Via
Date archives "January 2009"
Evaluating Obama
Masterly interview of Noam Chomsky by Le Monde, with French subtitles: Noam Chomsky, regard critique sur l’Amériqueby lemondefr
Roberto Verzola: Finite demand makes relative abundance possible
A very important contribution to abundance theory by Roberto Verzola: “It is almost by definition that economists predominantly focus on scarcity, when they define economics as the study of “the most efficient ways to allocate scarce resources to meet infinite human wants”. If, indeed, people had infinite wants, then not even all the resources of… Continue reading
The self-policing of DIY Biology communities
Is it a good idea, though, to encourage “freelance” researchers to experiment with DNA, however well-intentioned they may be? This particular issue is examined in an article by the New Scientist, which warns: “someone might intentionally synthesise or recreate deadly pathogens like the 1918 flu strain, which killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide. “That… Continue reading
Eliminating bad nodes in a distributed network
One of the biggest threats to a P2P network is a bad node. A bad node — which occurs through either malicious insertion or malfunction — can block/capture/falsify information flow in the network and thereby threaten its very existence. It seems to me that an efficient peer production project needs to do three things good:… Continue reading
Principles of openness in education
The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy. Via Open Education News: The Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto, which beautifully expresses the value of openness in… Continue reading
A milestone for open standards for additive manufacturing
Via the Wohlers Talk blog: “This week will go down as an important milestone. On Tuesday, January 13 in West Conshohocken (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, a group of more than 70 individuals from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Africa approved the formation of an official ASTM Committee to create industry standards around additive manufacturing technologies. The… Continue reading
Dean Baker’s proposals for the Obama stimulus package
Great example of how stimulating/promoting/funding open and participatory processes makes economic and policy sense. I’m only quoting the 3 ‘p2p’ related policy proposals out of a total of seven. For some personal details about Dean Baker, see the book information at the bottom of this entry. By economist Dean Baker: 1. Policy proposals: “President Obama… Continue reading
Open Green Maps for sustainability
Via Springwise: “New York-based Green Map System has made online maps of sustainable initiatives accessible to keen greens everywhere. Its selection of hand-picked mapmakers in 50 countries are responsible for the site’s 450+ maps, facilitating global sustainability from a grassroots level. Ethical stores, green spaces and recycling sites are just some of the sites the… Continue reading
Five years of civic hacking in the UK
“Using our services, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister.” Quite of the entries in our wiki section p2p politics would fall under the rubric of ‘civic hacking‘, i.e…. Continue reading
Richard Miller on the new literacies for learning
You should have seen Dr. Miller present this live … he used an iMovie and spoke the text off the top of his head as it played. Incredible messages, incredible visualization, incredible delivery. Was one of the best keynotes I’ve ever seen… The following presentation is strongly recommended by Kevin Jarrett: “as you will see… Continue reading
The DRM victory is (not) complete
It’s important to recognize milestones and victories, and this one can count. Ed Felten of the Freedom to Tinker blog summarizes it well: “Last week’s agreement between Apple and the major record companies to eliminate DRM (copy protection) in iTunes songs marks the effective end of DRM for recorded music. The major online music stores… Continue reading
Do we need energy-backed currencies?
(via an email from Dante Monson) That we do need such a currency is one of the main underlying theses of Marc Fawzi’s project for a P2P Energy Economy, which he develops in our wiki. But the idea has been preceded by concrete experiments already, i.e. the Wat checks system in Japan (thanks to Dante… Continue reading
Report: Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life
48-page report from the ETC Group, reviewed by David Bollier. The report can be downloaded here. David Bollier: “The ETC Group has long prowled the frontiers of the life sciences and the troubling long-term agendas of those industry sectors. In a new report, the Ottawa-based public interest group describes the alarming concentration of the life… Continue reading
Citizen science as an alternative to Big Science
In this NYT guest editorial, Aaron Hirsh first describes the inevitability of Big Science approaches as scienfific communities grow to maturity, but also argues in the second part, that distributed citizen science is an alternative way to achieve bigness wihout centralization: Aaron Hirsh: “If Big Science is what it takes to gather the truly precious… Continue reading
Peer2Peer Tutors: “Students learn best from other students”
This article appeared in the Washington Post and was written by By Daniel de Vise: “Private tutoring is big business in the Washington suburbs. And now it is a full-time job for Kimel, who graduated this spring and can devote his full attention to Peer2Peer Tutors, the company he founded five years ago as a… Continue reading