August 2009
57 posts
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Dave Pollard: RESILIENCE IS FUTILE (ADAPT AND... →
Dave Pollard is nicely describing the necessity for our societies to adapt and improvise by pointing at the weak spot of the word “resilience”, which is that it implicitly says that systems should manage shocks and bounce back.
Interesting article!
I agree with his critique of the word resilience in some conexts but not others. In some cases it is just bad or not possible to have a...
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The Futurist: Timing the singularity →
An interesting post which gives an overview of the singularity discussion as well as gives some nice illustrations of how to think about it. Really worth reading!
WatchPaul Romer’s radical idea: Charter cities | Video on TED.com
It is sad but probably good that Paul Romer talks about his idea as “a radical idea”. It is basically the same idea as GE are using when they are talking about creating small kiosks to test entrepreneurial ideas outside the main organization. What Romer does is taking the knowledge from economic history and innovation...
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Thoughts connected to autonomous devices
Yes, this continuous automation which causes things around us act on their own will of course create a lot of challenges. Especially since our behavior and social systems is based on the assumption that only humans can do things, and machines are merely dead objects. That is on its way to change…
When I read this title my mind made a connection to something completely different. Ever since...
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Are we ready for the Autonomous Age? →
infoneernet:
Next time you ride an escalator, spare a thought for Bumper Harris – the one-legged chap supposedly employed by London Underground in 1911 to spend all day riding the newly installed escalators at Earl’s Court station to prove to nervous passengers that they were safe.
Today we’re more likely to think of automation as cool than threatening, if we think of it at all. But public...
Geek Squad vs ... vs IT dept →
There is a difference between computer supports. Geek Squad is really different and maybe something to copy for large and generally unhelpful IT Departments.
I think this is becoming increasingly important in the future since computer users will have very different behavior and values compared to the users in the 1970:s who today’s traditional IT departments were designed for.
Appland: How smartphones are transforming our... →
infoneernet:
Sherry Turkle at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies people’s relationship with technology, says the power of the latest cellphones lies in the fact that they are “always on, always on you”. With this capability, she says, the devices effectively become an appendage to our body and mind that plays a role in everything from our social interactions to emotions.
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Academic libraries are undergoing a quiet... →
One of the core purposes of an academic library, part from supporting students, seems (at least according this article) to circle around administering the complex databases and maintaining access rights of expensive and highly protected research databases.
“It’s been a mixed blessing, [with the digital development]” he explains. “Distributing and sharing information is much...
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On storytelling trend
This is a really good point that stories are today more important than facts!
One problem is that it is leading us away from an important aspect. Yes, we are storytelling animals who create meaning and share learnings through stories, but what we often miss is to mention the capability to decode, interpret and extract knowledge and wisdom which is embedded in the stories, or to build knowledge...
“We live in a world where facts are everywhere. If we wanted to know the gross...”
– Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind (via chrbutler) (via infoneernet)
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DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show -... →
The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
This might change a popular assumption that the future of crime fighting will have great...
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Bryce Harrison - Semmelweiss Syndrome: A Barrier... →
An nicely and short written transferal of a (to me very familiar story from Philosophy of Science) illustrating the nature of the resistance to change.
Dr. Semmelweiss was able to conclude that physicians were commingling infection one patient to another through the physicians themselves. His discovery was nothing short of brilliant, he found that by having physicians and other care givers wash...
“For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage...”
– Seth’s Blog: Education at the crossroads
"CO2 Pedometer" Lowers Volvo Group Employees'... →
Great Kerstin (who is a former collegue of mine)!
A really good example of how a small IT innovation can make a huge difference! It is really true that “what gets measured gets done!”
“This is a profound shift in management, the education for much of which focuses...”
– Leadership and Innovation in a Commoditized World - Now, New, Next - HarvardBusiness.org
Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay Before It’s Gone... →
With this backup everyone can have their own Pirate Bay up and running in a few minutes. “The basic website supplied in the torrent is a working site, where you can browse the index. You just need a lot of hardware to run a database of this size at a decent speed. And thanks to openbittorrent.com, you don’t even need a tracker,” the uploader told us.
