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heterodox Cambridge economist exposes 23 myths behind the neoliberal free-market dogma and urges us to recognize that "capitalism develops through long-term investments and technological innovations," spearheaded by an activist state committed to sustainable economic development.

Inundated by the deluge of information, and with little time on our hands, some of us turn to social media networks. Sometimes, postings by friends are useful. But often, the typically self-indulgent musings are not. It's "curators" to the rescue.

Data is everywhere, but use of data is not. So many of our efforts are centered around making money or getting people to buy more things, and this is understandable; however, there are neglected areas that could actually have a huge impact on the way we live. Jake Porway, a data scientist at The New York Times, has a proposition for you, tentatively called Data Without Borders. [T]here are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there doing wonderful things for the world, from rehabilitating criminals, to battling hunger, to providing clean drinking water. However, they're increasingly finding themselves with more and more data about their practices, their clients, and their missions that they don't have the resources or budgets to analyze. At the same time, the data/dev communities love hacking together weekend projects where we play with new datasets or build helpful scripts, but they usually just culminate in a blog post or some Twitter buzz. Wouldn't it be rad if we could get these two sides together?

When you think about what information be skeptical of, that decision can't begin and end with "corporate interests." Yes, those sources often give you bad information. But bad information comes from other places, too. The Fukushima accident was worse than TEPCO wanted people to believe when it first happened. Radiation isn't healthy for you, and there are people (plant workers, emergency crews, people who lived nearby) who will be dealing with the effects of Fukushima for years to come. But the fact that all of that is true does not mean that we should uncritically accept it when somebody says that radiation from Fukushima is killing babies in the United States. Just because the corporate interests are in the wrong doesn't mean that every claim against them is true.

Can social media really spur a revolution? Who benefits more from advances in technology-activists or authoritarian governments? What can the rest of the world do when Big Brother turns off the Internet? How did the successful Arab Spring turn into a complicated, bloody summer in Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere? Can blogging make a difference in Cuba and North Korea?

Orwell Prize winning hack Johann Hari has some explaining to do. After reading a recent blog post detailing how he seems to have plagiarised large parts of his interview with Antonio Negri I thought I'd have a closer look at his work.

"In the post on research on extreme rainfall and warming, Gavin Schmidt, the NASA climate scientist and Real Climate blogger, described the misinterpretation of some paper abstracts as mainly reflecting a cultural divide: "Here we show" statements are required by Nature and Science to clearly lay out the point of the paper. If you don't include it, they will write it in. The caveats/uncertainties/issues all come later. I think the confusion is more cultural than anything. No one at Nature or Science or any of the authors in any subject think that uncertainties are zero, but they require a clear statement of the point of the paper within their house style. I think that conclusion misses the reality that, particularly in the world of online communication of science, abstracts are not merely for colleagues who know the shorthand, but have different audiences who'll have different ways of interpreting phrases such as "here we show.""

"The appealing imagery of a scientist who simply follows his curiosity and then makes a discovery with a large societal payoff is part of the core mythology of post-World War II science policies. The mythology shapes how governments around the world organize, account for, and fund research. A large body of scholarship has critiqued postwar science policies and found that, despite many notable successes, the science policies that may have made sense in the middle of the last century may need updating in the 21st century. In short, investments in "basic research" are not enough. Benoit Godin has asserted (PDF) that: "The problem is that the academic lobby has successfully claimed a monopoly on the creation of new knowledge, and that policy makers have been persuaded to confuse the necessary with the sufficient condition that investment in basic research would by itself necessarily lead to successful applications." Or as Leshner and Cooper declare in The Washington Post: "Federal investments in R&D have fueled half of the nation's economic growth since World War II." A closer look at the actual history of Google reveals how history becomes mythology. The 1994 NSF project that funded the scientific work underpinning the search engine that became Google (as we know it today) was conducted from the start with commercialization in mind: "The technology developed in this project will provide the 'glue' that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion." In this case, the scientist following his curiosity had at least one eye simultaneously on commercialization."

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we're going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift - and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament. Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their "memories" - information stored at the cellular level - to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose.

"Unsourcing", as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers' problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company's own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.

Recall that in the aftermath of initial revelations about Peter Gleick's phishing of the Heartland Institute, we heard defenses of his action that included claims that he was only doing the same thing that journalists do to the importance of looking beyond Gleick's misdeeds at the "larger truth." Consider also what was described in the UEA emails as "pressure to present a nice tidy story" related to climate science as well as the IPCC's outright falsification related to disasters and climate change. Such shenanigans so endemic in the climate change debate that when a journalist openly asks whether the media should tell the whole truth about climate change, no one even bats an eye.