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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

POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Eme... - 1 views

www.aspeninstitute.org/...tion-opportunity-social-equity

book paper value networks

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 17 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes
  • concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy
  • personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment
  • ...70 more annotations...
  • the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society
  • As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.
  • America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.
  • For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.
  • an alarming trend
  • What is the role of technology in these developments?
  • a sweeping look at the relationship between innovation and productivity
  • New Economy of Personal Information
  • Power-Curve Society
  • the future of jobs
  • the report covers the social, policy and leadership implications of the “Power-Curve Society,”
  • World Wide Web
  • as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.
  • the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.
  • the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy
  • Economic and social insecurity is widespread.
  • major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.
  • Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful?
  • appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class
  • A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.
  • How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down?
  • Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?
  • many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored
  • what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?
  • The Innovation Economy
  • Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation
  • What drives innovation are new tools and then the use of those new tools in new ways.”
  • at least 50 percent of the acceleration of productivity over these years has been due to ICT
  • economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.
  • Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.
  • Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.
  • Others scholars
  • see innovation as going in cycles, not steady trajectories.
  • A conventional approach is to see innovation as a linear, exponential phenomenon
  • leads to gross errors
  • Atkinson
  • believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.
  • innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”
  • costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas
  • innovation costs are plummeting
  • Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.
  • we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”
  • what is meant by “innovation,”
  • “invention plus implementation.”
  • A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.
  • 90 percent of innovation costs involve organizational capital,”
  • there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.
  • This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”
  • The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”
  • Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.
  • Institutions and social practice cannot keep up with the constant waves of new technologies
  • “We are moving into an era of constant instability,”
  • “and the half-life of a skill today is about five years.”
  • Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.
  • The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”
  • pace of innovation is a major story in our economy today.
  • The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform
  • tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices
  • standard
  • The App Economy illustrates the rapid, fluid speed of innovation in a networked environment
  • crowdsourcing model
  • winning submissions are
  • globally distributed in an absolute sense
  • problem-solving is a global, Long Tail phenomenon
  • As a technical matter, then, many of the legacy barriers to innovation are falling.
  • small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.
  • Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,
  • “In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”
  • This notion of “permissionless innovation” is crucial,
  • “In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite
Kurt Laitner

What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views

blogs.valvesoftware.com/...it-into-todays-corporate-world

valve management structure company paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 07 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
  • Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
  • the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
  • they are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within… capitalism
  • The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
  • The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
  • Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
  • Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
  • The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
  • Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
  • In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
  • Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
  • One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
  • He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero 
  • As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
  • Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
  • Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
  • Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
  • In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
  • There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?
Kurt Laitner

Are you ready for 3-D printing? | McKinsey & Company - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...are_you_ready_for_3-d_printing

3d printing mckinsey additive

shared by Kurt Laitner on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • But patent expirations and new entrants in Asia should apply downward pressure over the next ten years
  • The cost of materials ought to drop in the long term as third-party firms become credible alternative powder suppliers and as increased demand for powder enhances scale efficiencies more generally
  • Throughput rates are expected to increase on the back of growing laser power, higher numbers of lasers, and better projection technology. All of that will serve to reduce expensive machine time
  • Kurt Laitner on 24 Feb 15
     
    Overly focused on additive 3d printing (the ecosystem of automated fabrication (ie fablab scale) and its exponential cost decreases are far more interesting).  The expiration of patents in the space is also a key feature of the current transformation, and should prompt discussions of dysfunctional IPR.  Comments on costs trends are also supportive.  No mention of the next big thing which is cradle to cradle desktop manufacturing.
Kurt Laitner

