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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy - 0 views

  • In the  emerging institutional model of peer production
  • we can distinguish an interplay between three partners
  • a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design;
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players
  • a set of "for-benefit institutions' which manage the 'infrastructure of cooperation'
  • an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons;
  • because democracy, and the market, and hierarchy, are modes of allocation of scarce resources
  • Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy
  • we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
  • The post-democratic logic of community
  • these communities are not democracies
  • Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation
  • has achieved capacities both for global coordination, and for the small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms and that it does this without 'command and control'! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.
  • Everyone can contribute without permission, but such a priori permissionlessness is  matched with mechanisms for 'a posteriori'  communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called 'maintainers' and the 'editors',  decide
  • These decisions require expertise, not communal consensus
  • tension between inclusiveness of participation and selection for excellence
  • allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a 'object-oriented' cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its 'peer governance' mechanisms
  • The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, the hierarchy and democracy,  is a 'distribution of tasks'
  • no longer a division of labor between 'jobs', and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call 'stigmergic signalling'
  • work environment is designed to be totally open and transparent
  • every participating individual can see what is needed, or not and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution
  • this new model
  • Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.
  • And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would also discourage contributions by the community of participants.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      disagree, there are many ways to ethically distribute governance, not just democracy
  • Hence, an increased exodus of productive  capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetization, which only operates at its margins.
  • Where there is no tension between supply and demand, their can be no market, and no capital accumulation
  • Facebook and Google users create commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly and they are not at all rewarded for their own value creation.
  • Since what they are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods, there is no return of income for these value creators
  • This means that social media platforms are exposing an important fault line in our system
  • If you did not contribute, you had no say, so engagement was and is necessary.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      key divergence from birth/process citizenship driven democracy
  • ⁃   At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on ⁃   These commons are enabled and protected through nonprofit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, which empowers and enables that social production ⁃   Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures ties them to the values and goals of the commons communities, and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximising profit at any cost
  • the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ie value equations..?
  • Today, it is proto-mode of production which is entirely inter-dependent with the system of capital
  • Is there any possibility to create a really autonmous model of peer production, that could create its own cycle of reproduction?
  • contribute
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      defined as?
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "ad hoc": perhaps based on context, needs and everyone's understanding of the situation
  • and whose mission is the support of the commons and its contributors
  • In this way, the social reproduction of commoners would no longer depend on the accumulation cycle of capital, but on its own cycle of value creation and realization
  • Phyles are mission-oriented, purpose-driven, community-supportive entities that operate in the market, on a global scale, but work for the commons.
  • peer production license, which has been proposed by Dmytri Kleiner.
  • Thijs Markus writes  so eloquently about Nike in the Rick Falkvinge blog, if you want to sell $5 shoes for $150 in the West, you better have one heck of a repressive IP regime in place.
  • Hence the need for SOPA/PIPA , ACTA'S and other attempts to criminalize the right to share.
  • An economy of scope exists between the production of two goods when two goods which share a CommonCost are produced together such that the CommonCost is reduced.
  • shared infrastructure costs
  • 2) The current system beliefs that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let's call this feature, enforced 'artificial scarcity'.
  • 1) Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let's call this feature, runaway 'pseudo-abundance'.
  • So what are the economies of scope of the new p2p age? They come in two flavours: 1) the mutualizing of knowledge and immaterial resources 2) the mutualizing of material productive resources
  • how does global governance look like in P2P civilization?
  • conflicts between contributors
  • are not decided by authoritarian fiat, but by 'negotiated coordination'.
Kurt Laitner

Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views

  • The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      in other words, people are financially motivated until they are financially secure, then other motivations come in
  • "leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees
  • At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so part of the dynamic is that everyone is paid fairly, if not there is the feeling of exploitation
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      which are... abundance?
  • It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
  • giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them
  • There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      the real question though is why, and whether it is the paying them that is the problem, or perhaps how that is determined, and who else gets what on what basis..  if you have to have them question the fairness of the situation, they will likely check out
  • Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
  • If you pay me for it, it must be work
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      only because a dichotomy of work and play exists in western culture
  • It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      yes, why is key
  • interesting examples of an effect called crowding
  • Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
  • A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
  • Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
  • Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      or perhaps the key was to help her fit the medication into her day, which she was having trouble with...
  • The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      absolutely, in some sense the guilt of being late is replaced by a rationalization that you are paying them - it is still a rationalization, and parents in this case need to be reminded that staff have lives too to reinforce the moral suasion
  • "The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
  • External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      emphasis on "if" and replacing that with "in so far as"
  • External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      interesting footnote
  • In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc.  If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
  • cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      are these learned or intrinsic?
  • this is labor, this is work, just do it.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      except that this cultural meme is already a bias, not a fact
  • When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      true, and part of our challenge then is to remove this dichotomy
  • So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and perhaps the problem is simply the conversion to money, rather than simply tracking these activities themselves (went to church 50 times this year!, helped 50 orphans get families!) (the latter being more recognition than reward
  • Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and tracking them causes them to conform to cultural expectations
  • You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and we are left with the challenge, how to work to purpose but still have our scarce goods needs sufficiently provided for?  it has to be for love AND money
  • When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      so pay them highly for highly valued labour, and don't forget to recognize them as well... no?
  • you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this is a non argument, these are just interacting but separate problems, use ether or bitcoin, change legislation, what have you
  • Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      exactly, so use commonsource, they can use it all they want, but they have to flow through benefit (provide attribution, recognition, and any financial reward must be split fairly)
  • You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc.  if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
  • No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this is an utter cop out - figure out what is close enough to fair and iterate forward to improve it, wow
  • too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      yes to the human evaluation part, but "it's too complicated" is disingenuous at the least
  • Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      yes indeed, so get your metrics right, and be prepared to adjust them as they are gamed - and ultimately, as financial penalties are to BP, even if some people game the system, can we better the gaming of the capitalist system.. it's a low bar I know
  • They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      it doesn't have to be this way, unless you think that way already
  • If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      wow, talk about entrepreneurial taker attitude rationalization
  • People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and getting paid for others free work isn't sleazy, somehow...?
  • Donate.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      better yet, give yourself a reasonable salary, and give the rest away
  • Thank-you gifts
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      cynical.. here have a shiny bobble you idiot
  • Pay bounties
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      good way to get people to compete ineffectively instead of cooperating on a solution, the lottery mechanism is evil
  •  
    while good issue are brought up in this article, the solutions offered are myopic and the explanations of the observed effects not satisfying
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Design Like No One Is Patenting - How SparkFun Stays Ahead of the Pack - 0 views

  • Electronics supplier SparkFun designs dozens of products a year and they haven’t patented a single one. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
  • makes its living by shipping kits and components like bread boards, servo motors and Arduino parts to a mixture of students, hobbyists, and professionals making prototypes
  • the company has made its name is in a stable of its own custom parts and kits, the designs for which it gives away for free.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • “We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”
  • “The open source model just forces us to innovate,” says Boudreaux.
  • the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.
  • wolf of obsolescence is always at electronics’ door
  • don’t spend much time worrying about the copyists, they just keep releasing new looks
  • it’s about staying relevant and filling the needs of the community
  • SparkFun’s rapid turnover model is one that echoes the fashion industry.
  • keep their service exemplary
  • listening to their customers
  • developed a community of loyal users and fans
  • weekly new product posts
  • You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.
  • SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.
  • Their catalog has about 2,500 items at any given time
  • SparkFun orders parts from 500 suppliers
  • 15 new products every week
  • hey retire products at a similar rate, due to either low sales, or obsolescence
  • Of the 2,500 items, about 400 are things designed internally.
  • To handle the pace of change, SparkFun needs to keep its inventory lean.
  • “We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”
  • To help manage the demand, they use an in-house software system
  • along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.
  • the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”
  • monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”
  • anyone in the company can suggest ideas and contribute designs.
  • ideas run through an internal process of design, review, prototyping, testing and release.
  • “They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”
  • symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community
  • I don’t think they help much
  • The risk of this rate of change is that SparkFun can end up outpacing some of their customers.
  • “There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”
  • unprotected and unencumbered by patents
  • racing to get the latest, coolest things in the hands of its customers.
  • patents
  • “We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”
  • cost $30,000 to $50,000
  • USPTO is so backed up you’ll have to wait three to five years to even hear back on their decision.
  • how much does technology change in five years?
  • company’s blog where they’ve been documenting production and business practices for years.
  • they even want to open source Sparkle. “It’s a wild ride,” she says, “but a fun one for sure.”
  •  
    shared by Jonathan, annotated by Tibi
Kurt Laitner

