When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts
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shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
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Digital Reality | Edge.org - 0 views
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*neilgershenfeld fab labs IoT molecular computing nano star trek replicator
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In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
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is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
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detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
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The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts
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The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
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On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process
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There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
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There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology
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By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
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Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.
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Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today
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What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person
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the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless
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It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it
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At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
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To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything
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The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.
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Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.
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We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans
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Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
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But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials
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because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
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Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do
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And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble.
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At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard
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We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude.
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Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university
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Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."
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The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally
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You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
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To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
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There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.
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Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
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If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before
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You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.
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What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?
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It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing
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2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs
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To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.
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But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
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In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
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It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before
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There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out
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instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally
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The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use
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it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
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the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever
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Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs
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To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism
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I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility
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The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally
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The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale
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My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower
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If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry
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The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science
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If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality
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I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.
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When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.
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the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside
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you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know
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For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.
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Why Great Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem - 0 views
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Michelin developed a revolutionary new kind of tire with sensors and an internal hard wheel that could run almost perfectly for 125 miles after a puncture.
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Mastery of the ecosystem is the great strength that made Apple the supreme success story of our time,
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In a world where mobile phone makers sold their devices to operators to sell to consumers, Jobs had such a powerful ecosystem that he could get operators to compete to partner with him: “And here was Apple, offering not just exclusive access to the most talked-about phone in history, but also exclusive access to Apple consumers—the most desirable customer segment imaginable
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How do you take the measure of the ecosystem that your innovation will need to be part of and rely on? How do you not miss the blind spots that can lurk almost anywhere?
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There are terrible pitfalls in the usual progression from prototype to pilot to rollout. It relies perilously on getting everything right from the very start. Often a far wiser and safer approach can be what Adner calls a “minimum viable footprint (MVF) rollout followed by a staged expansion.” In other words, start with a complete ecosystem, but a limited one.
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What Dollar Shave Club can Teach You About Making a Video for Your Startup - Techvibes.com - 0 views
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Too often people are so caught up in their product that they want to jump right into talking about features before clearly articulating the customer need they are addressing. Don't start making a video until you have your value proposition nailed down.
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shared by Steve Bosserman on 30 Mar 12
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Designing great data products - O'Reilly Radar - 1 views
radar.oreilly.com/...in-approach-data-products.html
data_prediction data_products drivetrain predictive_modeling
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Note from Bill Fulkerson: The Drivetrain Approach: A four-step process for building data products. We are entering the era of data as drivetrain, where we use data not just to generate more data (in the form of predictions), but use data to produce actionable outcomes. That is the goal of the Drivetrain Approach.
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The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views
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Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
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Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
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individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
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we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
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the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems
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We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
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An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
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Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
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We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
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The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
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anything that does not have a price and exists ‘outside’ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
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regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
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we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
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it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
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It requires that we enlarge our understanding of ‘value’ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
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deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
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P2P Economy: The next great economic age - 0 views
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The Energy Efficiency of Trust & Vulnerability: A Conversation | Switch and Shift - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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It lets us reallocate our resources to what matters and utilize our skills and those around us to increase effectiveness…impact.
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If we are working together, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘done’. When are we done, what does that look like?
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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’).
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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.
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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)
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POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Eme... - 1 views
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how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes
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concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy
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personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment
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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.
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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.
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For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.
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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.
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the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.
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the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy
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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.
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A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.
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Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?
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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
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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?
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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
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economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.
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Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.
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Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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.”
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A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.
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there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.
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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,”
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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.”
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Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices
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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.
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Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,
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“In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”
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“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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The Tyddyn Teg cooperative has eight members and some lovely volunteer helpers. We share a commitment to the importance of quality local food and the challenges of sustainability in the twenty first century. We see ourselves as part of the global family of small farmers and aim to become a practice based centre for research and education for sustainable local food production. Our primary objective has been to maintain vegetable production and meet the needs and expectations of our veg box customers. In this we have had a great deal of help and advice from John and Pippa (who were the previous owners of the farm). We are also supplying vegetables to Moelyci Shop and Dimensions Shop in Bangor. Our aims over the coming years are: Expand and improve our vegetable growing Develop the Farm to support WWOOFing Create new spaces for events Open opportunities to have a small scale restaurant/cafe on the farm Establish a luxury camping business where people can come and stay Provide a living wage to every member of the cooperative
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The New Normal in Funding University Science | Issues in Science and Technology - 1 views
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Government funding for academic research will remain limited, and competition for grants will remain high. Broad adjustments will be needed
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systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II
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unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011
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even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field
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The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work
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ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States
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The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation
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if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students
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Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially
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These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.
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At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt
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the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions
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growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.
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studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security
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Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates
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universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs
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The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.
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The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.
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The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research
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Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has
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The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.
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Why should universities and colleges continue to support scientific research, knowing that the financial benefits are diminishing?