Digital Reality | Edge.org - 0 views

edge.org/...il_gershenfeld-digital-reality

*neilgershenfeld fab labs IoT molecular computing nano star trek replicator

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts
  • first attribute is metrology that comes from the parts
  • digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
  • is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
  • That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts
  • Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors
  • detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
  • The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.
  • The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts
  • The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
  • On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process
  • a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself
  • There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
  • There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology
  • By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
  • Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.
  • Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today
  • What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person
  • The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs
  • the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless
  • It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it
  • At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
  • To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything
  • conducting, resistive, insulating.
  • The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.
  • Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.
  • We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans
  • You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.
  • Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
  • But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials
  • because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      great quote (replace challenges with changes for effect)
  • Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do
  • And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble. 
  • irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring
  • At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard
  • We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude. 
  • Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university
  • Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."
  • Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."
  • Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools
  • The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally
  • You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
  • To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
  • There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.
  • Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
  • If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before
  • You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.
  • What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      !!!
  • It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing
  • 2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs
  • To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.
  • But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
  • In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
  • It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before
  • There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      worse actually.. the trash stays
  • The bits come and go, globally connected for knowledge, but the atoms stay in the city.
  • instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      this may solve greece's problem, walk away from debt, you can't buy other people's (country's) stuff anymore, so make it all yourself
  • The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use
  • Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab
  • it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
  • the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever
  • Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs
  • To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism
  • I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility
  • The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally
  • My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people
  • The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale
  • My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower
  • If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry
  • Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do
  • The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science
  • If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality
  • I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.
  • When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.  
  • the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside
  • you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know
  • For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      our challenge in the OVN space
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
     
    what is heavy is local, what is light is global, and increasingly manufacturing is being recreated along this principle
Kurt Laitner

UK Indymedia - WOS4: The Creative Anti-Commons and the Poverty of Networks - 0 views

www.indymedia.org.uk/...350884.html

@ukindymedia commons free material vs immaterial exchange value use value rival goods non-rival goods

shared by Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Something with no reproduction costs can have no exchange-value in a context of free exchange.
  • Further, unless it can be converted into exchange-value, how can the peer producers be able to acquire the material needs for their own subsistence?
  • For Social Production to have any effect on general material wealth it has to operate within the context of a total system of goods and services, where the physical means of production and the virtual means of production are both available in the commons for peer production.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • "All texts published in Situationist International may be freely reproduced, translated and edited, even without crediting the original source."
  • The website of the creative commons makes the following statement about it's purpose: "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright -- all rights reserved -- and the public domain -- no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work -- a 'some rights reserved' copyright."
  • The website of the creative commons makes the following statement about it's purpose: "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright -- all rights reserved -- and the public domain -- no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work -- a 'some rights reserved' copyright."
  • Or more specifically, who is a position to convert the use-value available in the "commons" into the exchange-value needed to acquire essential subsistence or accumulate wealth?
  • All texts published in Situationist International may be freely reproduced, translated and edited, even without crediting the original source
  • The point of the above is clear, the Creative Commons, is to help "you" (the "Producer") to keep control of "your" work. The right of the "consumer" is not mentioned, neither is the division of "producer" and "consumer" disputed.
  • Creative "Commons" is thus really an Anti-Commons, serving to legitimise, rather than deny, Producer-control and serving to enforce, rather than do away with, the distinction between producer and consumer
  • specifically providing a framework then, for "producers" to deny "consumers" the right to either create use-value or material exchange-value of the "common" stock of value in the Creative "Commons" in their own cultural production
  • Thus, the very problem presented by Lawrence Lessig, the problem of Producer-control, is not in anyway solved by the presented solution, the Creative Commons, so long as the producer has the exclusive right to chose the level of freedom to grant the consumer, a right which Lessig has always maintained support for
  • The Free Software foundation, publishers of the GPL, take a very different approach in their definition of "free," insisting on the "four freedoms:" The Freedom to use, the freedom to study, the freedom to share, and the freedom to modify.
  • The website of the creative commons makes the following statement about it's purpose: "Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright -- all rights reserved -- and the public domain -- no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work -- a 'some rights reserved' copyright
  • In all these cases what is evident is that the freedom being insisted upon is the freedom of the consumer to use and produce, not the "freedom" of the producer to control.
  • Moreover, proponents of free cultural must be firm in denying the right of Producer-control and denying the enforcement of distinction between producer and consumer
  • where a class-less community of workers ("peers") produce collaboratively within a property-less ("commons-based") society
  • Clearly, even Marx would agree that the ideal of Communism was commons-based peer production
  • the property in the commons is entirely non-rivalrous property
  • The use-value of this information commons is fantastic
  • However, if commons-based peer-production is limited exclusively to a commons made of digital property with virtual no reproduction costs then how can the use-value produced be translated into exchange-value?
  • Further, unless it can be converted into exchange-value, how can the peer producers be able to acquire the material needs for their own subsistence
  • The root of the problem of poverty does not lay in a lack of culture or information
  • but of direct exploitation of the producing class by the property owning classes
  • The source of poverty is not reproduction costs, but rather extracted economic rents, forcing the producers to accept less than the full product of their labour as their wage by denying them independent access to the means of production
  • So long as commons-based peer-production is applied narrowly to only an information commons, while the capitalist mode of production still dominates the production of material wealth, owners of material property, namely land and capital, will continue to capture the marginal wealth created as a result of the productivity of the information commons.
  • Whatever exchange value is derived from the information commons will always be captured by owners of real property, which lays outside the commons.
  • For Social Production to have any effect on general material wealth it has to operate within the context of a total system of goods and services, where the physical means of production and the virtual means of production are both available in the commons for peer production
  • For free cultural to create a valuable common stock it must destroy the privilege of the producer to control the common stock, and for this common stock to increase the real material wealth of peer producers, the commons must include real property, not just information
  • Kurt Laitner on 31 Jan 14
     
