The system is not made up of artifacts but rather an elegantly designed void. He says “I prefer to use the analogy of rescuing an endangered species from extinction, rather than engaging in an invasive breeding program the focus should be on the habitat that supports the species. Careful crafting of the habitat by identifying the influential factors; removing those that are detrimental, together with reinforcing those that are encouraging, the species will naturally re-establish itself. Crafting the habitat is what I mean by designing the void.”
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Designing the Void | Management Innovation eXchange - 0 views
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This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable. You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior.
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This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable. You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior.
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Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that.
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Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that.
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they are also responsible for managing their own capitalization; a form of virtual ownership develops. Everything they need for their work, from office furniture to high-end machinery will appear on their individual balance sheet; or it will need to be bought in from somewhere else in the company on a pay-as-you go or lease basis. All aspects of the capital deployed in their activities must be accounted for and are therefore treated with the respect one accords one’s own property.
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The result is not simply a disparate set of individuals doing their own thing under the same roof. Together they benefit from an economy of scale as well as their combined resources to tackle large projects; they are an interconnected whole. They have in common a brand, which they jointly represent, and also a business management system (the Say-Do-Prove system) - consisting not only of system-wide boundaries but also proprietary business management software which helps each take care of the back-end accounting and administrative processing. The effect is a balance between freedom and constraint, individualism and social process.
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Culture is like climate- it does not exist in and of itself- it cannot exist in a vacuum, it must exist within a medium.
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Incompatibility between the presenting culture and the underlying one provide a great source of tension
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The truth of course is that when tension builds to a critical level it takes just a small perturbation to burst the bubble and the hidden culture reveals itself powered by the considerable pent-up energy.
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Consider again the idea that for the health of an endangered species; the conditions in their habitat must be just right. In business, the work environment can be considered analogous to this idea of habitat.
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A healthy environment is one that provides a blank canvas; it should be invisible in that it allows culture to be expressed without taint
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The over-arching, high-level obligations are applied to the organization via contractual and legal terms.
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But it is these obligations that the traditional corporate model separates out into functions and then parcels off to distinct groups. The effect is that a clear sight of these ‘higher’ obligations by the people at the front-end is obstructed. The overall sense of responsibility is not transmitted but gets lost in the distortions, discontinuities and contradictions inherent in the corporate systems of hierarchy and functionalization.
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employees are individually rewarded for their contribution to each product. They are not “compensated” for the hours spent at work. If an employee wants to calculate their hourly rate, then they are free to do so however, they are only rewarded for the outcome not the duration of their endeavors.
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Another simplification is the application of virtual accounts (Profit and Loss (P&L) account and Balance Sheet) on each person within the business.
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The company systems simply provide a mechanism for cheaply measuring the success of each individual’s choices. For quality the measure is customer returns, for delivery it is an on-time-and-in-full metric and profit is expressed in terms of both pounds sterling and ROI (return on investment).
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The innumerable direct links back to an external reality -like the fragile ties that bound giant Gulliver, seem much more effective at aligning the presenting culture and the underlying embodied culture, and in doing so work to remove the existing tension.
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With a culture that responds directly to reality, the rules in the environment can be “bounding” rather than “binding”- limiting rather than instructive; this way individual behavior need not be directed at all. The goal is to free the individual to express himself fully through his work, bounded only by the limits of the law. With clever feedback (self-referencing feedback loops) integrated into the design, the individuals can themselves grow to collectively take charge of the system boundaries, culture and even the environment itself, always minded of the inherent risks they are balancing, leaving the law of the land as the sole artificial boundary.
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the conventional company, which, instead of rewarding enterprise, trains compliance by suppressing individual initiative under layer upon layer of translation tools.
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without the divisive and overbearing management cabal the natural reaction of humans is to combine their efforts
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recruited by another staff member (sponsor) and they will help you learn the basics of the business management system- they will help you get to know the ropes.