Asia Times Online :: Nondominium - the Caspian solution - 0 views

  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
  • Nondominium - the Caspian solution By Chris Cook Twenty-first century problems cannot be solved with 20th century solutions. Nowhere is that saying so true as in territorial disputes where oil and gas are involved. The riches of the Caspian Sea have been the subject of dispute for years, and relatively simple - but still intractable - binary issues between Iran and Russia are now multiplied by the conflicting claims of what are now five littoral Caspian nations: Azerbaijan, Iran; Kazakhstan; Russia and Turkmenistan. Their claims relate not just to rights on the Caspian Sea surface, but to rights in the sea, and above all to the rights to the treasures that lie under it. There are two 20th century legal approaches: international law //ad information var tf_adModel = "FEV"; var tf_adType = "InBannerVideo"; var tf_commonLocation = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/expand/"; //leave this variable as it is var tf_cookieFlash = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/TFSObj_v2s"; var tf_isExpansionHandle = true; var tf_floatAdScriptPath = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/floating/TF_FloatAdLibrary.js"; var tf_zoomFlash = "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/common/floating/TFScale_v1"; var tf_banner = { "flag" : "inBanner", "width" : 300, "height" : 250, "widthExpanded" : 600, "heightExpanded" : 450, "widthFloating" : 950, "heightFloating" : 570, "iWin" : [ ], "flashFile" : "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/4523336/Glow_Banner_Square_Template_V201", extraFlashVars:"tf_showPanelonLoad=true&tf_phase2=false", "video_expand" : "http://cdnx.tribalfusion.com/media/4523336/video.flv", "imageFile" : 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  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A Caspian partnership The proposal is that the littoral states should form a Caspian Foundation legal entity, and commit to that entity all existing rights in respect of the use, and the fruits of use (usufruct), of the Caspian Sea, and everything on it, in it, or under it. The Caspian Foundation would act as custodian or steward and the nations would have agreed governance rights of veto. This negative or passive veto right of stewardship is very different from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under condominium. Moreover, it does not have the active power of control held under common law by a trustee on behalf of beneficiaries, and the legal complexities and management conflicts which go with it. The Caspian Foundation would be a subscriber to a Caspian Partnership framework agreement between the nations, investors of money or money's worth, and a consortium of service providers. This Caspian Partnership would not be yet another international organization, with everything that goes with that. It would not own anything, employ anyone or contract with anyone: it would simply be an associative framework agreement within which Caspian nations self-organize to the common purpose of the sustainable development of the Caspian Sea.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Welcome to the new reputation economy (Wired UK) - 1 views

  • banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan
  • headhunters hire you based on the expertise you've demonstrated on online forums
  • reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy?
  • The difference today is our ability to capture data from across an array of digital services. With every trade we make, comment we leave, person we "friend", spammer we flag or badge we earn, we leave a trail of how well we can or can't be trusted.
  • An aggregated online reputation having a real-world value holds enormous potential
  • peer-to-peer marketplaces, where a high degree of trust is required between strangers; and where a traditional approach based on disjointed information sources is currently inefficient, such as recruiting.
  • opportunity to reinvent the way people found jobs through online reputation
  • "It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.
  • At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED.
  • "People are currently underusing their networks and reputation," King says. "I want to help people to understand and build their influence and reputation, and think of it as capital they can put to good use."
  • Social scientists have long been trying to quantify the value of reputation.
  • Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers monitored brain activity
  • "The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.
  • Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.
  • Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes.
  • When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.
  • Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.
  • Presently, reputation data doesn't transfer between verticals.
  • A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.
  • trusted to pay on time
  • PeerIndex, Kred and Klout,
  • are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action,"
  • "Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"
  • Early influence and reputation aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations.
  • Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.
  • reputation is a measure of knowledge
  • a measure of trust
  • a measure of propensity to pay
  • measure of influence
  • Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.
  • It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.
  • The most basic level is verification of your true identity
  • reliability and helpfulness
  • do what we say we are going to do
  • respect another person's property
  • His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."
  • we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.
  • idea of global reputation
  • By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession.
Kurt Laitner

Using Nondominion to Evolve from Local to Global Commons - P2P Foundation - 0 views

  • 5 “As” (Architecture, Adaptiveness, Accountability, Allocation and Access) in the governance of the global commons for the benefit of humanity."
  • the new framework focuses on veto rights – rather than recognized ownership claims
  • mutual benefit.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • an association of beneficiaries.
  • A trustee (custodian) for the CHM would be elected by the representatives
  • to oversee the legal operation of a collective entity
  • The representatives would also appoint a Manager, for a parallel partnership venture, to identify opportunities to develop the common pool resource in accord with a transparent revenue-sharing formula
  • Each representative would have power to exercise a veto with regard to the resource development proposal(s) circulated by the manager.
  • Once an agreed formula (non-vetoed by the countries) emerged for recognizing needed inputs, and for overall revenue-sharing, the manager of the nondominium partnership would arrange open tenders to seek economic partners to maximize the value of the common pool resources.
  • Revenues from ensuing activities would be distributed to the association members on the originally-agreed basis
  • Oversight of compliance would rest with the nondominium’s trustee
  • Ostrom’s key principles of successful collective choice agreements and monitoring by independent auditors.
  • Moreover, it does not confer the active power of control held under common law by a Trustee on behalf of beneficiaries,
  • the proposed negative or passive veto right of stewardship differs fundamentally from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under Condominium
  • The Caspian Partnership agreement would comprise a master framework agreement within which a myriad of associative agreements between the Caspian littoral nations individually or severally would be registered.”
  • encourage Ostrom’s user association-based systems of economic governance
  • "Areas recognized as being the heritage of mankind are defined by treaties as falling outside of nation-state jurisdiction and ownership, and are to be instead developed on a basis that benefits all human beings
  • the combination of Elinor Ostrom’s economic governance strategies with nondominium legal structures can lead to a new basis for common pool resources to be developed on a basis benefiting all of humanity.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Collaborations: The rise of research networks : Nature : Nature Publishing Group - 0 views

