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Kurt Laitner

Value Accounting System - P2P Foundation - 0 views

  • are not exchanging anything among themselves
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      Not sure this is true in all cases or even in this one
  • A value creation process that requires more than one individual can be based on following 3 arrangements
  • stigmergic coordination
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  • collaboration
  • cooperation,
  • The problem is that this economic dependency is not symmetrical
  • All labor is transferred into fluid equity through a value accounting system, which grants ownership to the participant member to a percentage of the future revenue generated for the lifetime of the product created
  • risk is shared among all contributors
  • based on contributions
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      and RISK, and...
  • anyone can add value
  • decentralized in terms of allocation of resources
  • horizontal governance system
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      not necessarily
  • A prearrangement on revenue is impossible in this context
  • impossible to do time management
  • no one can force anyone else to work more
  • the value equation embodies positive and negative (intrinsic) incentives
  • contains parameters to incentivise periodic and frequent contributions
  • quality of execution
  • priority level of tasks.
Kurt Laitner

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

  • 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.
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  • "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
  •  
    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

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

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

Proposal - Food SFS-08-2014 - 1 views

  • development of more resource-efficient and sustainable food production and processing
  • competitive and innovative
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      We are proposing collaborative ways, here the accent is put on competitive waysĀ 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      We are proposing collaborative methods. Here, the accent is put on COMPETITIVE ways for a "sustainable circular economy"
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  • reduction in water and energy use
  • gas emissions and waste generation
  • improving the efficiency
  • ensuring or improving shelf life, food safety and quality
  • competitive eco-innovative processes should be developed
  • sustainable circular economy
  • Intellectual Property (IP)
  • In phase 1, a feasibility study
  • technological/practical as well as economic viability of an innovation idea/concept with considerable novelty to the industry sector
  • to establish a solid high-potential innovation project
  • increase profitability of the enterprise through innovation
  • increase the return in investment in innovation activities
  • The proposal should contain an initial business plan based on the proposed idea/concept.
  • apply to phase 1 with a view to applying to phase 2 at a later date, or directly to phase 2.
  • EUR 50,000. Projects should last around 6 months
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Phase 1 has a classical language. We would need to mask our true identity and beliefs writing this grant proposal. I don't think it's for us... But this is only my opinion.Ā 
  • In phase 2, innovation projects will be supported that address the specific challenge of Sustainable Food Security
  • demonstrate high potential in terms of company competitiveness and growth underpinned by a strategic business plan
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      This is more about individual companies and their competitive advantage. Not about networks and not about collaboration and sharing.Ā 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Moreover, they put emphasis on IP protection and ownership, when we must talk about commons, knowledge commons applied to agriculture, sharing platforms, etc.Ā 
  • Proposals shall be based on an elaborated business plan either developed through phase 1 or another means.
  • Particular attention must be paid to IP protection and ownership
  • Successful beneficiaries will be offered coaching and mentoring support during phase 1 and phase 2.
  • Enhancing profitability
  • competitive solutions
  • global business opportunities
  • sustainable
  • turnover
  • IP management
  • return on investment and profit
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Hoy SCRI SRS 2014.pdf - 0 views

  •  
    By the Ohio Connection - Hoy Casey and team
sebastianklemm

IFAD Investing in rural people - 0 views

  •  
    At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) we invest in rural people, empowering them to increase their food security, improve the nutrition of their families and increase their incomes. We help them build resilience, expand their businesses and take charge of their own development. IFAD is an international financial institution and specialized United Nations agency based in Rome, the UN's food and agriculture hub. Since 1978, we have provided US$22.4 billion in grants and low-interest loans to projects that have reached an estimated 512 million people.
sebastianklemm

Inter-American Development Bank - 0 views

  •  
    "We work to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through financial and technical support for countries working to reduce poverty and inequality, we help improve health and education, and advance infrastructure. Our aim is to achieve development in a sustainable, climate-friendly way."
sebastianklemm

Fresh Ventures Studio - 0 views

  •  
    "Fresh Ventures is a venture building program and startup studio based in The Netherlands. We co-found companies with experienced professionals and entrepreneurs to address systemic challenges in the food system." (Direct feedback upon inquiry: "At Fresh we're focusing on pre-idea and pre-team, so the maturity of this solution is already too progressed for us, but it's exciting to see the development.")
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

