

The process is pretty cpu intensive, so we had to use a number of load balanced machines to handle requests. They output files on amazon s3, all keyed by a unique id. If this becomes popular (fingers crossed), there's no database or anything that will bottleneck reads or writes, and it should just scale linearly as we add more boxes.

It's funny how the text-to-singing stuff ended up being only a small portion of the project.

Links: emoticarolers.com
Make Holiday Carol

The Visible Hand

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 12

I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon.

As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and Asia. Like many people, I’m incredulous. How could this happen?

Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse. Few people saw this coming until it hit.

“It was the triumph of data over common sense,” said reporter Adam Davidson on the excellent episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money.” Economist Michael Lehmann in the San Francisco Chronicle called it “the triumph of ideology over common sense.” It’s obvious both common sense and the common man have taken a beating.

It’s hard to stomach that our government must bail out Wall Street. It really means we’ve bet our future on the same people who created the present situation. To paraphrase a joke I’ve heard: It’s like going to a casino in Vegas and rooting for the house. One New York Times reader expressed the frustration that many feel: “Why can’t we take half of the $700 billion and just build something?”

These events shake our belief that free markets work to the benefit of all. The fundamental tenet of capitalism is the “invisible hand”: Adam Smith wrote that “by pursuing his own interest [each person] frequently promotes that of the society.” This year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism — it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

A headline in the Christian Science Monitor says: “With finance crisis, hands-off era over.” Government will need to be more assertive in regulating Wall Street. But I think it goes beyond that. I wonder if we, as individuals, have been living in our own era of hands-off. Have Americans become so disengaged that we’ve become dependent on some invisible force to provide what we need? Have we gotten used to leaving important matters to experts, until they turn out to be wrong?

Isn’t it time for us to become hands-on again?

We, the people, face enormous challenges. Apart from the economic mess, we know fundamental changes are coming because of global warming. Our dependence on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.

Better we meet the challenges head-on rather than hide. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed it up: “We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a ‘liar loan.’ ... The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.”

We have to believe it starts with each of us — not some faceless government or corporate bureaucracy. It’s time for us, individually and working together in business, to reconsider what it means to be productive, not just profitable. It’s time for us to reengage in how our government sets priorities for education, health care, housing, and transportation.

The DIY mindset celebrated in this magazine must again become an essential life skill, rooted once again in necessity and practicality. Our future security lies in knowing what we’re capable of creating, and how we can adapt to change by being resourceful.

A challenge this great can bring out the best in us. We need everyone, because every person has something to contribute. We need a showing of all hands.

Recent Posts

• Annals of the Patently Absurd on August 22, 2008
• What A Tiger Can Do on June 19, 2008
• Hurrah for Home Chemistry on April 28, 2008
• Good Devices Gone Bad on March 31, 2008
• Hazards of Wifi on March 21, 2008
• I Make... (Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4) on March 15, 2008
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• Hand of Google on January 18, 2008