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Kurt Laitner

Value Creating Service Systems: From Service Systems to Digital Lives - 0 views

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    "Service dominant logic suggest that value is always co-created in context of use and experience. Co-creation is not an option (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008). "Moving things along meant a focus on 2 key aspects. philosophy and methods. "An SD logic approach is not one that you can run a survey of attitude, behaviours or intentions. The person is embedded in his actions and practices of value creation. The focus on context means the unit of analysis is in the sociology of real life behaviours. A sociological approach makes methods a problem because we've inherited a world where we have created tools from analysing water in a bucket, not by looking at its behaviour in a river. "GD logic is compelling not only because it is entrenched for over 500 years, but also because you could measure its constructs. GDP, sales, revenues, CPI - they are all constructs of a GD logic society. What SD logic needed was better methods and new constructs. "To that end, and rather ironically, I found an ally in digital technology. Here was a world of sensors and actuators with an enthusiastic community looking for novel ways of deploying them into homes and buildings i.e. the internet-of-things. "I also found, as an ally, the thinking around new economic and business models. Here was another strand of literature largely marginalised by mainstream business literature because it was (the way I interpreted it) taking a systemic view of value proposition, value creation and value capture (ie, change one, change all) and the way the organisation had to be agile and transformed for it - which sat very nicely with SD logic. "Customised products are firm centric. Personalised products are customer initiated and empowering. Personalised products also tend to move the product into becoming platforms to afford co-creation, which advanced the notion of symmetry in value co-creation further. Finally, with the advent of platforms, the economics of 2 or multi-sided markets completed my set of theoretica
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    an interesting starting point for research
Kurt Laitner

Forget the Foundations - In These Times - 0 views

  • Their “actions” didn’t involve writing grant proposals, discussing their concerns with a board of directors or contacting state agencies. They tested water samples themselves, and, in 1979, produced a study revealing high levels of radioactive contamination, a high percentage of pregnancies complicated by excessive bleeding or terminated in abortion and large numbers of children born with birth defects. Despite their work, the Centers for Disease Control and Indian Health Services discredited the study, and WARN wasn’t vindicated until the South Dakota School of Mines substantiated their claims that same year.
  • But unlike Erin Brockovich, this tale of local activists fighting against faceless institutions doesn’t have a happy ending: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission simply raised the level of “acceptable contamination,” and Indian Health Services started providing bottled water in one area. Congress authorized a new water pipeline to the reservation in 2002–only to have the funding diverted by the financial demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • who defer responsibility onto do-nothing organizations, only later to complain about their lack of agency
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  • that foundations perpetuate First World interests and free-market capitalism, thus preserving many of the problems radical activists wish to eradicate, such as the unregulated concentration of wealth.
  • Foundations were created in the early 20th century by multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, to evade corporate and estate taxes.
  • foundations divert money away from the collective tax base
  • who are more interested in supporting milquetoast reformers than social-justice organizations
  • federal and state funding for education and healthcare has shrunk
  • This is a culture of noblesse oblige, Ahn writes, where the “privileged are obliged to help those less fortunate, without examining how that wealth was created or the dangerous implications of conceding such power to the wealthy.”
  • is the power those with money wield over community leaders.
  • consequently realigning their interests (i.e., maintaining their jobs) with maintaining the system
  • This allegiance keeps community leaders from challenging the root causes of social inequities–the social-change work–at the same time that they pedal to keep up by providing for the needs of individuals devastated by institutional exploitation.
  • Kivel concedes this is valuable work, but points out the inherent injustice of this paradigm: “When temporary shelter becomes a substitute for permanent housing, emergency food a substitute for a decent job … we have shifted our attention from the redistribution of wealth to the temporary provision of social services to keep people alive.”
  • University of Southern California Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges contemporary grassroots activists to stop seeking a “pure way of doing things.” “Many are looking for an organizational structure and a resource capability that will somehow be impervious to co-optation,”
  • transitioning from foundation support to a volunteer collective reliant solely on grassroots dollars
Kurt Laitner

