Excerpted from Glyn Moody: “It is not just an issue for life-saving medical devices that can kill as well as save: it is about our increasing reliance on embedded software in everyday life, in developed countries at least. The key question is: how can we trust those devices if we can’t see the code? Clearly,… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2012"
Video of the Day: Introducing examples of crowdsourcing
This video gives examples of crowdsourcing by Kickstarter, Soundcloud, Twitter, Facebook, OpenIDEO, youtube, ReCaptcha, Amazon, Google Demo Slam, Oxford English Dictionary, WIkipedia, Google Earth, Watch the video, “We Are Crowdsourcing” here:
Book of the Day: The Semantic Sphere
Book: The Semantic Sphere: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy. Pierre Levy. Wiley-ISTE. 2011 The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep… Continue reading
Potato movement shows Greek ‘post-crisis’ shift to a sharing economy
Excerpted from Jon Henley: “The so-called potato movement, through which thousands of tonnes of potatoes and other agricultural produce – including, hopefully, next month, Easter lamb – are being sold directly to consumers by their producers, is taking off across Greece. “It’s because everyone benefits,” said Kamenides, standing in a clearing in the woods above… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Jean Lievens on the P2P Revolution in Media
A text from Jean lievens: “The Internet as a “new” medium is not an extension or an extra platform of the traditional media; it is qualitatively different because it turns the passive media consumer (the couch potato) into an active contributor. People not only like to consume, they also like to contribute and share. The… Continue reading
Video of the Day: James Quilligan About Why We Have to Occupy the Commons
Via: Talk at the Occupy Wall Street Forum on the Commons, February 16, 2012, well worth listening to: Anna Betz: “”In this talk, he encouraged the audience to challenge Garrett Hardin’s definition of the Commons, as found in his 1968 article in Science Journal, ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. He explained that what Hardin described are,… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Reinventing Discovery – The New Era of Networked Science
Book: Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Michael Nielsen. Princeton University Press, 2011 Summary In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet,… Continue reading
Video of the Day: How Strong Property Rights Promoted Slavery and Discouraged Manufacturing Progress
Suresh Naidu talks about Property Rights and Growth: Lessons from Slavery: “Strong enforcement of property rights is good for economic growth, says the conventional wisdom. The link may not be as clear cut, says Suresh Naidu. He and co-investigator Jeremiah Dittmar are digging through court records and newspaper ads on runaway slaves to come up… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: We the Web Kids
* Article: Piotr Czerski. We, the Web Kids. (translated by Marta Szreder) Excerpted Piotr Czerski, on understanding the digital natives: 1. “We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Future We Deserve
Book: The Future We Deserve. Ed. by Vinay Gupta. 2012. The Future We Deserve is a new book project about collaboratively creating the future we deserve. We will be working together at internet scale on internet time to brainstorm and barnstorm our way towards an image of a world we all believe in, a world… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Why New Technologies Do Not Make Poor Countries Rich
Video interview of Diego Comin via: “Over the past two hundred years, poor countries have become faster at adopting the technologies of rich countries. So why is it, the economist asks, that poor countries have remained poor, by and large? The answer, Diego Comin says, is that poor countries use technologies less intensely: fewer people… Continue reading
How the #OccupyWallStreet Movement Has Shifted the Economic Paradigm
Excerpted from Janet Meaton: (go to the original for the references!) “First of all the Occupy Movement has created a useful space where finally the elephant in the room is exposed and legitimate discussion of the dysfunction of the present economic system is now widely underway from mainstream media to politicians, to academia, to students,… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: The Civic as the Foundation for the Commons, Markets and Governments
Via Marvin Brown: “I know, many people think of three spheres: market, government, and civil society. Well, most of these people are on automatic pilot. Like unmanned drones, they attack anything that proposes a different framework. OK, this is one way of sorting things out, but it now prevents us from directing the market to… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Charles Eistenstein on Sacred Economics
Directed by Ian MacKenzie ; Produced by Velcrow Ripper, Gregg Hill, Ian MacKenzie “Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Reproducible Science Needs Open Source Software
Excerpted from an important editorial from Nature magazine, By Kyle Niemeyer: “Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for… Continue reading
Graphic of the day: P2P Product Cycle
Source: Simone Cicero More information here.