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Along with that job you will be given a cash float (risk capital), P&L Account, a Balance Sheet and computer software to help plan and record your activities. Your operation is monitored by your sponsor to see if you increase the margin or volume, and so establish a sustainable operation. Training and mentoring is provided to support the steep learning curve - but without removing the responsibility of producing a return on the sponsor’s risk capital.
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You will, in the meantime be looking to establish some of your own work for which you will not have to pay a commission or royalty to your sponsor and this will provide you with more profitable operations such that eventually you might pass back to the sponsor the original operation, as it has become your lowest margin activity. It will then find its way to a new employee (along with the associated Balance Sheet risk capital) where the process is repeated by the sponsor.[4]
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Remuneration for staff is calibrated in a way that reflects the balance of different forces around ‘pay’
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there is an obligation upon the company to pay a minimum wage even if the profitability of the operation does not support this
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there are therefore two aspects of the basic pay structure: one is “absolute” and reflects the entrepreneurial skill level of the employee according to a sophisticated grading scale
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A further 20% of the original profit will be paid into his risk capital account, which will be his responsibility to deploy in any way he sees fit as part of his Balance Sheet. Of the three remaining 20% slices of the original profit, one is paid out as corporation tax, another as a dividend to the shareholders and the last retained as collective risk capital on the company’s balance sheet- a war chest so to speak.
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Julian Wilson and Andrew Holm sell products / services to their staff (such as office space and software) they have an identical customer/supplier relationship with the other employees.
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Naturally there are some people that can’t generate a profit. The sponsor’s risk capital will eventually be consumed through pay. After a process of rescue and recovery- where their shortcomings are identified and they are given the opportunity to put them right, they either improve or leave, albeit with a sizeable increase in their skills.
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there is a gradual process of accustomisation; the void of the new employee is surrounded by others dealing with their particular activities, offering both role models and operations they may wish to relinquish. One step at a time the new employee acquires the skills to become completely self-managing, to increase their margins, to make investments, to find new business, to become a creator of their own success. Ultimately, they learn to be an entrepreneur.
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Matt Black Systems it is not simply commitment that they targeted in their employees, rather they aim for the specific human qualities they sum up as magic- those of curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality).
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a new form of association of individuals working together under the umbrella of a company structure: a kind of collective autonomy
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Turning an organisation on its head- removing all management, establishing a P&L account and Balance Sheet on everyone in the organisation and having customers payment go first into the respective persons P&L account has revolutionised this company.
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This innovative company’s approach views business success as wholly reliant upon human agency, and its wellspring at the individual level.
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problem (of unnecessarily high overheads placed on production) that arguably is behind the decline in western manufacturing
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organizational design brings to light the unconscious socio-philosophical paradigm of the society in which it exists, organizational development points to how change occurs.
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scientific management employs rationalism and determinism in pursuit of efficiency, but leaves no place for self-determination for most people within the system.
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today, a really “modern” view of an organization is more likely to be depicted in terms that are akin to an organism.
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the Taylorist approach may be more real in theory than in practice: its instrumentalist view of the workforce is cursed by unintended consequences. When workers have no space for their own creative expression, when they are treated like automata not unique individuals, when they become demotivated and surly, when they treat their work as a necessary evil; this is no recipe for a functional organization.
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The natural, human reaction to this is unionization, defiance and even outright rebellion; to counter this, management grows larger and more rigid in pursuit of compliance, organizations become top heavy with staff who do not contribute directly to the process of value creation but wield power over those who do.
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Even when disgruntled employees strike free and start their own businesses they seem unable to resist the hegemony of the conventional command-and-control approach
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Making the transition involves adherence to a whole new sociology of work with all the challenging social and psychological implications that brings.
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In the “theory of constraints” the goal is to align front-line staff into a neat, compact line for maximum efficiency. Surely the most considered approach is to have front-line staff self-align in pursuit of their individual goals?