Crisis of Value Theory - P2P Foundation - 0 views

  • accumulation of knowledge assets
  • a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information
  • In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.
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  • But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same.
  • The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.
  • capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence
  • 1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential 2) The monetization of such value is linear
  • What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.
  • more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field
  • “the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”
  • This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy
  • crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners
  • The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.
  • We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.
  • Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.
  • The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “
  • increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm
  • there is no more outside.
  • one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means
  • Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks
  • failure of artificial abundance
  • failure of artificial scarcity
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    the passing of the capitalist age
Francois Bergeron

Cell Tester Opens the Window of Discovery | Product Information | Articles - 0 views

  • Written by Lisa J Fulghum    Physiologic Mechanisms in Cardiac Myocytes and Skeletal Muscle Cells The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool for cellular investiga
  • The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool for cellular investigation that can (without any changes) be used for one single living cell, for a small multi-cellular preparation and for single or larger skinned muscle strip preparations. Translational experiments from the single living cells to the intact multi-cellular level can be accomplished.
  • The Cell Tester offers: Integral microtweezer apparatus that facilitates cellular attachment Two integrated piezo manipulators are included Bio-compatible adhesive (MyoTak™) included Unique rotational stage that allows for easy cellular alignment, improved experimental throughput (shown in the image above) Ultra-quiet force transducer included Linear displacement motor stretches or compresses cells with 25nm precision Fits ANY inverted microscope Use native cuvette or ANY 35mm glass bottom dish
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    The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Key management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

  • Key management
  • his includes dealing with the generation, exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys.
  • Key management concerns keys at the user level, either between users or systems.
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  • This is in contrast to key scheduling; key scheduling typically refers to the internal handling of key material within the operation of a cipher.
  • it involves system policy, user training, organizational and departmental interactions, and coordination between all of these elements.
  • Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
  • A public key infrastructure is a type of key management system that uses hierarchical digital certificates to provide authentication, and public keys to provide encryption. PKIs are used in World Wide Web traffic, commonly in the form of SSL and TLS.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views

  • “commons law” (not to be confused with common law)
  • Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
  • Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
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  • individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
  • reframe the very notion of “the economy” to incorporate non-market sharing and collaboration.
  • we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
  • the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems
  • We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
  • An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
  • Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
  • We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
  • The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
  • These are, however, precisely the attributes of natural systems.
  • Exchange value is the primary if not the exclusive concern.
  • anything that does not have a price and exists ‘outside’ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
  • industry lobbies have captured if not corrupted the legislative process
  • regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
  • we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
  • it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
  • It requires that we enlarge our understanding of ‘value’ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
  • articulate and foster a coherent new paradigm
  • deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Innovation Canada: A Call to Action - Review of Federal Support to Research and Develop... - 1 views

  • Canada has a solid foundation on which to build success as a leader in the knowledge economy of tomorrow
  • innovation in Canada lags behind other highly developed countries
  • innovation is the ultimate source of the long-term competitiveness of businesses and the quality of life of Canadians
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  • We heard that the government should be more focussed on helping innovative firms to grow and, particularly, on serving the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
  • greater cooperation with provincial programs
  • innovation support is too narrowly focussed on R&D – more support is needed for other activities along the continuum from ideas to commercially useful innovation
  • more productive and internationally competitive economy
  • whole-of-government program delivery vehicle – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC)
  • SR&ED program should be simplified
  • includes non-labour costs, such as materials and capital equipment, the calculation of which can be highly complex
  • the base for the tax credit should be labour-related costs, and the tax credit rate should be adjusted upward
  • fund direct support measures for SMEs
  • promoting the growth of firms
  • facilitating access by such firms to an increased supply of risk capital at both the start-up and later stages of their growth.
  • building public–private research collaborations
  • National Research Council (NRC) should become independent collaborative research organizations
  • become affiliates of universities
  • create opportunity and demand for leading-edge goods
  • encouragement of innovation in the Canadian economy should become a stated objective of procurement policies and programs.
  • the government needs to establish business innovation as a whole-of-government priority
  • put innovation at the centre of the government's economic strategy
  • Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) – a body with a whole-of-government focus that would oversee the realization of our proposed action plan, as well as serve as a permanent mechanism to promote the refinement and improvement of the government's business innovation programs going forward.
  • focus resources where market forces are unlikely to operate effectively or efficiently and, in that context, address the full range of business innovation activities, including research, development, commercialization and collaboration with other key actors in the innovation ecosystem
  • the closer the activity being supported is to market, and therefore the more likely it is that the recipient firm will capture most of the benefit for itself.
  • specific sectors
  • of strategic importance
  • concentrated in particular regions
  • succeed in the arena of global competition
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      They don't go beyond the firm
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      they are still stuck in the competitive paradigm
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Still stack with the old paradigm of the "knowledge economy"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy  My opinion is that we're moving into a know-how economy. 
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

