What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
57More
Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views
-
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.
- ...53 more annotations...
-
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
-
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
-
Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
-
Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
-
The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
-
The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
-
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
-
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.
-
shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
-
Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
-
Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
-
But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
-
Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
-
The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
-
in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
-
Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
-
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.
-
It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
-
There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
-
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.
-
Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
75More
The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views
-
Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
- ...72 more annotations...
-
systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
-
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.
-
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
-
the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
-
growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
-
The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
-
Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
-
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.
-
Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
-
faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
-
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
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
-
national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
-
nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
-
-
-
relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
-
-
Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
-
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.
-
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
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
21More
What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views
-
Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
-
Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
-
the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
- ...18 more annotations...
-
Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
-
The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
-
The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
-
Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
-
Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
-
The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
-
Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
-
In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
-
Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
-
One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
-
He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero
-
As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
-
Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
-
Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
-
Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
-
In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
-
There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?
15More
Forget the Foundations - In These Times - 0 views
-
Their “actions” 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 “acceptable contamination,” 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
- ...12 more annotations...
-
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.
-
This is a culture of noblesse oblige, Ahn writes, where the “privileged 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.”
-
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: “When 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.”
-
University of Southern California Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges contemporary grassroots activists to stop seeking a “pure way of doing things.” “Many are looking for an organizational structure and a resource capability that will somehow be impervious to co-optation,”
-
transitioning from foundation support to a volunteer collective reliant solely on grassroots dollars
1More
Open Source 3-D Printed Nutating Mixer - Appropedia, the sustainability wiki - 0 views
-
"As the open source development of additive manufacturing has led to low-cost desktop three-dimensional (3-D) printing, a number of scientists throughout the world have begun to share digital designs of free and open source scientific hardware. Open source scientific hardware enables custom experimentation, laboratory control, rapid upgrading, transparent maintenance, and lower costs in general. To aid in this trend, this study describes the development, design, assembly, and operation of a 3-D printable open source desktop nutating mixer, which provides a fixed 20° platform tilt angle for a gentle three-dimensional (gyrating) agitation of chemical or biological samples (e.g., DNA or blood samples) without foam formation. The custom components for the nutating mixer are designed using open source FreeCAD software to enable customization. All of the non-readily available components can be fabricated with a low-cost RepRap 3-D printer using an open source software tool chain from common thermoplastics. All of the designs are open sourced and can be configured to add more functionality to the equipment in the future. It is relatively easy to assemble and is accessible to both the science education of younger students as well as state-of-the-art research laboratories. Overall, the open source nutating mixer can be fabricated with US$37 in parts, which is 1/10th of the cost of proprietary nutating mixers with similar capabilities. The open source nature of the device allow it to be easily repaired or upgraded with digital files, as well as to accommodate custom sample sizes and mixing velocities with minimal additional costs."
11More
Smart contracts · FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions Wiki · GitHub - 0 views
-
Once voting groups are someday eventually added to OT, they will also be able to act as parties to agreements, and they will be able to take a vote in order to change their own bylaws!
- ...7 more annotations...
-
The script code is unable to manipulate any assets excepting those explicitly declared beforehand on the smart contract,
-
Not only can the smart contract move_funds() between these declared accounts, as its script logic dictates, but it can also stash_funds() directly inside the contract itself!
-
You can also define variables in your smart contract, which persist through its entire lifetime. As the smart contract—including its internal state—continues to process over time, receipts will continue to drop into the relevant parties’ inboxes,
-
A signed copy of the original smart contract shows it as it was, when the parties first signed and activated it. Additionally, a server-signed, updated version of the contract comes with each receipt, showing the latest state
-
Once the contract expires (or is deactivated) then a finalReceipt is dropped into all relevant inboxes, after which no other receipts are possible for that smart contract.
-
Let’s say a party needs to DIRECTLY trigger one of the clauses on the contract. (Instead of waiting around for it to trigger automatically based on some rule.) For example, perhaps an escrow user wishes to execute a clause in order to DISPUTE THE OUTCOME, or perhaps an arbitrator wishes to activate a clause in order to RENDER A JUDGMENT. OT’s smart contracts can do precisely these sorts of things, limited only by your imagination (and my pre-alpha code.)