  • Co-authorship has been increasing inexorably3, 4. Recently it has exploded.
  • Collaboration is normally a good thing from a wider public perspective. Knowledge is better transferred and combined by collaboration, and co-authored papers tend to be cited more frequently
  • The first paper with 1,000 authors was published in 2004
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • a paper with 3,000 authors came in 2008
  • By last year, a total of 120 physics papers had more than 1,000 authors and 44 had more than 3,000
  • independent contributions to joint efforts, usually in the form of data, that involve only weak intellectual interaction
  • Papers with hundreds of co-authors contribute to the apparent pervasiveness of collaboration between countries.
  • Consequently, distinguishing Malta's own science performance is already impossible. This blurring of national distinctiveness could be a growing issue.
  • The rapid growth of each nation's research base and regional links, driven by relatively strong economies investing in innovation, will undoubtedly produce a regional research labour force to be reckoned with by 2020
  • China's rapid growth since 2000 is leading to closer research collaboration with Japan
  • Taiwan
  • South Korea
  • Australia
  • Asia-Pacific region
  • India has a growing research network with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, although it is not as frequent a collaborator with China as one might expect
  • Middle East, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have a strong research partnership that is drawing in neighbours including Tunisia and Algeria.
  • Latin America has an emerging research network focused around Brazil,
  • has doubled its collaboration with Argentina, Chile and Mexico in the past five years
  • Africa has three distinct networks: in southern Africa, in French-speaking countries in West Africa and in English-speaking nations in East Africa.
  • proximity is just one of several factors in networks
  • use paths of least resistance to partnership, rather than routes that might provide other strategic gains
  • Commonwealth countries
  • have adopted similar research structures
  • Students
  • proximity
  • lower cost of living
  • generous government scholarships
  • Job opportunities
  • countries in science's old guard must drop their patrician tendencies, open up clear communication channels and join in with new alliances as equal participants before they find themselves the supplicants.
  • Collaboration between the public and private sectors has become more apparent because of government interest in exploiting research for economic competitiveness. Some data show that industrial investment in research seems to be dropping — perhaps a reaction to the recession, but the trend seems to be long term, at least in the United Kingdom9
  • Incentives for collaborative innovation investment that draws directly on the science base would be a good start.
  • So what are the costs and benefits of collaboration? It provides access to resources, including funding, facilities and ideas. It will be essential for grand challenges in physics, environment and health to have large, international teams supported by major facilities and rich data, which encourage the rapid spread of knowledge.
  • Research networks are a tool of international diplomacy.
  • As for costs, collaboration takes time and travel and means a shared agenda
  • The risk is that international, national and institutional agendas may become driven by the same bland establishment consensus.
  • The iconoclastic, the maverick and the marginal may find a highly collaborative world a difficult place to flourish
  •  
    "Co-authorship has been increasing inexorably3, 4. Recently it has exploded."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Private 'Distributed Ledgers' Miss the Point of a Blockchain | Bank Think - 0 views

  • a new buzzword making waves throughout the financial industry: “distributed ledger.”
  • Some say it's a tool to enable transparency by ensuring that all members of a group receive cryptographically secured messages about participants’ activities
  • Some are even bold enough to predict that distributed ledgers will end the madness of managing multiple database and reconciliation structures.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Distributed ledgers have primarily claimed to supplant the need for Bitcoin's mining process by introducing trust requirements among participants. These ledgers also promise users the immutability of Bitcoin without the need for expensive mining operations.
  • the technology powering distributed ledgers predates blockchains by well over 20 years.
  • Proponents of distributed ledgers argue that they can displace centralized providers such as SWIFT,
  • by moving money faster
  • There’s no doubt that blockchain technology will facilitate disruptive innovations in finance
  • But a world of private ledgers sounds eerily similar to a range of “private Internets.”
  • Blockchain technology is useful not because it offers efficiency in a world of message-passing but because it uses a complex process to settle value between untrusted parties.
  • But distributed ledgers do not offer users the ability to easily convert their tokens and messages into fungible units of value. Nor do distributed ledgers escrow value between parties that don't trust each other.
  • If a ledger is not a public resource, it will have the pressures incumbent to existing settlement systems plus the overhead of maintaining a shared database among competitors. What efficiency will remain thereafter remains dubious.
  • Permissioned Blockchains
  • their institutional users will probably find it expedient to hash their private-chain transactions and use those hashes to create bitcoin addresses and then send tiny fractions of a bitcoin to them to register their data at a location that cannot be hacked or changed.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      This is also a problem with access, if an access event needs to be recorded in a way that cannot be altered, in a data location that cannot be altered, it will need to be stored on a block chain. 
  • In other words, all private ledger/blockchains will lead to Bitcoin's Rome, driven there by its low cost and high public accountability.
  •  
    the case against private chains.
Kurt Laitner