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The Fallacy Of The Link Economy | paidContent →
The dilemma seems to be:
Historically, the value of those casual browsers was captured by the newspaper because the readers would have to buy a copy. Now all the value gets captured by the aggregator that scrapes the copy and creates a front page that a set of readers choose to scan. And because creating content costs much more scraping it, there is little rational economic reason to create...
Plenty of proof that ads don't support Web music |... →
Interesting article about the problems of the ad-financed music:
Music fans generally refuse to pay to listen online and resent on-site advertising. The hard truth is that to this point, ad-supported music as a standalone business has failed.
FT.com / UK - Welcome to a new world of risk-aware... →
This is an article that is signalling that the concept of Strategic Resilience is coming up on the agenda. Even if many companies explain the changes as environmental effects, some of the changes are dealing with other challenges like the problems of a volatile and risky business environment.
There are hints of a change afoot. This week, for example, Gerard Kleisterlee, chief executive of Philips,...
Planning for the unthinkable; futurist Peter... →
We’ve been so focused on the financial crisis that we’ve neglected to pay attention to other issues, which, if left on the backburner, could upset the status quo. That’s the view of futurist and business strategist Peter Schwartz.
Peter Schwartz talks about e g a possible coming effect on food prices which probably will occur because of the nature of commodity together with increasing...
Mind Hacks: Revisting the 'Hawthorne effect' →
The Hawthorne Effect is famous for showing that people will change their behaviour when observed, or that any change increases productivity, or perhaps that experimenters always influence their participants. It has become one of those legends of psychology that turns out to be not quite what we believe.
Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security -... →
It seems that we are very soon seeing a different agenda concerning climate change and the security policy from the US?
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest. If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming...
Think Again: Twitter | Foreign Policy →
A good and insightful article about the pros and cons (and complexity) of Twitter by EVGENY MOROZOV. His conclusion is that Twitter is a better tool for having creative communication and idea changing with your (virtual or real acquintances) than overthrowing governments.
I agree to a certain extent but only if you look at a specific technology like Twitter. If you look at the web of...
As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become... →
Even if there still is a digital divide, the hype of digital books together with decreasing available resources, the growing need to renew the learning processes and the increasing speed in which information and facts change (at least in some areas) the chances are that schools are now facing a tsunami of change not seen before.
What many teachers see is that the world of the pupils have...
Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing... →
I think many of these results or insights are valid for many other situations as well. People in group seems to behave in a very interesting way on changes in their environment.
Winning the ultimate battle: How humans could end... →
Interesting discussion about if war is our human DNA or not. According to this link research seems to tell it is not… but is it the right question to ask?
War, i e what we mean by war since the last 500 or maybe 100+ years, I would argue is a very different thing than earlier eras of conflict. My reason for thinking that has to do with the vast number of organizations and institutions that...
Parents Not To Blame For Increased Problem... →
The research highlights a different set of challenges for parents compared with 25 years ago. Young people now are reliant on their parents for longer, with higher proportions of 20-24 year olds living with their parents. Many more remain in some kind of education or training into their late teens. In addition, the development of new technology, such as mobile phones and the Internet, has created...
FuturePundit: Psychopath Brain Different In Brain... →
Humanity is by full speed heading towards a future where we are treated and valued differently based on how brain works on a neurophysiological level.
I would suggest that everyone who haven’t read “Brave New World” (Aldous Huxley) do so…
Is Twitter users more innovative than Facebook...
Cosy social networks ‘are stifling innovation’ - tech - 05 August 2009 - New Scientist
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger says this about social networks:
“The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold,”
If I look at the characteristics of my use of different social media technologies Facebook...
WatchWhat the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
View more documents from Marta Kagan. (via What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later)
Comment on Scandinavian welfare success during...
This is an interesting comparison between Scandinavian countries and US and UK in Guardian today, but… there is always a but… it is written based on the effects from a rather short period of time.
According to liberal thinkers, Scandinavian countries should have drowned in the current economic crisis with their bloated public sectors and a nanny-state mentality that stifles individual...
Future of the book is not a "container question" →
Could this explanation, which touches upon the future of books, be written so even book people understand the Copernican shift digital technology is bringing to a world that for 500+ years (and maybe much more) have been thinking about spreading information and stories as fundamentally a broadcasting process?
infoneernet:
Reading at its core is a consumption activity that at it’s best is a...