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The removal of hierarchy and specialization is key to a massive improvement in both profitability and productivity. In summary: there are no managers in the company, or foremen, or sales staff, or finance departments; the company is not functionally compartmentalized and there is no hierarchy of command. In fact every member of staff operates as a virtual micro-business with their own Profit & Loss account and Balance Sheet, they manage their own work and see processes through from end to end
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if one creates a space in which staff pursue their own goals and are not paid by the hour, they will focus on their activities not the clock; if they are not told what to do, they will need to develop their own initiative; if they are free to develop their own processes, they will discover through their own creative faculties how to work more productively- in pursuit of their goals
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The human qualities which are of greatest potential value to the business are: curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality)
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These qualities are the very ones most likely to be withheld by an individual when the environment is ‘wrong’.
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Any elements in the business environment that undermine the autonomy and purpose of the individual will see the above qualities withheld
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the responsibility of the individual is formalized, specified and restricted. An improved system is not one where responsibility is distributed perfectly but rather one where there is simply no opportunity for responsibility to be lost (via the divisions between the chunks). Systems must be reorganized so responsibility -the most essential of qualities -is protected and wholly preserved.
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Matt Black Systems believe this can only be done by containing the whole responsibility within an individual, holding them both responsible and giving them ‘response-ability’
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productivity is up 300%, the profit margin is up 10%[3], customer perception has shifted from poor to outstanding, product returns are at less than 1%, “on time and in full” delivery is greater than 96%, pay has increased 100%.
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staff develop broader and deeper skills and feel greater job security; they get direct feedback from their customers which all go to fuel self-confidence and self-esteem.
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What is particular about their story is that behind it is a very consciously crafted design that surrounds the individualism of each person with hard boundaries of the customer, the law and the business. It is these boundaries rather than the instructive persona of ‘the boss’ that gives rise to the discipline in which individuals can develop. Autonomy is not the same as freedom, at least not in the loose sense of ‘do as you please’. An autonomous person is a person who has become self-governing, who has developed a capacity for self-regulation, quite a different notion from the absence of boundaries. Indeed, it is with establishing the right boundaries that the business philosophy is most concerned. The company provides the crucible in which the individual can develop self-expression but the container itself is bounded. Wilson calls this “designing the void”. This crucible is carefully constructed from an all-encompassing, interconnecting set of boundaries that provide an ultimate limit to behaviours (where they would fall foul of the law or take risks with catastrophic potential). It is an illusion to think, as a director of a company, that you are not engaged in a process of social conditioning; the basis of the culture is both your responsibility and the result of your influence. The trick is to know what needs to be defined and what needs to be left open. The traditional authoritarian, controlling characters that often dominate business are the antithesis of this in their drive to fill this void with process, persona and instruction. Alternatively, creating an environment that fosters enterprise, individuals discover how to be enterprising.
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peer into the future - Leaves blender - 0 views
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"easily replicable design with stock components and minimal use of custom parts (unless they can be digitally fabricated with a RepRap class 3-D printer or CNC mill -e.g. limit to what is found in most fab labs and avoid high energy processes and a skilled machinist). The designers should seek to minimize cost and complexity while keeping throughput high (continuous if possible)."
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Optical force sensor for high density planar electrical interconnects - 0 views
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ICT-37-2014 - 0 views
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Focus will be on SME proposing innovative ICT concept, product and service applying new sets of rules, values and models which ultimately disrupt existing markets.
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Participants can apply to Phase 1 with a view to applying to Phase 2 at a later date, or directly to Phase 2.
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Proposals shall contain a specification for the outcome of the project, including a first commercialisation plan, and criteria for success.
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We are not a SME and have no classical commercialization plan. We can form an Exchange Firm for example, and offer services for OVNi for example, helping local food networks, providing them infrastructure. But in that case, the business plan for the Exchange Firm should contain a revenue model. Who is going to pay for the deployment of the OVNi in order to make the Exchange Firm commercially viable in the eyes of the Commission?
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Enhancing profitability and growth performance of SMEs by combining and transferring new and existing knowledge into innovative, disruptive and competitive solutions
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Conference Detail for Industrial and Commercial Applications of Smart Structures Techno... - 0 views
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"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."
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GitHub Has Big Dreams for Open-Source Software, and More - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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GitHub has no managers among its 140 employees, for example. “Everyone has management interests,” he said. “People can work on things that are interesting to them. Companies should exist to optimize happiness, not money. Profits follow.” He does, however, retain his own title and decides things like salaries.