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faculty members are committed to their scholarship and will press on with their research programs even when external dollars are scarce
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it is critical to have active research laboratories, not only in elite public and private research institutions, but in non-flagship public universities, a diverse set of private universities, and four-year colleges
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How then do increasingly beleaguered institutions of higher education support the research efforts of the faculty, given the reality that federal grants are going to be few and far between for the majority of faculty members? What are the practical steps institutions can take?
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change the current model of providing large startup packages when a faculty member is hired and then leaving it up to the faculty member to obtain funding for the remainder of his or her career
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universities invest less in new faculty members and spread their internal research dollars across faculty members at all stages of their careers, from early to late.
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national conversation about changes in startup packages and by careful consultations with prospective faculty hires about long-term support of their research efforts
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Many prospective hires may find smaller startup packages palatable, if they can be convinced that the smaller packages are coupled with an institutional commitment to ongoing research support and more reasonable expectations about winning grants.
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Smaller startup packages mean that in many situations, new faculty members will not be able to establish a functioning stand-alone laboratory. Thus, space and equipment will need to be shared to a greater extent than has been true in the past.
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construction of open laboratory spaces and the strategic development of well-equipped research centers capable of efficiently servicing the needs of an array of researchers
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Collaborative proposals and the assembly of research teams that focus on more complex problems can arise relatively naturally as interactions among researchers are facilitated by proximity and the absence of walls between laboratories.
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The more likely trajectory of a junior faculty member will evolve from contributing team member to increasing leadership responsibilities to team leader
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nternal evaluations of contributions and potential will become more important in tenure and promotion decisions.
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relationships with foundations, donors, state agencies, and private business will become increasingly important in the funding game
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Further complicating university collaborations with business is that past examples of such partnerships have not always been easy or free of controversy.
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some faculty members worried about firms dictating the research priorities of the university, pulling graduate students into proprietary research (which could limit what they could publish), and generally tugging the relevant faculty in multiple directions.
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University faculty and businesspeople often do not understand each other’s cultures, needs, and constraints, and such gaps can lead to more mundane problems in university/industry relations, not least of which are organizational demands and institutional cultures
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n addition to funding for research, universities can receive indirect benefits from such relationships. High-profile partnerships with businesses will underline the important role that universities can play in the economic development of a region.
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Universities have to see firms as more than just deep pockets, and firms need to see universities as more than sources of cheap skilled labor.
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We do not believe that research proposed and supervised by individual principal investigators will disappear anytime soon. It is a research model that has proven to be remarkably successful and enduring
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However, we believe that the most vibrant scientific communities on university and college campuses, and the ones most likely to thrive in the new reality of funding for the sciences, will be those that encourage the formation of research teams and are nimble with regard to funding sources, even as they leave room for traditional avenues of funding and research.
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How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views
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emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
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At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
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Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
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peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
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Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
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For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
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In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
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Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
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The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
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using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
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The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
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So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
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One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
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we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
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No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
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the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
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the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs, and ignore externalities.
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we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
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entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
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The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
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Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
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I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
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Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views
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I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
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This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
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we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
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Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
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Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
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This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
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there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
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Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
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does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
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Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
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You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
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if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
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In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
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Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
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If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
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Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
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how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
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Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
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we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
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there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
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Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
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Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
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This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
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Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
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Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
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If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
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When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
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If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
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Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
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By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
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Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
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Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
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Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
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Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
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the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
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You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
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In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
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Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
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keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
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What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
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If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
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Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
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To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
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Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
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As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
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Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
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The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
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As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
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Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
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It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
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After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
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This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
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millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
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There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
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By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
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It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
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Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views
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So here we have it, the new triarchy: - The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario) - The private sector, with the corporation and private property - The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)
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At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations
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The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.
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More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.
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Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.
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In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.
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fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics
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trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"
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retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects
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the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society
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the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.
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communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.
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It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.
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In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.
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Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.
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The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.
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civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations
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the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
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Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.
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if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.
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The New Sacred « Dynamics of Myth - 0 views
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We have to both overcome the hold of the old mythology and gain adoption of the new. What drives adoption of a meaningful cultural phenomenon?
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largely driven by the church and government institutions which we don’t necessarily want to recreate, right?
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The Authority establishes a values framework, a ruling hierarchy directs and stewards the sacred content, and a host of intermediaries that carry it out to the faithful consumers.
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All around us there’s a collapse of the legitimacy of authorities, with much cynicism from the population. There’s never been a greater need for sacred content that can be trusted and deemed legitimate. How to achieve it without authorities? This is where we have to pivot our minds. We have to replace the dynamics of its creation within the authority with something else. This slide suggests an alternative:
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We can create a values framework using collaborative culture techniques like community mythology projects. Out of these come sacred content that is legitimate because we created it according to shared values and a collective conscience. We have to put in place processes and rituals to establish, enshrine and communicate it.