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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views

www.edge.org/...is-shame-necessary

shame collaboration cooperation paper theory

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
  • Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group.
  • 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...
  • Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.
  • humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.
  • 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.
  • Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas
  • It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt
  • Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.
  • 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.
  • five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing
  • Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,
  • shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
  • What if government is not involved in the shaming?
  • Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?
  • Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
  • vertical agitation
  • 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.
  • corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success
  • shame and reputation interact
  • in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand
  • Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
  • why we learned to speak.1
  • Language
  • The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
  • allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.
  • 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.
  • Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.
  • What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?
  • 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.
  • what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:
  • Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.
  • Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves
  • Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high
  • In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,
  • which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.
  • Today's world allows for amorphous identities
  • It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
  • Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.
  • Some people have no shame
  • shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative
  • a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly
  • if the payoff is high enough
  • There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
  • shame is not enough to catalyze major social change
  • This is why punishment remains imperative.
  • 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.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 28 Oct 11
     
    The role of non-rational mechanisms in convergence - social emotions like shame and guilt 
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views

issues.org/...-in-funding-university-science

open science paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
  • he sequester simply makes acute a chronic condition that has been getting worse for years.
  • the federal budget sequester
  • ...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
  • Researchers across the country encounter increasingly fierce competition for money.
  • 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
  • anxiety and frustration
  • 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
  • Origins of the crisis
  • 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 demand for research money greatly exceeds the supply
  • the demand for research funding has gone up
  • 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
  • competitive grants system
  • 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
  • The production of science and engineering doctorates has grown apace
  • Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
  • proposal pressure goes up
  • 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.
  • Dead-end solutions
  • 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.
  • Path out of crisis
  • 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?
  • esearch culture
  • attract good students and faculty as well as raise their prestige
  • mission to expand the boundaries of human knowledge
  • faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
  • training
  • take place in
  • research laboratories
  • 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.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Aug 14
       
      Sharing of resources, see SENSORICA's NRP
  • 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
  • phaseout of the individual laboratory
  • enhanced opportunities for communication and networking among faculty members and their students
  • 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.
  • An increased emphasis on team research
  • investments in the research enterprise
  • can be directed at projects that have good buy-in from the faculty
  • learn how to work both as part of a team and independently
  • Involvement in multiple projects should be encouraged
  • 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.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Aug 14
       
      Need value accounting system
  • relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
  • The opportunities to form partnerships with business are especially intriguing
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Aug 14
       
      The problem is to change the model and go open source, because IP stifles other processes that might benefit Universities!!!
  • 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.
  • developed rules and guidelines to control them
  • 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
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Aug 14
       
      Needs for mechanisms to govern, coordinate, structure an ecosystem -See SENSORICA's Open Alliance model
  • 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.
  • foundations or other philanthropy
  • 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.
Kurt Laitner

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

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

valve management structure company paper

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

Forget the Foundations - In These Times - 0 views

inthesetimes.com/...forget_the_foundations

Madonna Thunderhawk financing foundation activism paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • foundations divert money away from the collective tax base
  • who are more interested in supporting milquetoast reformers than social-justice organizations
  • federal and state funding for education and healthcare has shrunk
  • This is a culture of noblesse oblige, Ahn writes, where the “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.”
  • is the power those with money wield over community leaders.
  • consequently realigning their interests (i.e., maintaining their jobs) with maintaining the system
  • This allegiance keeps community leaders from challenging the root causes of social inequities–the social-change work–at the same time that they pedal to keep up by providing for the needs of individuals devastated by institutional exploitation.
  • Kivel concedes this is valuable work, but points out the inherent injustice of this paradigm: “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
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Open Source 3-D Printed Nutating Mixer - Appropedia, the sustainability wiki - 0 views

www.appropedia.org/rce_3-D_Printed_Nutating_Mixer

open science open hardware OSH catalog

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23
     
    "As the open source development of additive manufacturing has led to low-cost desktop three-dimensional (3-D) printing, a number of scientists throughout the world have begun to share digital designs of free and open source scientific hardware. Open source scientific hardware enables custom experimentation, laboratory control, rapid upgrading, transparent maintenance, and lower costs in general. To aid in this trend, this study describes the development, design, assembly, and operation of a 3-D printable open source desktop nutating mixer, which provides a fixed 20° platform tilt angle for a gentle three-dimensional (gyrating) agitation of chemical or biological samples (e.g., DNA or blood samples) without foam formation. The custom components for the nutating mixer are designed using open source FreeCAD software to enable customization. All of the non-readily available components can be fabricated with a low-cost RepRap 3-D printer using an open source software tool chain from common thermoplastics. All of the designs are open sourced and can be configured to add more functionality to the equipment in the future. It is relatively easy to assemble and is accessible to both the science education of younger students as well as state-of-the-art research laboratories. Overall, the open source nutating mixer can be fabricated with US$37 in parts, which is 1/10th of the cost of proprietary nutating mixers with similar capabilities. The open source nature of the device allow it to be easily repaired or upgraded with digital files, as well as to accommodate custom sample sizes and mixing velocities with minimal additional costs."
chrisaiki

Smart Contracts are self-executing contractual states, stored on the blockchain, which ... - 0 views

smartcontract.com

smart contract

shared by chrisaiki on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • chrisaiki on 27 May 16
     