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Another member of GitHub has posted a talk that stresses how companies flourish when people want to work on certain things, not because they are told to.
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Asana bases work on a series of to-do lists that people assign one another. Inside Asana there are no formal titles, though like GitHub there are bosses at the top who make final decisions.
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Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.
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GitHub’s popularity has also made it an important way for companies to recruit engineers, because some of the best people in the business are showing their work or dissecting the work of others inside some of the public pull requests.
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For all the happiness and sharing, real money is involved here. In July GitHub received $100 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This early in most software companies’ lives, $20 million would be a fortune.
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“For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”
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As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly.
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Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.
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Still, these fast-rising successes may be on to something more than simply universalizing the means of their own good fortune. An early guru of the Information Age, Peter Drucker, wrote often in the latter part of his career of the need for managers to define tasks, and for workers to seek fulfillment before profits.
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Custom Lens Design | Optical Design - 1 views
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Social... - 0 views
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the development of marketing is sensible to its environment and is hence already self-limiting itself according to the previously mentioned legal and social framework
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explore new inner dynamics of marketing, new directions in the field of possibilities offered by the current organology and its articulations between techniques and social organization in order to influence and shape marketing as an associative force – in opposition to its current dissociative force – in the larger psychic, social and technic organology
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empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production
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transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed
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the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
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denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions
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“if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)
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What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser
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would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information
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An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.
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is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities
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change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy
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with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation
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Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.
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the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.
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3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
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5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.
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big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm
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the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
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less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.
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means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement
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Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means
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But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities
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Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police
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a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system
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Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.
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Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers
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a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.
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the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest
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Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,
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This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.
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the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations
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shared by Francois Bergeron on 28 Oct 12
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Thinking Space: We are in a new transition, part 2 - 3 views
yihongs-research.blogspot.ca/...-in-new-transition-part-2.html
thinking space transition web of minds
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Modern education is a typical effort that people are trying to make a product line of high-quality mind asset.
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Without explicit, formal presentation of mind asset, we cannot efficiently connect and compose varied mind asset and we cannot well measure the value of mind asset. The issue of mind aggregation is particularly critical because individual mind is often too shallow to be high quality.
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There is a natural gap between the presented value of the mind asset in the book and the real value of the mind asset in real world. This gap of knowledge understanding is a typical difficulty of mind asset measurement.
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Because of the Web, the first time in history human mind becomes a critical circulating asset in society that ordinary people can buy, sell, produce, and share.
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shared by Steve Bosserman on 05 Feb 12
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Fuel Cell Taps Into Roach Power | Chemical & Engineering News - 2 views
cen.acs.org/...uel-Cell-Taps-Roach-Power.html
capillary biofuel cockroach batteries enzyme sensor_technology
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Their cockroach biofuel cell is a bundle of thin carbon wires sealed inside a glass capillary tube. The cell is about 0.05 cm in diameter and a few centimeters long. To make up the cell's anode, Scherson and his team coated the wires with two enzymes: trehalase to break the sugar trehalose into two glucose molecules and glucose oxidase to extract electrons from the glucose. To create the cathode, the researchers coated the wires with the enzyme bilirubin oxidase to shuttle the generated electrons to oxygen to produce water. Because the enzymes alone can't efficiently transfer electrons to and from the electrode, the researchers also added an osmium complex to the carbon wires to act as an electron shuttle. The researchers selected trehalose, says Scherson, because of its high concentration in cockroach blood, 30 mM.
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Displacement | Microstrain - 0 views
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MicroStrain offers a range of miniature displacement sensors. These include contact sensors, non-contact sensors, and signal conditioners. Within our contact sensors, we offer gauging, non-gauging, sub-miniature (very small) and micro-miniature (smallest available on the market) displacement sensor designs. MicroStrain displacement/position sensors are known as DVRTs (Differential Variable Reluctance Transducers) which are half-bridge LVDTs (Linear Variable Differential Transformers). Our DVRTs deliver a very high linear stroke range to body length ratio, and can be used in environments where traditional LVDTs are too large. MicroStrain’s miniature displacement transducers are extremely robust, capable of operating at temperatures up to 175°C in corrosive media such as saline, oil, and brake fluid. The near frictionless design enables sensors to operate over millions of cycles without wear or degradation in signal quality.