    Strong grasp of the issues, not entirely in agreement on the thesis that the solution is the removal of producer control as this does not support the initiation of an economy, only its ongoing function once established, and the economy is continuously intiating itself, so it is not a one time problem. I do support the notion that producers are in fact none other than consumers of prior art but also that effort is required to remix as much as the magical creation out of nothing. In order to incent this behavior then (or even merely to allow it) the basic scarce needs of the individual must be taken care of. This may be done by ensuring beneficial ownership, but even that suffers from the initiation problem, which the requires us to have a pool of wealth to kickstart the thing by supporting every last person on earth with a basic income - that wealth is in fact available...
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

www.nature.com/...490335a.html

open science

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 05 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • 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
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 05 Aug 14
     
    "Co-authorship has been increasing inexorably3, 4. Recently it has exploded."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

www.forbes.com/...o-government-to-our-identities

blockchainaccess_project paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • 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
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."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Custom Lens Design | Optical Design - 1 views

specialoptics.com/index.html

supplier optics

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 24 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 24 Jan 13
     
    Tibi is satisfied by this company, they have low cost high performance optics. He knows them from Raydiance. 
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.
Steve Bosserman

Seth's Blog: Redefining productivity - 0 views

sethgodin.typepad.com/...redefining-productivity.html

connection_economy productivity

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 17 Oct 12
     
    "Innovation drives the connection economy, not low cost."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

