"activating" human agency and political will and addressing the root causes for power unbalance and resistance to change is at the heart of tomorrow's paradigm shift.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url
32More
Engaging For the Commons - Global Pull Platform - Helene Finidori - 0 views
-
action-oriented strategy and process methodology for generating engagement, accountability and outcomes in the political, economic, social and environmental spheres, which may contribute to enable this activation.
- ...29 more annotations...
-
treated as social objects: the nodes around which social networks are created, conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, new territories explored, meaning and intents shared, learning achieved.
-
will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation
-
Select or refer designated actors to acknowledge or request their engagement and action at various levels
1More
shared by Steve Bosserman on 24 May 12
- No Cached
When Cities Run Themselves | WOUB - 0 views
woub.org/...when-cities-run-themselves
urban trends machine-to-machine automation internet-of-things sensor_technology
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Machines talking to machines No doubt that the Olympics will have a profound effect in shaping London's future. By the time the Games begin, for instance, it will have Europe's largest free WiFi zone, with the city's iconic red phone booths converted, fittingly, into hotspots. But another opportunity London landed earlier this month could have just as much impact, perhaps more. A company called Living PlanIt announced that it will begin testing its "Urban Operating System" in the Greenwich section of the city. What does that mean? Put simply, London would have its own operating system, much as your PC runs on Windows or your Mac runs on Apple's IOS. This ties into the latest hot buzz phrase, "the internet of things," which describes a world where machines talk to other machines. No human interaction required. So, for a city, this means sensors in buildings would connect to sensors in water treatment plants which would connect to sensors in stoplights. It would be one gigantic, computerized urban nervous system, which a lot of experts think is the only way cities can survive a future when they'll contain more than two out of every three people on Earth. Based on what sensors reveal about the location and movement of humans in a section of a city, for instance, buildings will automatically adjust their temperatures, streetlights will dim or brighten, water flow will increase or slow. Or, in the event of a disaster, emergency services would have real-time access to traffic data, trauma unit availability, building blueprints. And soon enough, our smart phones will be able to tap in to the Urban OS. So will our household appliances. This is not some 21st century analogue of the personal jet pack. The Urban OS is the driving force behind a smart city being built from the ground up in northern Portugal. Construction is scheduled to be completed in three years; eventually it will have about 150,000 residents. It will also have more than 100 million sen
Local Food Systems concepts impact issues - 1 views
1More
Meg Munn MP - Sheffield Heeley's voice in Parliament | Welcome - 0 views
-
Figures recently issued by Co-operativesUK show that co-operative business grew by 1.5% in 2011, twice the rate of the UK economy as a whole. This is the fourth consecutive year that the co-operative sector has outperformed the rest of UK business. The figures also show that it is not only in growth that co-operative businesses do better, they are also much more reliant - 98% are still in operation after three years compared to 65% of all businesses. Also 88% try to minimize the environmental impact of their activities compared to 44% of all businesses who state they do not take any action in this regard at all. Membership of trading co-operatives from 2010 to 2011 grew by 5.5% to 13.5 million people - the increase from 2008 to 2011 is 19.7%. Currently the number of co-operatives in the UK is around 5,900 - a growth of 23% from 2008. The largest growth by sector was in the renewable energy sector, and there are now 242 co-operative schools across the country.
38More
The Energy Efficiency of Trust & Vulnerability: A Conversation | Switch and Shift - 0 views
- ...34 more annotations...
-
When we don’t trust, we exert a lot of energy to keep up our guard, to continually assess and verify. This uses a lot of energy and time.
-
As we let ourselves be vulnerable, we also leave ourselves more open to new ideas, new ways of thinking which leads to empathy and innovation.
-
It lets us reallocate our resources to what matters and utilize our skills and those around us to increase effectiveness…impact.
-
If we are working together, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘done’. When are we done, what does that look like?
-
As the ability to replicate something has become more of a commodity, we are increasingly seeing that complex interactions are the way to create ‘value from difference’ (as opposed to ‘value from sameness’).
-
Efficient systems are great at dealing with complicated things – things that have many parts and sequences, but they fall flat dealing with complex systems, which is most of world today.
-
When we never do the same thing or have the same conversation twice, it becomes much more important to figure out why and what we do than how we do it (process, which is a given)
1More
Raise Green - 0 views
-
Raise Green's investor marketplace is a platform for local impact investing. We offer access to accredited and non-accredited, corporate or individual investors who want fractional ownership in clean energy and climate solution projects, and are looking to invest for local impact. Our investor marketplace is licensed with the SEC and FINRA to sell private securities. Raise Green is a licensed Funding Portal with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) under Section 4(a)(6) of the United States Securities Act, SEC File No.: 7-191.
48More
Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views
-
Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
- ...45 more annotations...
-
appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
-
People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
-
rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
-
The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
-
What’s coming along next ? “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ? Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ? New mental models ? Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
-
It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
-
clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
-
experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
-
that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
-
Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
-
are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
-
The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
-
a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
-
the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
-
The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory. It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
-
Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
-
in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
-
contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
-
Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
-
But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
17More
Club of Amsterdam blog: The impact of culture on education - 0 views
-
For example in some countries the objective of education is: to develop a critical mind, which in other cultures is viewed as absurd. In these countries students are supposed to try to learn as much as possible from the older generation and only when you are fully initiated you may communicate to have ideas of yourself.
-
For example in some countries the objective of education is: to develop a critical mind, which in other cultures is viewed as absurd. In these countries students are supposed to try to learn as much as possible from the older generation and only when you are fully initiated you may communicate to have ideas of yourself.
-
The combined scores for each country explain variations in behavior of people and organizations. The scores indicate the relative differences between cultures.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
n masculine cultures like USA, UK, Germany, Japan and Italy the dominant values are achievement and success. The dominant values in feminine cultures are consensus seeking, caring for others and quality of life. Sympathy is for the underdog. People try to avoid situations distinguishing clear winners and losers. In masculine cultures performance and achievement are important. The sympathy is for the winners. Status is important to show success. Feminine cultures like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have a people orientation. Small is beautiful and status is not so important.
-
In masculine cultures like USA, UK, Germany, Japan and Italy the dominant values are achievement and success. The dominant values in feminine cultures are consensus seeking, caring for others and quality of life. Sympathy is for the underdog. People try to avoid situations distinguishing clear winners and losers. In masculine cultures performance and achievement are important. The sympathy is for the winners. Status is important to show success. Feminine cultures like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have a people orientation. Small is beautiful and status is not so important.
-
In masculine cultures like USA, UK, Germany, Japan and Italy the dominant values are achievement and success. The dominant values in feminine cultures are consensus seeking, caring for others and quality of life. Sympathy is for the underdog. People try to avoid situations distinguishing clear winners and losers. In masculine cultures performance and achievement are important. The sympathy is for the winners. Status is important to show success. Feminine cultures like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have a people orientation. Small is beautiful and status is not so important.
-
For example in some countries the objective of education is: to develop a critical mind, which in other cultures is viewed as absurd. In these countries students are supposed to try to learn as much as possible from the older generation and only when you are fully initiated you may communicate to have ideas of yourself.
-
c. Masculinity vs. Femininity (MAS) In masculine cultures like USA, UK, Germany, Japan and Italy the dominant values are achievement and success. The dominant values in feminine cultures are consensus seeking, caring for others and quality of life. Sympathy is for the underdog. People try to avoid situations distinguishing clear winners and losers. In masculine cultures performance and achievement are important. The sympathy is for the winners. Status is important to show success. Feminine cultures like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have a people orientation. Small is beautiful and status is not so important.
-
He defines culture as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others”.
-
Analyzing his data, Hofstede found five value clusters (or “dimensions”) being the most fundamental in understanding and explaining the differences in answers to the single questions in his questionnaires
-
The five dimensions of national culture identified by Hofstede are: Power Distance Index (PDI) Individualism vs. collectivism (IDV) Masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) Long Term Orientation (LTO)
-
Power distance is the extent to which less powerful members of a society accept that power is distributed unequally. In high power-distance cultures everybody has his/her rightful place in society. Old age is respected, and status is important. In low power-distance cultures people try to look younger and powerful people try to look less powerful
-
In individualistic cultures, like almost all the rich Western countries, people look after themselves and their immediate family only; in collectivist cultures like Asia and Africa people belong to "in-groups" who look after them in exchange for loyalty
-
In masculine cultures like USA, UK, Germany, Japan and Italy the dominant values are achievement and success. The dominant values in feminine cultures are consensus seeking, caring for others and quality of life. Sympathy is for the underdog. People try to avoid situations distinguishing clear winners and losers. In masculine cultures performance and achievement are important. The sympathy is for the winners. Status is important to show success. Feminine cultures like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands have a people orientation. Small is beautiful and status is not so important
-
Uncertainty avoidance (or uncertainty control) stands for the extent to which people feel threatened by uncertainty and ambiguity. In cultures with strong uncertainty avoidance, people have a strong emotional need for rules and formality to structure life
-
The last element of culture is the Long Term Orientation which is the extent to which a society exhibits a future-orientated perspective rather than a near term point of view. Low scoring countries like the USA and West European countries are usually those under the influence of monotheistic religious systems, such as the Christian, Islamic or Jewish systems. People in these countries believe there is an absolute and indivisible truth. In high scoring countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, for example those practicing Buddhism, Shintoism or Hinduism, people believe truth depends on time, context and situation
8More
A model for device development | Researchers at the Stanford University Program in Biod... - 2 views
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Inventors must also determine if they are in a position to efficiently seize the market opportunity.
-
regulatory considerations, reimbursement strategies, intellectual property, and business development objectives. This leads to Phase I of the development model.
-
R&D in Phase II is responsible for generating early concepts. Brainstorming sessions are often held during this stage of development with members of R&D, marketing, and physician consultants. Computational analyses, such as stress and flow studies, are conducted to further understand the behavior of a proposed device. The team often develops a 3D CAD model of a proposed device
1More
Photosynq - An Open Reseach Project - 0 views
-
Been looking at this project too...seems like a good way that we might be able to get a better handle on how our jasmine rice grows over the 5-6 month growing season, how the plant performs in different soil types, the impact of increasingly variable rainfall on plant health, and perhaps being in a better position to be able to more accurately forecast yields and eventual seed quality.
2More
Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work - Tech News and Analysis - 0 views
-
also see http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm on this theme of absolute accountability
-
something to keep in mind while designing value equations, understanding the impact of absolute accountability, and the need to ensure we are measuring wht matters as important decisions will be made based on the metric, whether or not the metric is being used properly in context (for example using klout scores to choose among candidates for an engineering job)
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
1More
Impact of Social Sciences - The right tool for the job: Five collaborative writing tool... - 2 views
2More
Automatic Micro Manipulation System for Cell Manipulation - 1 views
-
Here, we applied piezo impact drive mechanism, which utilizes rapid deformation of piezoelectric element, to realize smooth insertion of the micro pipette into the cytoplasm without deformation. This mechanism had already been commercialized and being used in many institutes.
1More
Accelerometer and devices using the same - Patent # 6649905 - PatentGenius - 1 views
-
The forces involved in hitting a baseball are enormous. Estimates place them as high as 100 g. Not only must the instrument be able to measure them accurately in the first place but it must also be able to survive these extreme forces. Further,the instrument must be sufficiently miniaturized to be able to fit within a bore hole in the bat without fatally diminishing its strength. Preexisting accelerometers known to the present inventor fail on all scores. Solid state accelerometers have poorsignal to noise ratios and a relatively low dynamic range. Further, they have a long recovery time after a large impact.
2More
Big Data and Techno-panic ~or~ Fear, Loathing and Johannes Gutenberg | gonna.grow.wings - 0 views
-
Bell believes that techno-panics are most disruptive when the emerging technology impacts all three of the following: Our relationship to time. Our relationship to space. Our relationship to other people. What struck me about these three relationships—besides, of course, the recognition that the current crop of technological advances will turn them upside down—was that they are all crucial to the context in which sensemaking takes place.
-
In other words, the process of sensemaking relies on interacting with others to create a coherent map of an otherwise incoherent situation. This map is deeply linked context–a particular time, place, and set of individuals.