Goodbye, Dilbert: 'The Rise of the Naked Economy' » Knowledge@Wharton - 2 views

  • “teaming”: bringing together a team of professionals for a specific task
  • The old cubicle-based, static company is increasingly being replaced by a more fluid and mobile model: “the constant assembly, disassembly, and reassembly of people, talent, and ideas around a range of challenges and opportunities.”
  • Therefore, the new economy and its “seminomadic workforce” will require “new places to gather, work, live, and interact.”
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The consumer electronics company Plantronics, for example, knowing that on any given day 40% of its workforce will be working elsewhere, designed its corporate campus to only 60% capacity
  • Their joint enterprise, NextSpace, became their first venture into what they call “coworking,” or the creation of “shared collaborative workspaces.”
  • also nurtures what the authors call “managed serendipity” — ad hoc collaboration between people with diverging but complementary skills
  • the number of coworking spaces worldwide has shot up from 30 in 2006 to 1,130 in 2011
  • someone needs to keep an eye on the big picture, to “connect the dots.”
  • workspaces are designed on a flexible, on-demand and as-needed basis
  • Coonerty and Neuner found that the most productive collaborations tended to pair highly specialized experts with big-picture thinkers
  • they were struck by the number of entrepreneurs and freelancers working at coffee shops in the area
  • Business Talent Group
  • Clients get the specialized help they need at a cost below that of a full-time employee or traditional consulting firm, and specialists are well compensated and rewarded with flexible schedules and a greater degree of choice about which projects to take.
  • This has produced a new market dynamic in which the headhunter of yesteryear has been replaced by “talent brokers” who connect highly specialized talent with companies on a project-by-project basis
  • Matthew Mullenweg, doesn’t have much faith in traditional office buildings or corporate campuses: “I would argue that most offices are full of people not working.”
  • On the other hand, Mullenweg is a big believer in face-to-face collaboration and brainstorming, and flies his teams all over the globe to do so.
  • He also set up an informal workspace in San Francisco called the Lounge
  • Additionally, a 2010 Kauffman-Rand study worried that employer-based health insurance, by discouraging risk-taking, will be an ongoing drag on entrepreneurship
  • the problem of payroll taxes for freelancers
  • up to 44% of independent workers encounter difficulty getting paid fully for their work
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views

  • role of p2p movement
  • historical role
  • horizontalisation of human relationships
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
  • a huge sociological shift
  • new life forms, social practices and human institutions
  • emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
  • ethical revolution
  • openness
  • participation
  • inclusivity
  • cooperation
  • commons
  • the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
  • political expressions
  • the movement has two wings
  • constructive
  • building new tools and practices
  • resistance to neoliberalism
  • we are at a stage of emergence
  • difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
  • At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
  • Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
  • peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
  • Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
  • the horizontal meets the vertical
  • mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations
  • For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
  • Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
  • In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
  • Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
  • requires a clever adaptation
  • use for our own benefit
  • The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
  • platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
  • without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.
  • p2p activists should work on both fronts
  • using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
  • The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
  • So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
  • One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
  • we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
  • No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
  • the p2p dynamics
  • the new networked culture
  • the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
  • the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.
  • we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
  • abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
  • open design community
  • will inherently design for sustainability
  • for inclusion
  • conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
  • entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
  • The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
  • accelerated end of capitalism
  • Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
  • I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How The Blockchain Will Transform Everything From Banking To Government To Our Identities - 1 views