  • how to accomplish some common tasks
  • add a custom menu to a Spreadsheet and link specific functions in your script to menu items
  • the menu items, the functions pops up a message box.
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  • you will want the custom menu to be displayed as soon as the Spreadsheet is opened. To do this,include an onOpen function in your script
  • array of objects
  • An array is a collection of elements that works something like a Spreadsheet. Each element in an array can be identified by its location in the array, called an index point.
  • Arrays
  • are zero-based
  • Arrays are a convenient way to store and manipulate data within a computer program or script.
  • Each menu item is placed inside curly braces, and this syntax defines each name-function name pair as an object.
  • After the definition of the menu entries comes the definition of the menu itself:
  • Here's generalized code for creating menu items and a menu.
  • The following code pops up a message box when a user selects a menu item on the new menu:
  • the generalized code
Kurt Laitner

The Revolution at hand - Op-Ed - Domus - 0 views

  • Currently, our education prepares us to perform a job — at times any job — that pays us in terms of what we can possess and consume or, in other words, the goods that design and mass production consider to be to our satisfaction — at least partially.
  • We have produced artificial needs for years under this mantra
  • creating almost nonexistent necessities that are readily available and easy to narrate rather than investigating the problems and real needs of people and communities
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  • the need for large-scale production is disappearing due to the crystalline democratization of the means of production
  • Mediocrity is obsolete
  • Money has become absurdly limited
  • unable to model the exchanges that serve to give way to a new mode of radically inclusive and more equitable cooperative production
  • design becomes a political tool
  • Innovation and meaning have been restricted, trapped and suffocated by mechanisms of protection, monopolies, patents and copyrights.
  • If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers. Customers barely exist in the creative world now.
  • Production will occur only when there is a demand — and not a moment before
  • We need a new cultural infrastructure
  • A new distributed network of places of cultural and tangible production must be affirmed. The network will stem from fablabs, makerspaces and hackerspaces — the new factories — around the world, or from ambitious projects like the Italian Bottega 21: initiatives that unite the existing cultural heritage of places and traditions with currently available technologies
  • design itself must be independent from specific materials
  • We will teach students to investigate, discover and create work, products and services that the community needs, rather than merely follow any old curriculum while waiting for a "phantom" labour market to claim them
  • "The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not 'how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology', but 'how can we organize a society around something other than employment?'
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views

