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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

www.realitysandwich.com/_partner_state_ethical_economy

ethical economy new economy paper theory value networks Bauwens Michel

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • 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
      Kurt Laitner on 02 Apr 12
       
      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
      Kurt Laitner on 02 Apr 12
       
      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
      Kurt Laitner on 02 Apr 12
       
      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
      Kurt Laitner on 02 Apr 12
       
      defined as?
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 Apr 12
       
      "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'.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

www.appropedia.org/etely_3-D_Printable_Centrifuge

open science open hardware OSH catalog

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23
     
    "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

www.appropedia.org/rce_3-D_Printed_Nutating_Mixer

open science open hardware OSH catalog

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23
     
    "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."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

CanAirIO - 0 views

canair.io

GoodLabs_mapping

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 20
     
    "We are looking to build a citizen network, an air quality map that will allow us to know what we are breathing and how we can improve life quality. With the data collected we could independently validate official air quality numbers, because what can be measured can be improved. "
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...the_meme_hustler

O'Reilly paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
  • the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
  • ...139 more annotations...
  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
  • It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • “free software.”
  • association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • “open source”
  • The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
  • O’Reilly’s bet wa
  • the “cloud”
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
  • O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
  • The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • “open to intellectual exchange”
  • “open to competition”
  • “For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
  • “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
  • The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
  • “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
  • Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
  • O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
  • Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming. Here's How To Argue Productively - 0 views

www.fastcodesign.com/...-doesnt-work-what-does-arguing

innovation paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Science shows that brainstorms can activate a neurological fear of rejection and that groups are not necessarily more creative than individuals.
  • To innovate, we need environments that support imaginative thinking, where we can go through many crazy, tangential, and even bad ideas to come up with good ones.
  • work both collaboratively and individually
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • healthy amount of heated discussion, even arguing.
  • not feel so judged
  • become defensive and shut down
  • deliberative discourse
  • “Argue. Discuss. Argue. Discuss.”
  • It refers to participative and collaborative (but not critique-free) communication.
  • Multiple positions and views are expressed with a shared understanding that everyone is focused on a common goal. There is no hierarchy. It’s not debate because there are no opposing sides trying to “win.” Rather, it’s about working together to solve a problem and create new ideas.
  • Here are five key rules of engagement that we’ve found to yield fruitful sessions and ultimately lead to meaningful ideas.
  • creating a space where everyone can truly contribute.
  • “Yes, AND”
  • “no, BECAUSE.”
  • if you’re going to say no, you better be able to say why.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Apr 12
       
      inter-subjectivity as a criteria for objectivity  
  • We conduct ethnographic research to inform our intuition, so we can understand people’s needs, problems, and values.
  • accountable to something other than our own opinions, and it means we can push back on colleagues’ ideas without getting personal.
  • We curate teams to create diversity
  • bring different ways of looking at the world and solving problems to the table.
  • Argument is productive for us because everyone knows that we’re working toward a shared goal.
  • The statement of purpose establishes the rules: It reminds us that we are working together to move the ball down the field. As much as we may argue and disagree, anything that happens in the room counts toward our shared goal. This enables us to argue and discuss without hurting one another.
  • Deliberative discourse is a form of play, and for play to yield great ideas, we have to take it seriously.
Francois Bergeron

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

spie.org/...index.cfm

conference sensors structures smart

shared by Francois Bergeron on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 05 Mar 13
     
    "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

Data-Oriented Contract.pdf - 1 views

docs.google.com/...edit

contract network legal law

shared by Francois Bergeron on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 18 Feb 13
     
    (submited by Bob) Computable Contracts This Article explains how and why firms are representing certain contractual obligations as computer data. terms. This Article explains how parties can effectively "translate" certain contractual criteria into a comparable set of computer-processable rules. This can have the effect of significantly reducing transaction costs associated with contract monitoring and compliance as compared to the traditional written-language contracting paradigm.
Francois Bergeron

Thorlabs Laser Diode Driver: Constant Power EK1102 - 4 views

www.thorlabs.com/NewGroupPage9.cfm

laser driver constant power

shared by Francois Bergeron on 13 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 14 Nov 11
     
    We can use this or something like it to drive our Mosquito laser. But I think we can go simpler...
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Philippe Comtois on 17 Nov 11
     
    I agree that something simpler could work but starting with this to begin with might help get data faster.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 17 Nov 11
     
    It's not too expensive, I can write them to see how we can interface that with our LabJack and Philippe's NI USB DAQ.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Jan 12
     
    We already asked Thorlabs for the best choice, see EK2000 and EK1102
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Free-Form Authority Models - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Free-Form_Authority_Models

decision making decision-making

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 17 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • ‘authority models’in peer production, contrasts owner-centric authority models from free-form models
  • define the authority models at work in such projects. The models define access and the workflow, and whether there is any quality control.
  • the owner-centric model, entries can only be modified with the permission of a specific ‘owner’ who has to defend the integrity of his module.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The free-form model connotes more of a sense that all users are on the “same level," and that expertise will be universally recognized and deferred to.
  • the owner-centric authority model assumes the owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand
  • In the case of the Wikipedia, the adherents of the owner-centric model, active in the pre-Wikipedia "Nupedia" model, lost out, and presumable, the success of Wikipedia has proven them wrong
  • dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers
  • Far too much credence and respect accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled "trolls."
  • Wikipedia has, to its credit, done something about the most serious trolling and other kinds of abuse: there is an Arbitration Committee that provides a process whereby the most disruptive users of Wikipedia can be ejected from the project. But there are myriad abuses and problems that never make it to mediation, let alone arbitration.
  • most people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off-putting as to drive them away
  • any person who can and wants to work politely with well-meaning
  • root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise.
  • Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise
  • nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 17 Jul 12
     
    from p2p foundation 
Francois Bergeron

LightMachinery - Laser and Optics Library - 0 views

www.lightmachinery.com/library.php

supplier optic fiber optics

shared by Francois Bergeron on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • LightMachinery Laser and Optics Library
  • Francois Bergeron on 10 Aug 12
     
