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Kurt Laitner

Google Open Source Blog: Learning the meaning behind words - 0 views

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    I have mentioned in the past Dr Fantoni's work on word vector analysis to create a value chain post facto. Not sure if this technology will allow the same but is in the same area (NLP) and unlike Dr Fantoni's work, is open source.
Kurt Laitner

Impact of Social Sciences - The right tool for the job: Five collaborative writing tool... - 2 views

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    may be helpful for assessing potential tools
Kurt Laitner

The FLOK Society Vision of a Post-Capitalist Economy | David Bollier - 1 views

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    just in case anyone is unaware of this framwork, which is seminal
Steve Bosserman

Instead of Student Loans, Investing in Futures - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    So how do we finance something that is extremely valuable both for individuals and for society - something that, in most cases, should happen, but often won't happen because the risks are too high? The best way is to spread the risk. That's how insurance works. In Lumni's case, students share the risk with investors, who make more or less based on how well the students do. But they also share it with one another. Lumni pools its investments into funds to balance out the risks. They know that some students will run into difficulties, some will achieve average success, and some will do very well - but they don't know in advance how any individual student will fare. And students don't know this themselves. Through diversification, however, their funds can achieve stable returns. What this means is that the students who have the biggest problems benefit the most. And, in effect, those who decide to become investment bankers end up subsidizing the ones who decide to become social workers. Since a good society needs many different roles fulfilled, everyone benefits. That, at least, is the theory. Economists are skeptical about human capital contracts - which were first proposed by Milton Friedman in the 1950s - because they have many potential problems and little track record. But Lumni seems to be making them work - at least on a small scale. Whether it can succeed at a larger level remains to be seen.
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

Collaboration Is Misunderstood and Overused - Andrew Campbell - Harvard Business Review - 0 views

  • managers in different functions or different business units seem surprisingly reluctant to work together
  • Jealousies, misunderstandings and enmity seem more common than collaboration
  • Why does collaboration fail? There are lots of reasons. Collaboration can be time-consuming. It creates risks for the participants. Competing objectives can be hard to resolve
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • people confuse collaboration with teamwork.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "Competing objectives can be hard to resolve", well, this is what happens when you try to create a culture of collaboration within an overarching competitive environment.
  • Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome.
  • actions are interdependent
  • committed to a single result
  • joint decisions
  • cautious about taking unilateral action
  • someone with the authority to resolve disputes
  • Team members may dislike
  • each other
  • But with a good leader they can still perform.
  • Collaborators face a different challenge
  • they often also have competing goals
  • the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities
  • collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences
  • collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.
  • a collaborative relationship
  • is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.
  • my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team.
  • collaboration requires emotional engagement
  • respect
  • first-among-equals
  • creatively bargain
  • other over costs and benefits.
  • don't think of it as a permanent solution
  • collaborative relationship
  • transition to an easier form of interaction
Steve Bosserman

Food Safety in China, and the Risk to the U.S. - 0 views

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    Three years after the melamine-in-milk scandal that made 300,000 children sick, and two years after China passed its first-ever food safety law in response, the country is still struggling to keep its food supply healthy. The Chinese government recently cracked down, closing almost 5,000 food-producing businesses and arresting 2,000 people -- but China experts say a needlessly complex bureaucracy and ferocious determination to turn a profit mean the contamination will keep coming. (On forums where expats chat, Westerners living in China wonder whether there is anything safe to eat.) (Update: Commenters at the China Law Blog, many of them apparently resident in China, reflect the same anxiety.)
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