  • I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
  • This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
  • Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
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  • we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
  • What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?
  • Digital
  • Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
  • Trustless
  • don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority
  • Decentralized
  • Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
  • Cryptographic
  • This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
  • Identity
  • there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
  • Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
  • It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger
  • does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
  • Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins
  • It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may
  • if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce
  • Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approachā€Šā€”ā€Šthe one blockchain takes.
  • You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
  • if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
  • In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
  • Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
  • If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
  • We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was ā€œsaid.ā€ Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to ā€œspeak.ā€
  • how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
  • Replicate the same processes across all nodes
  • Empower every node with full agency
  • Hold this transformed state locally and reliably
  • Establish protocols for interaction
  • Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
  • we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
  • Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.
  • Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage
  • there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
  • Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
  • Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
  • This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
  • Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
  • Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
  • If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chainā€Šā€”ā€Špassing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
  • When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
  • If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
  • Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
  • By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
  • You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own recordā€Šā€”ā€Šthey already want it.
  • Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general ā€œcontainerā€ that gets configured to a specific use.
  • Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
  • Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
  • how units in a currency are issued
  • Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing
  • These coins are just ā€œspoken into beingā€
  • the challenging task of
  • ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies
  • These coins are just ā€œspoken into beingā€
  • the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
  • In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
  • Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.
  • Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True
  • Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limitsā€Šā€”ā€Šhow far people can spend into a negative balance
  • Notice the net number units in the system remains zero
  • One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.
  • concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)
  • keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
  • What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
  • If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
  • Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,
  • Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
  • Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case
  • To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
  • Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
  • seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.
  • As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
  • Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
  • Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:
  • The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
  • Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:
  • As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
  • Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
  • a distributed network of mutual trust
  • operates across national boundaries
  • everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records
  • Hawaladars are not anonymous
  • ā€œdouble-spendingā€
  • It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to ā€œforgetā€ their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
  • After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
  • This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
  • millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
  • There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
  • By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
  • It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
  •  
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.
  • ā€œOpen source softwareā€ 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
  • ā€œfree software.ā€
  • association with ā€œfreedomā€ rather than ā€œfree beerā€
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to ā€œfree softwareā€ 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.
  • ā€œopen sourceā€
  • The label ā€œopen sourceā€ 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.
  • ā€œopen 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 ā€œcloudā€
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not ā€œfreedomā€
  • 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 ā€œmy choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ā€˜user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.ā€
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: ā€œI 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.ā€
  • 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 ā€œopen sourceā€ not displaced ā€œfree softwareā€ as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the ā€œopennessā€ of open source software to the ā€œopennessā€ of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • ā€œopen to intellectual exchangeā€
  • ā€œopen to competitionā€
  • ā€œFor me, ā€˜open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the marketā€).
  • ā€œOpenā€ 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; ā€œopennessā€ 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 ā€œopen sourceā€ implied ā€œthe Internetā€ and that ā€œthe Internetā€ implied ā€œopen source,ā€ 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
  • ā€œIf you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,ā€
  • 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 ā€œopen source behavior,ā€ 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 ā€œfreedomā€ made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this ā€œfreedom to innovateā€ morphed into ā€œInternet freedom,ā€ 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 ā€œInternet freedomā€ 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 ā€œthe Internetā€ stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The ā€œinfowareā€ 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 ā€œcollective intelligenceā€ 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 ā€œcollective intelligenceā€
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of ā€œWeb 2.0.ā€ What did ā€œ2.0ā€ 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, ā€œWeb 2.0ā€ could also be much bigger than ā€œopen sourceā€; 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 ā€œcollective intelligence,ā€ 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 ā€œWeb 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.ā€
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like ā€œGov 2.0ā€ and ā€œWhere 2.0.ā€ 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 ā€œEnterprise 2.0.ā€ 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 ā€œcollective intelligence.ā€
  • 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 ā€œInternet-centrism.ā€
  • ā€œOpen sourceā€ gave us the ā€œthe Internet,ā€ ā€œthe Internetā€ gave us ā€œWeb 2.0,ā€ ā€œWeb 2.0ā€ gave us ā€œEnterprise 2.0ā€: 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 ā€œsemantic environmentā€ 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 ā€œestablishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.ā€ 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, ā€œWhen 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 ā€œlawā€ā€”are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific ā€œlawsā€ to moral ā€œlawsā€ to ā€œlawsā€ of the market to administrative ā€œlaws,ā€ the same word captures many different social relations. ā€œOpen,ā€ ā€œnetworks,ā€ and ā€œinformationā€ function much like ā€œlawā€ 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, ā€œthe map is not the territory.ā€
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of ā€œabstracting,ā€ 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 ā€œetc.ā€ 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 ā€œconsciousness of abstraction.ā€
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • ā€œWhat are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?ā€
  • 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 ā€œopen sourceā€ to ā€œWeb 2.0ā€ā€”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. ā€œA 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 ā€œfaint signalsā€ of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the ā€œalpha geeks.ā€ ā€œThe ā€˜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: ā€œThe 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.
  • ā€œthe skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can thinkā€
  • 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 ā€œcontextā€ 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 euphemismā€”ā€œmeme-engineeringā€ā€”to describe what has previously been known as ā€œpropaganda.ā€
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for ā€œpeer-to-peerā€ technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes ā€œchanged the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,ā€ 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 ā€œfree softwareā€ 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 ā€œopen sourceā€ has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His ā€œcorrespondentsā€ 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 ā€œcyberwarfareā€ 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 ā€œmeme maps,ā€ where the meme to be defined—whether it’s ā€œopen sourceā€ or ā€œWeb 2.0ā€ā€”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. ā€œA 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,ā€
  • 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.
Kurt Laitner