    The internet is full of information but finding good solid information can be very difficult. We have collected information from our own staff of experts and also bookmarked information on the web that is reliable and we can use on a daily basis. Please let us know if you have any suggestions and enjoy our library.
Kurt Laitner

The Implications of Crypto Assets Part 3: Distributed Autonomous Corporations - 0 views

newswax.com/...ibuted-autonomous-corporations

shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Namecoins are mined in the same manner as bitcoins
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14
       
      Major problem here, as described by Michel Bauwens - bitcoin is libertarian and hyper exploitative and bitcoin has been captured by 7 people who can release currency into circulation - the problem is the computer is the peer, and computers cost money
  • The idea of distributed autonomous corporations already exists, so now we just have to wait for the programmers and entrepreneurs to create the applications that build on the original thought.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14
       
      not sure how they exist then...?
  • little to no profit incentive for the developers and supporters of the projects. You can only go so far with donations
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • When you can create an encrypted email DAC that focuses on privacy and providing a quality product that can rival Gmail, it becomes much easier for the general public to care about computer security.
Steve Bosserman

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

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ent-loans-investing-in-futures

risk_management investment milton_friedman human_capital

shared by Steve Bosserman on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 31 May 11
     
    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.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

blogs.hbr.org/...boration_is_misunderstood.html

collaboration andrew campbell harvard business review article paper team work

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • 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
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Sep 11
       
      "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
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science - 3 views

sci-hub.io

papers articles database science

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Nov 16
     
    a place where we can find scientific papers that we can download.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Places to Intervene in a System by Donella H. Meadows - developer.*, Developer Dot Star - 0 views

www.developerdotstar.com/...places_intervene_system.html

systems complexity management paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 20 Sep 11 - Cached
  • Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in "leverage points."
  • where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
  • backward intuition
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • "Places to Intervene in a System," followed by nine items: 9.  Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards). 8.  Material stocks and flows. 7.  Regulating negative feedback loops. 6.  Driving positive feedback loops. 5.  Information flows. 4.  The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints). 3.  The power of self-organization. 2.  The goals of the system. 1.  The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
  • an invitation to think more broadly about system change.
  • Numbers ("parameters" in systems jargon) determine how much of a discrepancy turns which faucet how fast.
  • some of which are physically locked in, but most of which are popular intervention points.
  • Probably ninety-five percent of our attention goes to numbers, but there's not a lot of power in them.
  • Not that parameters aren't important—they can be, especially in the short term and to the individual who's standing directly in the flow. But they rarely change behavior. If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it.
  • Spending more on police doesn't make crime go away.
  • Numbers become leverage points when they go into ranges that kick off one of the items higher on this list.
  • Probably the most common kind of critical number is the length of delay in a feedback loop.
  • A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change (growth, fluctuation, decay) in the system state that the feedback loop is trying to control.
  • Delays that are too short cause overreaction, oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. At the extreme they cause chaos. Delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.
  • delays are not often easily changeable
  • It's usually easier to slow down the change rate (positive feedback loops, higher on this list), so feedback delays won't cause so much trouble
  • Most systems have evolved or are designed to stay out of sensitive parameter ranges. Mostly, the numbers are not worth the sweat put into them.
  • The plumbing structure, the stocks and flows and their physical arrangement, can have an enormous effect on how a system operates.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

About Us - 0 views

www.herpmapper.org/about

GoodLabs_mapping

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 20
     
    "HerpMapper is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization designed to gather and share information about reptile and amphibian observations across the planet. Using HerpMapper, you can create records of your herp observations and keep them all in one place. In turn, your data is made available to HerpMapper Partners - groups who use your recorded observations for research, conservation, and preservation purposes. Your observations can make valuable contributions on the behalf of amphibians and reptiles."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

www.wired.co.uk/...-to-the-new-reputation-economy

economy Reputation paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • 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

How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines | MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...proving-recommendation-engines

rival vs non-rival goods recommendation particle physics

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • how to deal with recommendations for objects whose value diminishes with the number of people who use it.
  • Clearly the resulting distribution of these different types of particles is entirely different.
  • The analogy here is with goods that any number of people can share or that only one person can have.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • explore the space between these extremes
  • a single object/state can be shared with a relatively small number of users/particles
  •  Preventing oversubscription ensures that the population of users sample a wider range of DVDs, which in turn provides a broader range of recommendations.
  • Retailers are not just interested in renting DVDs or selling books or whatever. They want to maximise profits.
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Jan 13
     
    Interesting discussion of rival and nov-rival goods recommendations engine. Goes to scarcity vs abundance, how to manage deamnd for scarce goods.
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