Group items tagged

1 - "Disciples of the Cloud": Businesses control all intellectual property and determine where and when work takes place. 2 - "Electronic Cottages": Businesses control all intellectual property, but workers are able to determine where, when and how they work. 3 - "Replicants": Businesses depend on specialist consultants, their expertise and intellectual property. Work is much less predictable and reliable, but workers are free to choose where, when and how much they work. 4 - "Mutual Worlds": Businesses operate as cooperatives of independent contractors. Intellectual property is controlled by workers, who focus on small local ventures, often connected to networks of similar ventures elsewhere to give scale."

FORGET using passwords to log on to your computer, needing touch screens to navigate on your smartphone or paying expensive energy bills; in the future your daily activities will create all the energy you need to power your house, biometrics will unlock your devices, and your mind will be capable of controlling them.

A court challenge has delayed plans to expel a Texan student for refusing to wear a radio tag that tracked her movements. Religious reasons led Andrea Hernandez to stop wearing the tag that revealed where she was on her school campus. The tags were introduced to track students and help tighten control of school funding.

Brilliant article on the insides of the struggle for control of the internet....  "For more than a year, the intelligence services of various authoritarian regimes have shown an intense desire to know more about what goes on in an office building on L Street in Washington DC, six blocks away from the White House."

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today-perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

"Together, they highlight five "technologies that matter" for cities in 2020: mobile broadband; smart personal devices, whether they're dirt-cheap phones or tablets; government-sponsored cloud computing (modeled on the U.K.'s national "G-cloud" initiative); open-source public databases to promote grassroots innovation, and "public interfaces." Instead of Internet cafés, imagine an outdoor LED screen and hacked Kinect box allowing literally anyone to access the Net using only gestures."

Rare earth elements massively improve energy efficiency and conductivity of metals. Yet rare earth are some of the most toxic and difficult materials to mine, and most are controlled by China. This article provokes consideration of both the need for developing super-efficient electronics with the costs associated in mining, as well as geo-political factors related to minerals extraction.

" Verbalizing visceral feelings about technology, whether attraction or repulsion, Kelly explores the "technium," his term for the globalized, interconnected stage of technological development. Arguing that the processes creating the technium are akin to those of biological evolution, Kelly devotes the opening sections of his exposition to that analogy, maintaining that the technium exhibits a similar tendency toward self-organizing complexity. Having defined the technium, Kelly addresses its discontents, as expressed by the Unabomber (although Kelly admits to trepidation in taking seriously the antitechnology screeds of a murderer) and then as lived by the allegedly technophobic Amish. From his observations and discussions with some Amish people, Kelly extracts some precepts of their attitudes toward gadgets, suggesting folk in the secular world can benefit from the Amish approach of treating tools as servants of self and society rather than as out-of-control masters. Exploring ramifications of technology on human welfare and achievement, Kelly arrives at an optimistic outlook that will interest many, coming, as it does, from the former editor of Wired magazine. --Gilbert Taylor "

Who will own the brains of smart cities--citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of "gov 2.0" champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities' mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and "frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness."