Pulling others to the leading edge

Those of us working with advanced technology, who push the frontiers of knowledge forward, take a lot of what we know for granted. We take our mathematical ability, our economic sensibility, or our personal responsibility as givens. It's always mind-boggling for me whenever I'm reminded that there are a lot of people worse off than I am.

Sometimes it seems like the best gains that I could possibly make by working in advanced technology to better the world are marginal, at best. The higher yield activity would be to reach people, care for them, educate them, and convince them to take better care of themselves.

If only Americans as a whole could be convinced to exercise consistently and to eat right, the impact on their health would be more substantial than if I were to discover the next wonder drug.

Rather than spending absurd amounts of time developing myself to understand ever more esoteric realms of knowledge, I could instead equip people to make a good living for themselves by working with kids who are behind in school.

We're in a service-oriented economy now. We've moved on from making physical goods. Just like manufacturing moved from cottage industries to mass production, we're stuck in an intellectual cottage industry right now and need to move on to mass production. In a knowledge economy, people are the greatest asset. It makes sense to invest in people.

I hesitate to use the phrase, but “social work” just may leave the world better off, on average, than advanced research projects. I'm not saying we should stop discovering and innovating, but rather that we should stop and look back once in a while to see if we can pull anyone else up with us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Arrays in Visual Basic and classic ASP

For the programmer who is used to C-like syntax, working with arrays in Visual Basic or classic ASP can be aggravating. In this post, I will briefly go over declaring single- and multi-dimensional arrays, then iterating through them — the basic operations that make arrays useful. One-dimensional arrays Let's declare an array with six elements. Dim OneDimArray(5) Yes, that says "5", but it has six elements. When we're going through the elements of this array, we'll start counting from zero and end at five. Iterating through one-dimensional arrays For i = 0 to UBound(OneDimArray) Response.Write(i) Next There will be six elements iterated through. General notes about arrays in Visual Basic So far, we're left with the impression that Visual Basic is a strange language. When we declare arrays in VB, the real size is the declared array size plus 1. If you're used to programming in a C-like programming language such as C++ or Java, it's the declared array...
Read more

JavaScript syntax highlighters

I'm really into writing documentation, and very often, this documentation must include code samples. I wanted a JavaScript syntax highlighter that: involved very little hassle in setting up, worked like a real parser using parse trees to ensure accurate highlighting, and provided decent coverage of the most common programming languages in use today. Obviously, by opting to go with a JavaScript syntax highlighter, I chose to forgo the option of doing my syntax highlighting on the server side. Doing it on the server side still interests me, but for immediate and practical reasons, the quickest way to get syntax highlighting in my documentation would be to do it on the client side. I went searching around for JavaScript syntax highlighters, and these are the top three that met my criteria. Javascript code prettifier . This was the first decent one that I found. It's pretty basic but I got up and running very quickly. The documentation is sparse and the tone of the README quite ter...
Read more

The costs of configurable settings in your web application

By and large, the received wisdom when it comes to configurability and flexible settings for web applications is that more is better. Making something configurable frees up the engineer from having to make mundane (but necessary) changes that can be left to other people. It's desirable to change the state of software without having to rebuild or redeploy the code. There are a lot of obvious benefits to making software configurable, and these benefits are plain to all. What I'm going to focus on here are the costs of configurability, based on my experience and observations over five years of writing web applications full-time. These costs apply to other kinds of software beyond the realm of web applications. I just choose to limit the scope of discussion to web apps because these costs manifest themselves the most when there's a fast development cycle and rapid iteration. The following is intended to be a comprehensive, itemized breakdown of the costs of making an applicati...
Read more