  • more open people processes
  • Participative processes like Open Space, World Cafes, Unconferences, Peer Circles
  • Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
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  • maker faires
  • community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising
  • The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological
  • Technological
  • information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web
  • appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
  • Sociological
  • People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
  • get informed and take action
  • Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes
  • play and work together
  • rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
  • The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
  • Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation
  • What’s coming along next ?  “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
  • Shorter cycle-based development and release
  • Agile development
  • It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT)
  • clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
  • experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
  • The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data
  • ethical, political and social impact policy decisions
  • that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
  • ‘we’ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies
  • participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the ‘new rules’
  • What the Future May Hold
  • the ‘scenario planning’ approach
  • world’s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy
  • A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation
  • Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
  • are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
  • The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
  • cultural ‘mutation’
  • Wirearchy
  • a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
  • the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
  • The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
  • Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
  • Participative Work Design – The Six Criteria
  • in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
  • contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
  • peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world
  • Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
  • But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Chubb detector lock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • A Chubb detector lock is a type of lever tumbler lock with an integral security feature, a form of relocker, which frustrates unauthorised access attempts and indicates to the lock's owner that it has been interfered with. When someone tries to pick the lock or to open it using the wrong key, the lock is designed to jam in a locked state until (depending on the lock) either a special regulator key or the original key is inserted and turned in a different direction. This alerts the owner to the fact that the lock has been tampered with.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Card reader - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Smart card
  • There are two types of smart cards: contact and contactless. Both have an embedded microprocessor and memory. The smart card differs from the proximity card in that the microchip in the proximity card has only one function: to provide the reader with the card's identification number. The processor on the smart card has an embedded operating system and can handle multiple applications such as a cash card, a pre-paid membership card, or an access control card.
  • A contactless card does not have to touch the reader or even be taken out of a wallet or purse. Most access control systems only read serial numbers of contactless smart cards and do not utilize the available memory. Card memory may be used for storing biometric data (i.e. fingerprint template) of a user. In such case a biometric reader first reads the template on the card and then compares it to the finger (hand, eye, etc.) presented by the user. In this way biometric data of users does not have to be distributed and stored in the memory of controllers or readers, which simplifies the system and reduces memory requirements.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

PeerPoint « Poor Richard's Almanack 2010 - 1 views

  • Each PeerPoint is an autonomous node on a p2p network with no centralized corporate  infrastructure.
  • The PeerPoint will be connected between the user’s pc, home network, or mobile device and the ISP connection.
  • The PeerPoint is designed to Occupy the Internet.
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  • provide greater user value
  • For numerous reasons the services provided by the commercial companies do not adequately meet the creative, social, political, and financial needs of the 99%
  • allows self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums, and movements.
  • With the PeerPoint approach, each user will own her own inexpensive internet appliance and all the data and content she creates
  • If a FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack.
  • The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are: world class, best-of-breed open source p2p architecture consistent, granular, user-customizable security management and identity protection integrated with other apps in the suite via a common distributed database and/or “data bus” architecture. consistent, user-customizable large, medium, and small-screen (mobile device) user interfaces ability to interface with its corresponding major-market-share service (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) GPS enabled
  • First tier applications: distributed database social networking  (comparison of distributed social network applications) trust/reputation metrics crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management  (wiki, Google Docs, or better) project management/workflow data visualization (data sets, projects, networks, etc.) user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better) crowd funding (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform) voting (LiquidFeedback or better) universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content
Yasir Siddiqui

Open Innovation in Cities - 0 views

  • The collaborative economy, driven by a convergence of numerous factors including the global economic recession, growing environmental consciousness and the growing ubiquity of information communication technologies (ICTs) is booming, with more than $2 billion in investment raised from venture capitalists 5  and $3.5 billion generated for users in P2P models in 2013. 6  
Steve Bosserman

Shareable: Pay-What-You-Can Cafés Share the Bounty with Those in Need - 1 views

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    Though some might brand the effort as socialism, Panera Bread - what with its $4 billion market cap and 60,000 employees - is more an example of conscious capitalism in action. And, with the Panera Cares Foundation, Shaich spreads the wealth one step further in an almost commons-based venture where food is a right, not a privilege. Here, the stakeholders are valued alongside the shareholders. But that's not all. Shaich also aims to triple-leverage Panera's resources by feeding people who can't feed themselves, training and funneling at-risk youth back into the mainstream, and setting an example for other corporations to do more than simply write a check. As a result, both private (funding) and public (people) assets are brought to bear in a successful partnership rooted in sharing.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The New Sacred « Dynamics of Myth - 0 views