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croStrain offers a range of miniature displacement sensors. These include contact sensors, non-contact sensors, and signal conditioners. Within our contact sensors, we offer gauging, non-gauging, sub-miniature (very small) and micro-miniature (smallest available on the market) displacement sensor designs. MicroStrain displacement/position sensors are known as DVRTs (Differential Variable Reluctance Transducers) which are half-bridge LVDTs (Linear Variable Differential Transformers). Our DVRTs deliver a very high linear stroke range to body length ratio, and can be used in environments where traditional LVDTs are too large. MicroStrain’s miniature displacement transducers are extremely robust, capable of operating at temperatures up to 175°C in corrosive media such as saline, oil, and brake fluid. The near frictionless design enables sensors to operate over millions of cycles without wear or degradation in signal quality. MicroStrain’s displacement sensing products including transducers, signal conditioners, and motherboards. These systems provide highly precise measurement solutions. MicroStrain’s contact displacement transducers deliver highly precise linear measurements with an extremely small, miniature design. Both gauging and non-gauging displacement transducers are available. Our non-contact displacement transducers are designed to measure the displacement and proximity of a metal target without physical contact. MicroStrain offers wireless, analog, and digital output DVRT signal conditioners. Signal conditioners are required for use with MicroStrain DVRT displacement sensors. .familyNav1, .familyNav2, .familyNav3, .familyNav4 { background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #CCCCCC; color: #FFFFFF; display: block; font-size: 14px; margin: 1px 0; padding: 6px 0 3px 6px; text-decoration: none; } .familyNav1:hover, .familyNav2:hover, .familyNav3:hover, .familyNav4:hover { opacity:1.0; filter:alpha(opacity=100); } .familyNav1:hover, .familyNav1.live { background:#0468AD; } .familyNav2:hover, .familyNav2.live{ background:#32641E; } .familyNav3:hover, .familyNav3.live{ background:#B55A11; } .familyNav4:hover, .familyNav4.live{ background:#76285D; } .familySub { margin: -1px 0 0; opacity:0.7; filter:alpha(opacity=80); font-size:12px; } .familySub img { width: 22px; } WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
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Non-invasive surgery through the skull - 0 views
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Introducing Edgeryders: the corporation without permission | Contrordine compagni - 0 views
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Edgeryders LBG provides the corporate infrastructure to deploy it: team building, technology, outreach and engagement, invoicing, banking, whatever. This is regulated by ad-hoc agreements between project leaders and the company, because every project is different. Once a contract is signed, the company’s board of directors takes on legal responsibility for delivering on it, just as with any other corporation.
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This much openness guarantees a very high rate of idea generation – and an equally high rate of idea rejection by lack of momentum. Anything that lives through this much natural selection has to be very, very good – and clients stand to benefit from it.
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You can never hire them – they would not get through your HR firewall, because your HR people don’t understand or recognize their qualifications.
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We provide an interface for them to keep true to themselves while meeting your accountability requirements
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shared by Steve Bosserman on 31 May 11
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Instead of Student Loans, Investing in Futures - NYTimes.com - 0 views
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ent-loans-investing-in-futures
risk_management investment milton_friedman human_capital
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So how do we finance something that is extremely valuable both for individuals and for society - something that, in most cases, should happen, but often won't happen because the risks are too high? The best way is to spread the risk. That's how insurance works. In Lumni's case, students share the risk with investors, who make more or less based on how well the students do. But they also share it with one another. Lumni pools its investments into funds to balance out the risks. They know that some students will run into difficulties, some will achieve average success, and some will do very well - but they don't know in advance how any individual student will fare. And students don't know this themselves. Through diversification, however, their funds can achieve stable returns. What this means is that the students who have the biggest problems benefit the most. And, in effect, those who decide to become investment bankers end up subsidizing the ones who decide to become social workers. Since a good society needs many different roles fulfilled, everyone benefits. That, at least, is the theory. Economists are skeptical about human capital contracts - which were first proposed by Milton Friedman in the 1950s - because they have many potential problems and little track record. But Lumni seems to be making them work - at least on a small scale. Whether it can succeed at a larger level remains to be seen.