Forget the Foundations - In These Times - 0 views

  • Their ā€œactionsā€ didn’t involve writing grant proposals, discussing their concerns with a board of directors or contacting state agencies. They tested water samples themselves, and, in 1979, produced a study revealing high levels of radioactive contamination, a high percentage of pregnancies complicated by excessive bleeding or terminated in abortion and large numbers of children born with birth defects. Despite their work, the Centers for Disease Control and Indian Health Services discredited the study, and WARN wasn’t vindicated until the South Dakota School of Mines substantiated their claims that same year.
  • But unlike Erin Brockovich, this tale of local activists fighting against faceless institutions doesn’t have a happy ending: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission simply raised the level of ā€œacceptable contamination,ā€ and Indian Health Services started providing bottled water in one area. Congress authorized a new water pipeline to the reservation in 2002–only to have the funding diverted by the financial demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • who defer responsibility onto do-nothing organizations, only later to complain about their lack of agency
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  • that foundations perpetuate First World interests and free-market capitalism, thus preserving many of the problems radical activists wish to eradicate, such as the unregulated concentration of wealth.
  • Foundations were created in the early 20th century by multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, to evade corporate and estate taxes.
  • foundations divert money away from the collective tax base
  • who are more interested in supporting milquetoast reformers than social-justice organizations
  • federal and state funding for education and healthcare has shrunk
  • This is a culture of noblesse oblige, Ahn writes, where the ā€œprivileged are obliged to help those less fortunate, without examining how that wealth was created or the dangerous implications of conceding such power to the wealthy.ā€
  • is the power those with money wield over community leaders.
  • consequently realigning their interests (i.e., maintaining their jobs) with maintaining the system
  • This allegiance keeps community leaders from challenging the root causes of social inequities–the social-change work–at the same time that they pedal to keep up by providing for the needs of individuals devastated by institutional exploitation.
  • Kivel concedes this is valuable work, but points out the inherent injustice of this paradigm: ā€œWhen temporary shelter becomes a substitute for permanent housing, emergency food a substitute for a decent job … we have shifted our attention from the redistribution of wealth to the temporary provision of social services to keep people alive.ā€
  • University of Southern California Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges contemporary grassroots activists to stop seeking a ā€œpure way of doing things.ā€ ā€œMany are looking for an organizational structure and a resource capability that will somehow be impervious to co-optation,ā€
  • transitioning from foundation support to a volunteer collective reliant solely on grassroots dollars
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Dark Intellectual Property. Why We Need a Kickstarter for Patents - 0 views