  • The first generation of the Internet was a great tool for communicating, collaborating and connecting online, but it was not ideal for business. When you send and share information on the Internet, you’re not sending an original but a copy. That’s good for information — it means people have a printing press for information and that information becomes democratized — but if you want to send an asset, it’s a problem. If I send you $100 online, you need to be sure you have it and I don’t, and that I can’t spend the same $100 somewhere else. As a result, we need intermediaries to perform critical roles — to establish identity between two parties in a transaction, and to do all the settlement transaction logic, which includes record-keeping.
  • With blockchain, for the first time, we have a new digital medium for value where anyone can access anything of value — stocks, bonds, money, digital property, titles, deeds — and even things like identity and votes can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is not established though a third party but with clever code and mass consensus using a network. That’s got huge implications for intermediaries and businesses and society at large
  • And also with government, as a central repository of information an entity that delivers services.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • There’s an opportunity to disrupt how those organizations work. Intermediaries, though they do a good job, have a few problems — they’re centralized, which makes them vulnerable to attack or failure
  • They tax the system
  • They capture data
  • They exclude billions of people from the global economy
  • internet of value
  • With blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity value fairly a priori, from cradle to grave.
  • creating a true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on the blockchain
  • unleashing a new age of entrepreneurship
  • build accountable governments through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.
  • The virtual you is owned by large intermediaries
  • This virtual you knows more about you than you do sometimes
  • So there’s a strange phenomenon from the first generation of the Internet where the most important asset class that’s been created is data —and we don’t control it or own it.
  • individuals taking back their identity through your own personal avatar
  • The financial services industry
  • antiquated
  • a complicated machine that does a simple thing
  • settlement
  • an opportunity to profoundly change the nature of the entire industry. The Starbucks transaction should be instant.
  • At the heart of it, the financial services industry moves value.
  • so this is both an existential threat to the financial services industry and an historic opportunity.
  • Banks trade on trust
  • Within the decade, every single financial asset, which is really just a contract
  • will all move to a blockchain-based format
  • In the accounting world, a lot of firms rely on costly audits to drive their profits
  • With blockchain, you could have a third entry time-stamped in a distributed ledger that could be acceptable to any relevant stakeholders from regulators to shareholders, giving you a perfect record of the truth and thus the financial health of an organization.
  • Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because transaction costs in an open market are greater than the cost of doing things inside the boundaries of the corporation.
  • four costs — of search, coordination, contracting and establishing trust
  • Blockchains will profoundly affect all of these.
  • you can now synthesize trust on an open platform and people who’ve never met can trust each other to do certain things. So this results in a whole number of new business models
  • It turns out the Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything, because a lightbulb buying power from your neighbor’s solar panel definitely won’t use banks or the Visa network
  • Right now, governments take tax revenue from corporations, individuals, licenses and so on. All of that can change. We can first of all have transparency in a radical sense because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Secondly, we can open up governments in a different sense of sharing data.
  • governments can enable self-organization to occur in society where companies, civil society organizations, NGOs, academics, foundations, and government agencies and individual citizens ought to use this data to self-organize and create what we used to call services or forms of public value. The third one has to do with the relationship between citizens and their governments.
  • There are more opportunities to create government by the people for the people
  • Electronic voting won’t be delivered by traditional server technology because it won’t be trusted by citizens
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
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 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
Francois Bergeron

Conference Detail for Industrial and Commercial Applications of Smart Structures Techno... - 0 views

  •  
    "Three-axis distributed fiber optic strain measurement in 3D woven composite structures   Paper 8690-6 Time: 1:50 PM - 2:10 PM Author(s): Matt Castellucci, Evan M. Lally, Sandra Klute, Luna Innovations Inc. (United States); David Lowry, NASA Johnson Space Ctr. (United States) Hide Abstract Add to My Schedule  Recent advancements in composite materials technologies have broken further from traditional designs and require advanced instrumentation and analysis capabilities. Success or failure is highly dependent on design analysis and manufacturing processes. By monitoring smart structures throughout manufacturing and service life, residual and operational stresses can be assessed and structural damage identified. Composite smart structures can be manufactured by integrating fiber optic sensors into existing composite materials processes such as layup, filament winding and three-dimensional weaving. In this work optical fiber was integrated into 3D woven composite parts at a commercial woven products manufacturing facility. The fiber was then used to monitor the structures during a VARTM manufacturing process, and subsequent static and dynamic testing. Low cost telecommunications-grade optical fiber acts as the sensor using a high resolution commercial Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometer (OFDR) system providing distributed strain measurement at spatial resolutions as low as 2mm. Strain measurements using the optical fiber sensors are correlated to resistive strain gauge measurements during static structural loading."
Francois Bergeron

Canadian high-tech startups: New report highlights secrets to their success - MaRS - 0 views

  •  
    "Over the past five years, approximately 183 Canadian high-tech companies have been acquired by other companies. On average, it took these companies eight years to reach this milestone, reaching an average valuation of US$100 million during that time period. Nothing surprising here, right? But know this: Of those 183 companies, 75% were acquired by companies outside of Canada, the majority of which were based in the United States."
Francois Bergeron

Support Little Devices | Little Devices @ MIT - 0 views

  •  
    "We are trying to change the way medical technology reaches the world by making it more agile, user-centered, and democratic. It's a big challenge". selected by Yasir
Francois Bergeron

Best Free CRM | Open Source CRM - 0 views

  •  
    This is about an open-source CRM. Problem with CRM softwares in a company is that people don't use them regularly so info is missing and the whole organization suffers. Reminds you of something ? Use of the VAS is rewarded by future revenue, but good use (complete info logging, on time, etc) could be additionally rewarded by the same "gamification strategy". "This is the "Gamification" aspect of the system. It awards you for using it. This adds a competitive aspect to your CRM, which engages the user much like a video game..."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