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Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views
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Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
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The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
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Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
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Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
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Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
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The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
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The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
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Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
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Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
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shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
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Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
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Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
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But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
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The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
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Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
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in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
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Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
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We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
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It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
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There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
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Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
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Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
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Proposal - Food SFS-08-2014 - 1 views
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technological/practical as well as economic viability of an innovation idea/concept with considerable novelty to the industry sector
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In phase 2, innovation projects will be supported that address the specific challenge of Sustainable Food Security
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demonstrate high potential in terms of company competitiveness and growth underpinned by a strategic business plan
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Proposals shall be based on an elaborated business plan either developed through phase 1 or another means.
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shared by Kurt Laitner on 19 Nov 14
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montreal high density indoor farming company - 1 views
business.financialpost.com/...a-year-in-a-single-square-foot
high density urban farming company 'for profit'
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These High-Tech Sensors Track Exactly How Fresh Our Produce Is So We Stop Wasting Food - 0 views
www.fastcompany.com/...uce-is-so-we-stop-wasting-food
food distribution sensor technology food waste
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The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views
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Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
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systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
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unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011
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even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field
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The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work
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ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States
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The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation
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if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students
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Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
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These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.
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At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt
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the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
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growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
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studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security
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Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates
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universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs
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The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.
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The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
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The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
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Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
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The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.
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Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
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faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
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it is critical to have active research laboratories, not only in elite public and private research institutions, but in non-flagship public universities, a diverse set of private universities, and four-year colleges
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How then do increasingly beleaguered institutions of higher education support the research efforts of the faculty, given the reality that federal grants are going to be few and far between for the majority of faculty members? What are the practical steps institutions can take?
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change the current model of providing large startup packages when a faculty member is hired and then leaving it up to the faculty member to obtain funding for the remainder of his or her career
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universities invest less in new faculty members and spread their internal research dollars across faculty members at all stages of their careers, from early to late.
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national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
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Many prospective hires may find smaller startup packages palatable, if they can be convinced that the smaller packages are coupled with an institutional commitment to ongoing research support and more reasonable expectations about winning grants.
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Smaller startup packages mean that in many situations, new faculty members will not be able to establish a functioning stand-alone laboratory. Thus, space and equipment will need to be shared to a greater extent than has been true in the past.
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construction of open laboratory spaces and the strategic development of well-equipped research centers capable of efficiently servicing the needs of an array of researchers
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Collaborative proposals and the assembly of research teams that focus on more complex problems can arise relatively naturally as interactions among researchers are facilitated by proximity and the absence of walls between laboratories.
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The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
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nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
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relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
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Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
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some faculty members worried about firms dictating the research priorities of the university, pulling graduate students into proprietary research (which could limit what they could publish), and generally tugging the relevant faculty in multiple directions.
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University faculty and businesspeople often do not understand each other’s cultures, needs, and constraints, and such gaps can lead to more mundane problems in university/industry relations, not least of which are organizational demands and institutional cultures
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n addition to funding for research, universities can receive indirect benefits from such relationships. High-profile partnerships with businesses will underline the important role that universities can play in the economic development of a region.
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Universities have to see firms as more than just deep pockets, and firms need to see universities as more than sources of cheap skilled labor.
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We do not believe that research proposed and supervised by individual principal investigators will disappear anytime soon. It is a research model that has proven to be remarkably successful and enduring
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However, we believe that the most vibrant scientific communities on university and college campuses, and the ones most likely to thrive in the new reality of funding for the sciences, will be those that encourage the formation of research teams and are nimble with regard to funding sources, even as they leave room for traditional avenues of funding and research.