Facilities | Grain Science and Industry | Kansas State University - 0 views
New computer approach could revolutionize design, manufacturing | News & Research Commu... - 1 views
8More
shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jan 13
- No Cached
How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines | MIT Technology Review - 0 views
www.technologyreview.com/...proving-recommendation-engines
rival vs non-rival goods recommendation particle physics
![](/images/link.gif)
-
how to deal with recommendations for objects whose value diminishes with the number of people who use it.
-
The analogy here is with goods that any number of people can share or that only one person can have.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Preventing oversubscription ensures that the population of users sample a wider range of DVDs, which in turn provides a broader range of recommendations.
-
Retailers are not just interested in renting DVDs or selling books or whatever. They want to maximise profits.
1More
Chubb detector lock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
-
A Chubb detector lock is a type of lever tumbler lock with an integral security feature, a form of relocker, which frustrates unauthorised access attempts and indicates to the lock's owner that it has been interfered with. When someone tries to pick the lock or to open it using the wrong key, the lock is designed to jam in a locked state until (depending on the lock) either a special regulator key or the original key is inserted and turned in a different direction. This alerts the owner to the fact that the lock has been tampered with.
Open Source Political Framework | A Separation of State and Politics - 1 views
ospoliticalframework.wordpress.com
open source framework political decision making tool tools decision making decision-making
![](/images/link.gif)
1More
Wright Center for Sensor Systems Engineering - Cleveland State University - 1 views
The Abstract :: North Carolina State University :: Researchers Develop Technique to Rem... - 1 views
18More
shared by Kurt Laitner on 20 Jan 14
- No Cached
Using Nondominion to Evolve from Local to Global Commons - P2P Foundation - 0 views
p2pfoundation.net/e_from_Local_to_Global_Commons
nondominium p2pfoundation *chriscook *markfrazier *elenorostrom *valnoraleister
![](/images/link.gif)
-
5 “As” (Architecture, Adaptiveness, Accountability, Allocation and Access) in the governance of the global commons for the benefit of humanity."
- ...15 more annotations...
-
The representatives would also appoint a Manager, for a parallel partnership venture, to identify opportunities to develop the common pool resource in accord with a transparent revenue-sharing formula
-
Each representative would have power to exercise a veto with regard to the resource development proposal(s) circulated by the manager.
-
Once an agreed formula (non-vetoed by the countries) emerged for recognizing needed inputs, and for overall revenue-sharing, the manager of the nondominium partnership would arrange open tenders to seek economic partners to maximize the value of the common pool resources.
-
Revenues from ensuing activities would be distributed to the association members on the originally-agreed basis
-
Ostrom’s key principles of successful collective choice agreements and monitoring by independent auditors.
-
Moreover, it does not confer the active power of control held under common law by a Trustee on behalf of beneficiaries,
-
the proposed negative or passive veto right of stewardship differs fundamentally from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under Condominium
-
The Caspian Partnership agreement would comprise a master framework agreement within which a myriad of associative agreements between the Caspian littoral nations individually or severally would be registered.”
-
"Areas recognized as being the heritage of mankind are defined by treaties as falling outside of nation-state jurisdiction and ownership, and are to be instead developed on a basis that benefits all human beings
-
the combination of Elinor Ostrom’s economic governance strategies with nondominium legal structures can lead to a new basis for common pool resources to be developed on a basis benefiting all of humanity.
46More
Science and Technology Consultation - Industry Canada - 0 views
-
Under this strategy
-
Genome Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
-
Still, Canadian businesses continue to underperform when it comes to innovation—a primary driver of productivity growth—when compared to other competing nations. The performance of business R&D is one oft-cited measure used to gauge the level of innovative activity in a country's business sector.
- ...38 more annotations...
-
Canadians have reached top tier global performance in reading, mathematics, problem solving and science, and Canada has rising numbers of graduates with doctoral degrees in science and engineering.
-
The ease and ability of the academic community to collaborate, including through research networks, is also well-recognized.
-
Still, the innovative performance of Canada's firms and the productivity growth continue to lag behind competing nations.
-
The government is also committed to moving forward with a new approach to promoting business innovation—one that emphasizes active business-led initiatives and focuses resources on better fostering the growth of innovative firms.
-
Achieving this requires the concerted effort of all players in the innovation system—to ensure each does what one does best and to leverage one another's strengths.
-
the government has invested more to support science, technology and innovative companies than ever before
-
Canada must become more innovative
-
providing a new framework to guide federal ST&I investments and priorities. That is why the Government of Canada stated its intention to release an updated ST&I Strategy in the October 2013 Speech from the Throne.
-
seeking the views of stakeholders from all sectors of the ST&I system—including universities, colleges and polytechnics, the business community, and Canadians
-
encouraging partnerships with industry, attracting highly skilled researchers, continuing investments in discovery-driven research, strengthening Canada's knowledge base, supporting research infrastructure and providing incentives to private sector innovation.
-
Canada has a world-class post-secondary education system that embraces and successfully leverages collaboration with the private sector, particularly through research networks
-
post-secondary and research institutions that attract and nurture highly qualified and skilled talent
-
-
Why a race? We need to change the way we see this!!! We need to open up. See the European Commission Horizon 2020 program http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/ They are acknowledging that Europe cannot do it alone, and are spending money on International collaboration.
-
-
-
There is nothing about non-institutionalized innovation, i.e. open source! There is nothing about the public in this equation like the Europeans do in the Digital Era for Europe program https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/node/66731
-
-
low taxes, strong support for new businesses, a soundly regulated banking system, and ready availability of financial services
-
-
provide incentive for innovative activity in firms, improved access to venture capital, augmented and more coordinated direct support to firms, and deeper partnerships and connections between the public and private sectors.
31More
Innovation Canada: A Call to Action - Review of Federal Support to Research and Develop... - 1 views
-
Canada has a solid foundation on which to build success as a leader in the knowledge economy of tomorrow
-
innovation is the ultimate source of the long-term competitiveness of businesses and the quality of life of Canadians
- ...28 more annotations...
-
We heard that the government should be more focussed on helping innovative firms to grow and, particularly, on serving the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
-
innovation support is too narrowly focussed on R&D – more support is needed for other activities along the continuum from ideas to commercially useful innovation
-
whole-of-government program delivery vehicle – the Industrial Research and Innovation Council (IRIC)
-
includes non-labour costs, such as materials and capital equipment, the calculation of which can be highly complex
-
the base for the tax credit should be labour-related costs, and the tax credit rate should be adjusted upward
-
facilitating access by such firms to an increased supply of risk capital at both the start-up and later stages of their growth.
-
encouragement of innovation in the Canadian economy should become a stated objective of procurement policies and programs.
-
Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) – a body with a whole-of-government focus that would oversee the realization of our proposed action plan, as well as serve as a permanent mechanism to promote the refinement and improvement of the government's business innovation programs going forward.
-
focus resources where market forces are unlikely to operate effectively or efficiently and, in that context, address the full range of business innovation activities, including research, development, commercialization and collaboration with other key actors in the innovation ecosystem
-
the closer the activity being supported is to market, and therefore the more likely it is that the recipient firm will capture most of the benefit for itself.
-
-
-
-
Still stack with the old paradigm of the "knowledge economy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy My opinion is that we're moving into a know-how economy.
-
Drew Sowersby - Graduate Student, Texas State University | Mendeley - 0 views
73More
POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Eme... - 1 views
-
how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes
-
concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy
-
personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment
- ...70 more annotations...
-
As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.
-
America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.
-
For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.
-
as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.
-
the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.
-
the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy
-
major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.
-
A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.
-
Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?
-
many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored
-
what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?
-
Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation
-
economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.
-
Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.
-
Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.
-
believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.
-
innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”
-
costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas
-
Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.
-
we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”
-
A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.
-
there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.
-
This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”
-
The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”
-
Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.
-
Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.
-
The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”
-
The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform
-
tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices
-
small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.
-
Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,
-
“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”
-
“In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite