TheMachine

"Along with the rise of the connected consumer - a subject that has no shortage of consultants, writers and public speakers ready to tell your company what to do - shouldn't we also be thinking of the rise of empowered employee, the people in the most advantageous position today and tomorrow to fill those job shortages? "

"Cultured meat" -- burgers or sausages grown in laboratory Petri dishes rather than made from slaughtered livestock -- could be the answer that feeds the world, saves the environment and spares the lives of millions of animals, they say.

"If you're a smart Ph.D from MIT, you'd never go to Wall Street now," one hedge fund executive told the magazine. "You'd go to Silicon Valley. There's at least a propsect for a huge gain. You'd have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun."

well, the title says it all. 

Lack of R&D, innovation and structural problems in education are root causes of the eurozone crisis in Portugal, Greece, but also Italy and Spain struggle. 

Reuters about the real challenges of Italy, and the fact that Monti's reforms are largely cosmetic. 

We humans are naturally inclined to fear the worst. Peter H. Diamandis tries to ignore that tendency and looks at the future. 

We're not going to have a jobless recovery. We're going to have a jobless future.

It was the talk of Davos, grabbing the imagination of a forum otherwise shrouded in gloom: a miracle machine that cracks the code of life within hours and could revolutionise healthcare.

Discussion about Jobless Future on Google+

Richard Baldwin: a research paper about supply chains in the age of globalization 

but what does your brain conjure if you're asked to picture work in the 21st century?

The web evolves: making it easier to create and curate content. Facebook in a timeline of the evolving web.

kickstarter explained (video) 

Economists are failing to account for mass technological innovations when making forecasts and constructing models.

Joseph Stiglitz explains how the Great Depression is caused by the revolution in agriculture. We're facing a similar shift now in the "real" economy. 

Discussion about Jobless future on Hacker News

Paul Krugman about Apple and agglomeration, he endorses the article from the nytimes, and refers to his own essay on the economies of agglomeration. 

The accelerating rate of change in many fields of technology all manifest themselves in terms of human development, some of which can be accurately tracked within economic data.  Contrary to what the media may peddle and despite periodic setbacks, average human prosperity is rising at a rate faster than any other time in human history.  

An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.