  • The question then becomes about special content, and adoption of that content.
  • driving adoption of a mythology with values
  • We have to both overcome the hold of the old mythology and gain adoption of the new. What drives adoption of a meaningful cultural phenomenon?
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  • the shared Christian story during the Renaissance
  • Church, artists, businesses and consumers all contributed to the great rebirth of culture
  • largely driven by the church and government institutions which we don’t necessarily want to recreate, right?
  • So how do we achieve the same effect?
  • The answer is sacred content.
  • I adopt what I believe in, and if the content is sacred, then it is beyond question.
  • An authority has determined these are sacred and therefore worthy
  • The Authority establishes a values framework, a ruling hierarchy directs and stewards the sacred content, and a host of intermediaries that carry it out to the faithful consumers.
  • We now have a strong distrust of authority, which has lost all legitimacy:
  • All around us there’s a collapse of the legitimacy of authorities, with much cynicism from the population. There’s never been a greater need for sacred content that can be trusted and deemed legitimate. How to achieve it without authorities? This is where we have to pivot our minds. We have to replace the dynamics of its creation within the authority with something else. This slide suggests an alternative:
  • We can create a values framework using collaborative culture techniques like community mythology projects. Out of these come sacred content that is legitimate because we created it according to shared values and a collective conscience. We have to put in place processes and rituals to establish, enshrine and communicate it.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Open Source Completely 3-D Printable Centrifuge - Appropedia, the sustainability wiki - 0 views

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    "Centrifuges are commonly required devices in medical diagnostics facilities as well as scientific laboratories. Although there are commercial and open source centrifuges, the costs of the former and the required electricity to operate the latter limit accessibility in resource-constrained settings. There is a need for low-cost, human-powered, verified, and reliable lab-scale centrifuges. This study provides the designs for a low-cost 100% 3-D printed centrifuge, which can be fabricated on any low-cost RepRap-class (self-replicating rapid prototyper) fused filament fabrication (FFF)- or fused particle fabrication (FPF)-based 3-D printer. In addition, validation procedures are provided using a web camera and free and open source software. This paper provides the complete open source plans, including instructions for the fabrication and operation of a hand-powered centrifuge. This study successfully tested and validated the instrument, which can be operated anywhere in the world with no electricity inputs, obtaining a radial velocity of over 1750 rpm and over 50 N of relative centrifugal force. Using commercial filament, the instrument costs about U.S. $25, which is less than half of all commercially available systems. However, the costs can be dropped further using recycled plastics on open source systems for over 99% savings. The results are discussed in the context of resource-constrained medical and scientific facilities."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Open Source 3-D Printed Nutating Mixer - Appropedia, the sustainability wiki - 0 views

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    "As the open source development of additive manufacturing has led to low-cost desktop three-dimensional (3-D) printing, a number of scientists throughout the world have begun to share digital designs of free and open source scientific hardware. Open source scientific hardware enables custom experimentation, laboratory control, rapid upgrading, transparent maintenance, and lower costs in general. To aid in this trend, this study describes the development, design, assembly, and operation of a 3-D printable open source desktop nutating mixer, which provides a fixed 20° platform tilt angle for a gentle three-dimensional (gyrating) agitation of chemical or biological samples (e.g., DNA or blood samples) without foam formation. The custom components for the nutating mixer are designed using open source FreeCAD software to enable customization. All of the non-readily available components can be fabricated with a low-cost RepRap 3-D printer using an open source software tool chain from common thermoplastics. All of the designs are open sourced and can be configured to add more functionality to the equipment in the future. It is relatively easy to assemble and is accessible to both the science education of younger students as well as state-of-the-art research laboratories. Overall, the open source nutating mixer can be fabricated with US$37 in parts, which is 1/10th of the cost of proprietary nutating mixers with similar capabilities. The open source nature of the device allow it to be easily repaired or upgraded with digital files, as well as to accommodate custom sample sizes and mixing velocities with minimal additional costs."
Kurt Laitner

Smart contracts · FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions Wiki · GitHub - 0 views

  • Once voting groups are someday eventually added to OT, they will also be able to act as parties to agreements, and they will be able to take a vote in order to change their own bylaws!
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ah governance
  • Scripted clauses can also be configured to trigger on certain events.
  • Smart contracts are most distinguished by the fact that they can have scriptable clauses
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  • The script code is unable to manipulate any assets excepting those explicitly declared beforehand on the smart contract,
  • Not only can the smart contract move_funds() between these declared accounts, as its script logic dictates, but it can also stash_funds() directly inside the contract itself!
  • A smart contract can be activated, after which point it takes on a “life of its own”
  • You can also define variables in your smart contract, which persist through its entire lifetime. As the smart contract—including its internal state—continues to process over time, receipts will continue to drop into the relevant parties’ inboxes,
  • A signed copy of the original smart contract shows it as it was, when the parties first signed and activated it. Additionally, a server-signed, updated version of the contract comes with each receipt, showing the latest state
  • Once the contract expires (or is deactivated) then a finalReceipt is dropped into all relevant inboxes, after which no other receipts are possible for that smart contract.
  • Let’s say a party needs to DIRECTLY trigger one of the clauses on the contract. (Instead of waiting around for it to trigger automatically based on some rule.) For example, perhaps an escrow user wishes to execute a clause in order to DISPUTE THE OUTCOME, or perhaps an arbitrator wishes to activate a clause in order to RENDER A JUDGMENT. OT’s smart contracts can do precisely these sorts of things, limited only by your imagination (and my pre-alpha code.)
Kurt Laitner

Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being.pdf - 0 views

  • such as interest,engagement and meaning,
  • subjective well-being is taken to be:2Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that peoplemake of their lives, and the affective reactions of people to their experiences
  • “subjective well-being is an umbrella term for the different valuationspeople make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds,and the circumstances in which they live”.
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  • In measuring overall human well-being then, subjective well-being should be placedalongside measures of non-subjective outcomes, such as income, health, knowledge andskills, safety, environmental quality and social connections
  • Inparticular, a distinction is commonly made between life evaluations, which involve acognitive evaluation of the respondent’s life as a whole (or aspects of it), and measures ofaffect, which capture the feelings experienced by the respondent at a particular point in time(Diener, 1984; Kahneman et al., 1999
  • eudaimonic aspect ofsubjective well-being, reflecting people’s sense of purpose and engagement
  • The framework used here covers all three concepts of well-being:●Life evaluation.●Affect.●Eudaimonia (psychological “flourishing”)
  • the result of a judgement by the individual rather than thedescription of an emotional state.
  • Elements of subjective well-beingLife evaluation
  • making an evaluation of this sort as involving the individual constructing a “standard” thatthey perceive as appropriate for themselves, and then comparing the circumstances oftheir life to that standard
  • Life evaluations are based on how people remember their experiences (Kahneman et al.,1999) and can differ significantly from how they actually experienced things at the time
  • It is for this reason that life evaluations are sometimes characterised as measures of“decision utility” in contrast to “experienced utility”
  • One of the mostwell documented measures of life evaluation – thePersonal Wellbeing Index– consists of eightquestions, covering satisfactions with eight different aspects of life, which are summedusing equal weights to calculate an overall index (International Wellbeing Group, 2006)
  • (job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, house satisfaction, healthsatisfaction, leisure satisfaction and environmental satisfaction),
  • AffectAffect is the term psychologists use to describe a person’s feelings. Measures of affectcan be thought of as measures of particular feelings or emotional states, and they aretypically measured with reference to a particular point in time.
  • Such measures capturehow people experience life rather than how they remember it (Kahneman and Krueger,2006
  • While an overall evaluation of life can be captured in a single measure, affect has atleast two distinct hedonic dimensions: positive affect and negative affect (Kahneman et al.,1999; Diener et al., 1999
  • positive affect is thought to be largely uni-dimensional
  • negative affect may be more multi-dimensional.
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