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sebastianklemm

Tyddyn Teg - Tyddyn Teg - 0 views

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    Recommended by Billy Smith (via Mastodon)
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    The Tyddyn Teg cooperative has eight members and some lovely volunteer helpers. We share a commitment to the importance of quality local food and the challenges of sustainability in the twenty first century. We see ourselves as part of the global family of small farmers and aim to become a practice based centre for research and education for sustainable local food production. Our primary objective has been to maintain vegetable production and meet the needs and expectations of our veg box customers. In this we have had a great deal of help and advice from John and Pippa (who were the previous owners of the farm). We are also supplying vegetables to Moelyci Shop and Dimensions Shop in Bangor. Our aims over the coming years are: Expand and improve our vegetable growing Develop the Farm to support WWOOFing Create new spaces for events Open opportunities to have a small scale restaurant/cafe on the farm Establish a luxury camping business where people can come and stay Provide a living wage to every member of the cooperative
faly77

[ Fondation Louis Bonduelle - Call for participatory research on plant-based food | Res... - 0 views

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    Passed. Keep an eye on 2022 call for proposal.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

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

Fostering creativity. A model for developing a culture of collective creativity in science - 0 views

  • Scientific progress depends on both conceptual and technological advances, which in turn depend on the creativity of scientists
  • creative processes behind these discoveries rely on mechanisms that are similar across disciplines as diverse as art and science
  • research into the nature of creativity indicates that it depends strongly on the cultural environment
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  • create optimal conditions in a research organization with the aim of enhancing the creativity of its scientific staff
  • Creativity has been traditionally associated with art and literature but since the early twentieth century, science has also been regarded as a creative activity
  • Measuring creativity is a challenging task owing to its complex and elusive nature
  • Measurement of brain activity showed that creativity correlates with two brain states: a quiescent, relaxed state corresponding to the inspiration stage, and a much more active state corresponding to the elaboration stage
  • models of creativity
  • have a common feature: they depend on a balance between analytical and synthetic thinking, and usually describe the creative process as a sequence of phases that alternate between these states
  • Most research on creativity has focused on the individual
  • However, more recent studies suggest that creativity also depends strongly on the social and cultural context
  • breakthroughs depended on collaboration and social support
  • social environment in business organizations affects the creativity of their employees
  • Although creative individuals are essential, the strong link with the environment indicates that creativity might be greatly enhanced by generating a culture that supports the creative process.
  • Many of the interviewees repeatedly emphasized three main qualities necessary to be a good scientist: rigorous intellect, the ability to get the job done and the ability to have creative ideas.
  • almost all interviewees characterized their breakthrough moment as an abrupt leap in understanding
  • Although breakthroughs in science depend on such an ‘internal' conceptual shift, they also rely on ‘external' experimental results. However, most interviewees described their breakthroughs as largely internal:
  • Only two scientists expressed the view that their breakthroughs were purely external events, based on the observation of novel data.
  • intuition
  • must be combined with rational thinking to be effective
  • Although the synthesis of a new concept relies on intuition, which is based on subconscious mental processing, it must be subjected to conscious examination and analysis
  • specific mental skills or attitudes
  • ability to make unexpected connections
  • ability to choose relevant possibilities from an infinite set of irrelevant ones
  • interest in the unknown'
  • enjoyment of the creative process
  • stimulation by interacting with colleagues
  • undoubtedly the most crucial trait for creativity, which thrives on the exchange of ideas
  • The majority felt that the individual and the collective are equally important:
  • what interactions are optimal for creativity
  • The majority of interviewees answered that other people provided them with ‘inspiration to do something new'
  • positive feedback after the emergence of a new idea is almost as important as the inspiration that triggered it
  • collective provides the individual with technical expertise
  • Therefore, scientists would value a culture of interaction and mutual inspiration more highly than access to technology, although the latter is essential for their experiments.
  • At the end of the interviews, each scientist was asked to describe the best possible conditions for generating creativity at a research institute.
  • Cross-fertilization is absolutely essential
  • These results indicate strongly that an interactive environment is the single most important factor for stimulating creativity
  • interacting with people doing very different things
  • interacting with colleagues informally
  • interactions within any institution are strongly affected by its organization
  • Several interviewees described ‘an open hierarchy' as an important factor for creativity
  • hierarchy is based on genuine respect because people are great scientists, but at the same time they're very approachable and open towards what you have to say
  • These results suggest that the best conditions for scientific creativity come with a free-flowing hierarchy and a highly developed culture of interaction to guarantee the exchange of ideas and inspiration.
  • Furthermore, interdisciplinary interactions lead to the generation of new and unusual ideas
  • Finally, because of the freedom to try new things, these ideas can be tested and eventually generate new insights.
  • Creativity can be described as an emergent phenomenon
  • nonlinear phenomena
  • Emergence depends on dynamic interactions between individual agents within the system
  • The importance of a ‘freedom to try new things' and a ‘free-flowing hierarchy' further supports the idea that individual components in an emergent system must be able to interact flexibly without central control
  • During the interviews, it became apparent that although a culture of interaction and creativity exists at EMBL, this itself is not often the subject of discussion. The values on which this culture is based are seemingly implicit rather than explicit
  • Potentially, the EMBL culture of interaction could be strengthened further by consciously expressing and discussing the values on which it is based
Francois Bergeron

Acfas - 0 views

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    "L'Association francophone pour le savoir-Acfas est un organisme à but non lucratif contribuant à l'avancement des sciences au Québec et dans la Francophonie canadienne. " Selected by YAsir
Kurt Laitner

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

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