  • Use the Script Editor to write and run scripts, to set triggers, and to perform other actions such as sharing scripts.
  • start the Script Editor from a Google Site
  • declares a function called myFunction()
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • You can perform the following tasks from the Script Editor.
  • pening, deleting, renaming, and saving scripts
  • Cutting, copying, and pasting text
  • Find and replace
  • Setting a time zone
  • scripts with time-based triggers
  • Running functions
  • Viewing log messages
  • revision history
  • write pseudocode first
  • When you're planning a script
  • narrative version of what the script needs to do.
  • A particular script is associated with one and only one Google Spreadsheet.
  • If you make a copy of the Spreadsheet, the script is also copied.
  • A particular Spreadsheet can have multiple scripts associated with it.
  • use the onOpen event handler in more than one script associated with a particular Spreadsheet, all scripts begin to execute when you open the Spreadsheet and the order in which the scripts are executed is indeterminate.
  • event handler is a function executed when a particular event takes place.
  • see Running Scripts in Response to an Event.
  • A script cannot currently call or create another script and cannot call functions in another script.
  • If you want to store the results of a function, you must copy them into a spreadsheet cell.
  • You can trigger Apps Script events from links that are embedded in a Google Site. For information about how to do this, see Using Apps Scrip in Your Ssite.
  • You can insert a script into a Site as a gadget.
  • you must grant permission for the script to run as a service.
  • You also designate whether only you can invoke the service or whether all members of your domain can invoke the service.
  • you can assign functions within the script any arbitrary name.
  • The instructions in a function must be enclosed within curly braces.
  • event handler
  • when a spreadsheet is opened,
  • when a script is installed
  • when a spreadsheet is edited
  • at times you choose
  • menu item
  • Using a drawing or button embedded in a Spreadsheet
  • Using a custom function that is referenced as a Spreadsheet function
  • Clicking the Run button
  • object-oriented programming languages
  • Google Apps Script uses the JavaScript language.
  • Operations
  • are performed using the objects and methods described in the API documentation.
  • An API provides pre-packaged code for standard tasks you need to accomplish in scripts or programs.
  • API includes objects that you use to accomplish tasks such as sending email, creating calendar entries
  • A method describes the behavior of an object and is a function attached to an object.
  • MailApp
  • use to create and send email
  • To send email, you invoke the sendEmail method and provide values for the method arguments.
  • Google Apps Script can access or retrieve data in different formats in different ways.
  • A custom function
  • is called directly from a cell in a Spreadsheet using the syntax =myFunctionName()
  • they cannot set values outside the cells
  • have some restrictions not shared by other functions
  • cannot send email
  • cannot operate on a Google Site
  • cannot perform any operations that require user authorization
  • cannot perform any operations that require knowledge of who the user
  • onInstall function
  • onOpen function
  • Other functions run when you run them manually or when they are triggered by clicking
  • Custom functions and formulas in the spreadsheet execute any time the entire Spreadsheet is evaluated or when the data changes in the function or formula's cell.
  • share the Spreadsheet
  • publish the script to the Script Gallery
  • spreadsheet template
  • the color coding for that line will not be correct
  • A script with incorrect syntax or other errors does not run.
  • The Script Editor includes a debugger.
  • view the current state of variables and objects created by a script while that script runs.
  • step through the code line by line as it executes or set breakpoints
  • The debugger does not work with custom functions, onEdit functions, event triggers, or scripts running as a service.
  • use the debugger to find errors in scripts that are syntactically correct but still do not function correctly.
  • Functions ending in an underscore (_), for example, internalStuff_(), are treated differently from other functions. You do not see these function in the Run field in the Script Editor and they do not appear in the Script Manager in the Spreadsheet. You can use the underscore to indicate that users should not attempt to run the function and the function is available only to other functions.
Francois Bergeron

Science Exchange Jobs - AngelList - 1 views

  •  
    "Science Exchange is a community marketplace for scientists to list, discover, access and pay for scientific services from institutions around the world. Our mission is to improve the efficiency of scientific research by making it easy for researchers to access the global network of scientific resources and expertise. We do this by connecting researchers looking to get experiments conducted with scientific service providers who have the capacity to conduct those experiments."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views

  • Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
  • he sequester simply makes acute a chronic condition that has been getting worse for years.
  • the federal budget sequester
  • ...72 more annotations...
  • systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
  • Researchers across the country encounter increasingly fierce competition for money.
  • unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011
  • even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field
  • anxiety and frustration
  • The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work
  • Origins of the crisis
  • ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States
  • The demand for research money greatly exceeds the supply
  • the demand for research funding has gone up
  • The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation
  • competitive grants system
  • if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students
  • The production of science and engineering doctorates has grown apace
  • Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
  • proposal pressure goes up
  • These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.
  • At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt
  • the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
  • growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
  • Dead-end solutions
  • studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security
  • Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates
  • universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs
  • The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.
  • The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
  • Path out of crisis
  • The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
  • Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
  • The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.
  • Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
  • esearch culture
  • attract good students and faculty as well as raise their prestige
  • mission to expand the boundaries of human knowledge
  • faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
  • training
  • take place in
  • research laboratories
  • it is critical to have active research laboratories, not only in elite public and private research institutions, but in non-flagship public universities, a diverse set of private universities, and four-year colleges
  • How then do increasingly beleaguered institutions of higher education support the research efforts of the faculty, given the reality that federal grants are going to be few and far between for the majority of faculty members? What are the practical steps institutions can take?
  • change the current model of providing large startup packages when a faculty member is hired and then leaving it up to the faculty member to obtain funding for the remainder of his or her career
  • universities invest less in new faculty members and spread their internal research dollars across faculty members at all stages of their careers, from early to late.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Sharing of resources, see SENSORICA's NRP
  • national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
  • Many prospective hires may find smaller startup packages palatable, if they can be convinced that the smaller packages are coupled with an institutional commitment to ongoing research support and more reasonable expectations about winning grants.
  • Smaller startup packages mean that in many situations, new faculty members will not be able to establish a functioning stand-alone laboratory. Thus, space and equipment will need to be shared to a greater extent than has been true in the past.
  • construction of open laboratory spaces and the strategic development of well-equipped research centers capable of efficiently servicing the needs of an array of researchers
  • phaseout of the individual laboratory
  • enhanced opportunities for communication and networking among faculty members and their students
  • Collaborative proposals and the assembly of research teams that focus on more complex problems can arise relatively naturally as interactions among researchers are facilitated by proximity and the absence of walls between laboratories.
  • An increased emphasis on team research
  • investments in the research enterprise
  • can be directed at projects that have good buy-in from the faculty
  • learn how to work both as part of a team and independently
  • Involvement in multiple projects should be encouraged
  • The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
  • nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Need value accounting system
  • relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
  • The opportunities to form partnerships with business are especially intriguing
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The problem is to change the model and go open source, because IP stifles other processes that might benefit Universities!!!
  • Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
  • some faculty members worried about firms dictating the research priorities of the university, pulling graduate students into proprietary research (which could limit what they could publish), and generally tugging the relevant faculty in multiple directions.
  • developed rules and guidelines to control them
  • University faculty and businesspeople often do not understand each other’s cultures, needs, and constraints, and such gaps can lead to more mundane problems in university/industry relations, not least of which are organizational demands and institutional cultures
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Needs for mechanisms to govern, coordinate, structure an ecosystem -See SENSORICA's Open Alliance model
  • n addition to funding for research, universities can receive indirect benefits from such relationships. High-profile partnerships with businesses will underline the important role that universities can play in the economic development of a region.
  • Universities have to see firms as more than just deep pockets, and firms need to see universities as more than sources of cheap skilled labor.
  • foundations or other philanthropy
  • We do not believe that research proposed and supervised by individual principal investigators will disappear anytime soon. It is a research model that has proven to be remarkably successful and enduring
  • However, we believe that the most vibrant scientific communities on university and college campuses, and the ones most likely to thrive in the new reality of funding for the sciences, will be those that encourage the formation of research teams and are nimble with regard to funding sources, even as they leave room for traditional avenues of funding and research.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Why Great Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem - 0 views

  • “It is no longer enough to manage your innovation. Now you must manage your innovation ecosystem,”
  • example
  • Michelin developed a revolutionary new kind of tire with sensors and an internal hard wheel that could run almost perfectly for 125 miles after a puncture.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Yet by 2007 the product was such a failure that Michelin had to abandon it.
  • The company hadn’t confronted the entire ecosystem the tire would rely on
  • conversion costs
  • expensive new equipment
  • legal challenges
  • Mastery of the ecosystem is the great strength that made Apple the supreme success story of our time,
  • The iPod
  • a beginning ecosystem that Jobs enlarged by introducing the iTunes Music Store.
  • the ecosystem further by opening up the Mac-only device to PC users.
  • In a world where mobile phone makers sold their devices to operators to sell to consumers, Jobs had such a powerful ecosystem that he could get operators to compete to partner with him: “And here was Apple, offering not just exclusive access to the most talked-about phone in history, but also exclusive access to Apple consumers—the most desirable customer segment imaginable
  • How do you take the measure of the ecosystem that your innovation will need to be part of and rely on? How do you not miss the blind spots that can lurk almost anywhere?
  • three main steps to take.
  • There are terrible pitfalls in the usual progression from prototype to pilot to rollout. It relies perilously on getting everything right from the very start. Often a far wiser and safer approach can be what Adner calls a “minimum viable footprint (MVF) rollout followed by a staged expansion.” In other words, start with a complete ecosystem, but a limited one.
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