  • ā€œdark IP,ā€ the intellectual property (IP) that remains on the shelf: undiscovered, unexplored, untapped
  • our ability to catch so much in the net by dragging the surface (to use Mike Bergman’s analogy) actually still misses the invisible wealth of what lies beneath.
  • But dark IP is different than the other hidden-depths knowledge since it’s also unfair. Because taxpayers paid for much of the research — whether basic understanding with long-term benefits or more applied research with shorter-term benefits — that now lies collecting dust on university shelves.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • the people of the United States spent an average of nearly $40 billion every year supporting institutional research
  • 65 percent of invention disclosure bundles remain, on average, unlicensed and unused … each year.
  • ā€ā€¦the street finds its own uses for things.ā€
  • most of the IP (much of which we paid for) isn’t actually on the street, where entrepreneurial folks can do something with it.
  • the overworked and understaffed tech transfer offices
  • their models
  • There’s not necessarily room for exploration and discovery
  • byzantine bureaucracy of large organizations
  • But let’s face it, there’s also the hoarding and the overprotecting
  • So much IP is generated that it’s far too much for any one entity to ever make sense of
  • very few people are aware of — let alone able to access — an invention outside the social circle of its inventors, the scientific community involved, or even the ā€œcrowdā€ that’s sometimes harnessed in open innovation
  • we need new ways of democratizing it
  • Not democratizing the IP itself — institutions should still own and generate profits from the intellectual property they’ve created — but democratizing the ways in which we allow this IP to be discovered and licensed.
  • idea contests
  • marketplaces
  • competitions to find uses for on-the-shelf IP
  • missing out on the transformative potential of what technology can do here
  • promoting new ways of interacting around intellectual property
  • Marblar, where I’m an advisor
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The guy is not entirely for open innovation but proposes an intermediary model to democratize the use of IP
  • This turns off the average entrepreneur, who doesn’t have the patience and bandwidth to engage in all the unnecessary overhead of searching, browsing, and licensing IP.
  • Many small startups don’t even bother with IP
  • Another missing piece is ways of allowing the crowd to interact with each other and decide which technologies should be licensed
  • bidding wars
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      competitive dynamic for acquiring IP and using it effectively. This doesn't solve the problem, because some companies will still buy it for defensive purposes or block others from using it, unlike with truly open innovation.Ā 
  • Most of the examples I listed above haven’t changed much over the past decade or broken into the mainstream.
  • why not a Kickstarter for IP?
  • Such a website would bring together not just funds and transactions, but communities — with their attendant feedback mechanisms — that are interested in creating something novel around unused patents.
  • such a model would help get the ideas of a few into the minds of many.
  • open up the currently closed shelf to virtual browsing
  • inventions are not only ā€˜filed’ or ā€˜granted’ but ā€˜browsed’ or ā€˜licensed’.
Francois Bergeron

All's Not Fair in Science and Publishing | The Scientist MagazineĀ® - 0 views

  • My takeaway lesson was that the safest strategy was to divulge my results only after they were accepted for publication. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. Science is too often a cutthroat venture, with publications as the currency for measuring one’s success. But with everyone keeping their findings secret until they have been approved by the peer-review process, aren’t we slowing the course of scientific discovery?
  • Scientists have failed to establish clear mores for crediting discoveries
  • Many believe that false attribution is actually increasing in frequency, likely motivated by the steady decrease in grant-funding rates.
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  • Open Network
  • If scientific administrators aspire to accelerate innovation by encouraging team science, they must address this issue. Our university system should reward scientists who are honest and fair in their dealings with fellow investigators.  Specific protocols for guiding research and managing disagreements must be designed. Accurate laboratory records should reflect appropriate credit, and websites sponsored by international scientific organizations should be similarly designed to display accurate attribution of preliminary scientific discoveries. In addition, journals could post final drafts of papers before publication, allowing anonymous comments during a probationary period. If a substantive objection arises, the journal should require revisions or even reject the paper.
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