rd-review.ca/...00288.html

Industry Canada

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Canada has a solid foundation on which to build success as a leader in the knowledge economy of tomorrow
  • innovation in Canada lags behind other highly developed countries
  • innovation is the ultimate source of the long-term competitiveness of businesses and the quality of life of Canadians
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • We heard that the government should be more focussed on helping innovative firms to grow and, particularly, on serving the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
  • greater cooperation with provincial programs
  • innovation support is too narrowly focussed on R&D – more support is needed for other activities along the continuum from ideas to commercially useful innovation
  • more productive and internationally competitive economy
  • whole-of-government program delivery vehicle – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC)
  • SR&ED program should be simplified
  • includes non-labour costs, such as materials and capital equipment, the calculation of which can be highly complex
  • the base for the tax credit should be labour-related costs, and the tax credit rate should be adjusted upward
  • fund direct support measures for SMEs
  • promoting the growth of firms
  • facilitating access by such firms to an increased supply of risk capital at both the start-up and later stages of their growth.
  • building public–private research collaborations
  • National Research Council (NRC) should become independent collaborative research organizations
  • become affiliates of universities
  • create opportunity and demand for leading-edge goods
  • encouragement of innovation in the Canadian economy should become a stated objective of procurement policies and programs.
  • the government needs to establish business innovation as a whole-of-government priority
  • put innovation at the centre of the government's economic strategy
  • Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) – a body with a whole-of-government focus that would oversee the realization of our proposed action plan, as well as serve as a permanent mechanism to promote the refinement and improvement of the government's business innovation programs going forward.
  • focus resources where market forces are unlikely to operate effectively or efficiently and, in that context, address the full range of business innovation activities, including research, development, commercialization and collaboration with other key actors in the innovation ecosystem
  • the closer the activity being supported is to market, and therefore the more likely it is that the recipient firm will capture most of the benefit for itself.
  • specific sectors
  • of strategic importance
  • concentrated in particular regions
  • succeed in the arena of global competition
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 05 Feb 14
       
      They don't go beyond the firm
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 05 Feb 14
       
      they are still stuck in the competitive paradigm
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 05 Feb 14
       
      Still stack with the old paradigm of the "knowledge economy"  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy  My opinion is that we're moving into a know-how economy. 
Yasir Siddiqui

Do accelerators help startups? Here's what we found | VentureBeat | Entrepreneur | by S... - 1 views

venturebeat.com/...p-startups-heres-what-we-found

startups accelerators measurements open-alliance entrepreneur

shared by Yasir Siddiqui on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Yasir Siddiqui on 25 Feb 14
     
    As startup accelerators continue to propagate, founders are left wondering if these programs really help entrepreneurs achieve their goals. Is the effort worth giving away equity, investing time, and creating incremental costs? Step 1: When can Accelerator results be measured? Step 2: What results do Accelerators see? Step 3: Does the accelerator matter? How to evaluate an accelerator...
Francois Bergeron

ChipSight Slides - ChipSight - 0 views

chipsight.com/chipsight-slides

artificial vision recognition camera

shared by Francois Bergeron on 19 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 19 Jul 13
     
    low-cost camera interface peripheral for microprocessors that outputs visual information including object shape and location. found by Jonathan
Kurt Laitner

FedEx Expands Sensor-Based SenseAware Service for General Use | FedEx Newsroom - 0 views

news.van.fedex.com/senseaware-service-general-use

fedex sensor package

shared by Kurt Laitner on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Kurt Laitner on 29 Aug 13
     
    a low cost version of this for consumers to use regardless of their shipping company could be interesting
Francois Bergeron

CMC Microsystems - 0 views

www.cmc.ca

research connecting university market

shared by Francois Bergeron on 29 Sep 11 - Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 29 Sep 11
     
    For the past 25 years, CMC Microsystems has been proudly supporting research excellence at Canadian universities. CMC Microsystems enables and supports the creation and application of micro- and nano-system knowledge by providing a national infrastructure for excellence in research and a path to commercialization of related devices, components and systems. CMC delivers innovative and cost-effective services to a growing community of microsystems researchers that connect 45 universities across Canada, and presently involves 760 faculty members and over 2,000 graduate students and other researchers.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

SIE-01-2014 - 0 views

ec.europa.eu/...2590-sie-01-2014.html

horizon 2020 proposal

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14
       
      I don't see how this fits with SENSORICA or the OVN model. 
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 14
     
    "Specific Challenge: SMEs play a crucial role in developing resource-efficient, cost-effective and affordable technology solutions to decarbonise and make more efficient the energy system in a sustainable way. They are expected to strongly contribute to all challenges outlined in the legal base of the Horizon 2020 Societal Challenge 'Secure, Clean and Efficient Energy'[1],"
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'.
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