    Smart Contracts are self-executing contractual states, stored on the blockchain, which nobody controls and therefore everyone can trust. Contacted by Christophe may 28th
Kurt Laitner

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

github.com/...Smart-contracts

smart contract github implementation *nickszabo

shared by Kurt Laitner on 21 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Once voting groups are someday eventually added to OT, they will also be able to act as parties to agreements, and they will be able to take a vote in order to change their own bylaws!
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 21 Mar 13
       
      ah governance
  • Scripted clauses can also be configured to trigger on certain events.
  • Smart contracts are most distinguished by the fact that they can have scriptable clauses
  • ...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!
  • A smart contract can be activated, after which point it takes on a “life of its own”
  • You can also define variables in your smart contract, which persist through its entire lifetime. As the smart contract—including its internal state—continues to process over time, receipts will continue to drop into the relevant parties’ inboxes,
  • A signed copy of the original smart contract shows it as it was, when the parties first signed and activated it. Additionally, a server-signed, updated version of the contract comes with each receipt, showing the latest state
  • Once the contract expires (or is deactivated) then a finalReceipt is dropped into all relevant inboxes, after which no other receipts are possible for that smart contract.
  • Let’s say a party needs to DIRECTLY trigger one of the clauses on the contract. (Instead of waiting around for it to trigger automatically based on some rule.) For example, perhaps an escrow user wishes to execute a clause in order to DISPUTE THE OUTCOME, or perhaps an arbitrator wishes to activate a clause in order to RENDER A JUDGMENT. OT’s smart contracts can do precisely these sorts of things, limited only by your imagination (and my pre-alpha code.)
Kurt Laitner

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

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • how to deal with recommendations for objects whose value diminishes with the number of people who use it.
  • Clearly the resulting distribution of these different types of particles is entirely different.
  • The analogy here is with goods that any number of people can share or that only one person can have.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • explore the space between these extremes
  • a single object/state can be shared with a relatively small number of users/particles
  •  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.
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Jan 13
     
    Interesting discussion of rival and nov-rival goods recommendations engine. Goes to scarcity vs abundance, how to manage deamnd for scarce goods.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Chubb detector lock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Chubb_detector_lock

blockchainaccess_project wikipedia

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 09 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • 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.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Wright Center for Sensor Systems Engineering - Cleveland State University - 1 views

www.csuohio.edu/wcsse

ohio collaboration sensing sensemaking

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Sep 12
     
    Contact Tibi - > Casey and Steve for this connection.  IMPORTANT and should be followed soon. 
Kurt Laitner

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

shared by Kurt Laitner on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • 5 “As” (Architecture, Adaptiveness, Accountability, Allocation and Access) in the governance of the global commons for the benefit of humanity."
  • the new framework focuses on veto rights – rather than recognized ownership claims
  • mutual benefit.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • an association of beneficiaries.
  • A trustee (custodian) for the CHM would be elected by the representatives
  • to oversee the legal operation of a collective entity
  • 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
  • Oversight of compliance would rest with the nondominium’s trustee
  • 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.”
  • encourage Ostrom’s user association-based systems of economic governance
  • "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.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Science and Technology Consultation - Industry Canada - 0 views

www.ic.gc.ca/...h_07416.html

Industry Canada

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Under this strategy
    • Yasir Siddiqui
      Yasir Siddiqui on 15 Jan 14
       
      Testing
    • Yasir Siddiqui
      Yasir Siddiqui on 15 Jan 14
       
      testing
  • 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.
  • This valuable resource of highly qualified and skilled individuals needs to be better leveraged.
  • The ease and ability of the academic community to collaborate, including through research networks, is also well-recognized.
  • to develop technologies, products and services that add value and create high-paying jobs.
  • Canada has an impressive record when it comes to research and the quality of its knowledge base.
  • 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
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 15 Jan 14
       
      problem statement
  • 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.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 15 Jan 14
       
      exercise
  • seeking the views of stakeholders from all sectors of the ST&I system—including universities, colleges and polytechnics, the business community, and Canadians
  • written submissions from all Canadians on the policy issues and questions presented in this paper.
  • The government remains focused on creating jobs, growth and long-term prosperity for 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.
  • has transformed the National Research Council, doubled its investment
  • supported research collaborations through the federal granting councils
  • created the new Venture Capital Action Plan
  • helping to promote greater commercialization of research and development
  • Our country continues to lead the G7 in spending on R&D
  • Canada has a world-class post-secondary education system that embraces and successfully leverages collaboration with the private sector, particularly through research networks
  • destination for some of the world's brightest minds
  • global race
  • businesses that embrace innovation-based strategies
  • post-secondary and research institutions that attract and nurture highly qualified and skilled talent
  • researchers who push the frontiers of knowledge
  • governments that provide the support
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Feb 14
       
      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. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Feb 14
       
      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
  • reducing red tape
  • expanding training partnerships and improving access to venture capital.
  • Collaboration is key to mobilizing innovation
  • invest in partnerships between businesses and colleges and universities
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Feb 14
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Feb 14
       
      But the public and in people is still not in sight of the fed gov. 
  • Economic Action Plans (EAP) 2012 and 2013
  • 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.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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

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

Industry Canada

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

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

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

book paper value networks

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