The Economist recently published this insightful article entitled” Six Degrees of Mobilisation: To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?” The notion, six degrees of separation, comes from Stanley Milgram’s [small world] experiment in the 1960s which found that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people in the US. Last year, Facebook found that users on the social network were separated by an average of 4.7 hops. The Economist thus asks the following, fascinating question:
Mindmapping is a very serious and well researched subject, or art … or something . Whatever it is a map of the mind is definately something to be valued and this ‘instructionalicious' guide is no exception. Allow this infographic to simultaneously blow and map your mind.
Phi Beta Iota: Tens of billions of dollars are being spent on covert surveillance including the recording of all emails, telephone conversations, and other forms of exchange, but most of this is not being processed. Worse, it is not being processed toward making sense in the public interest. It is one thing to focus on the needle in the haystack threat warning. It is quite another to focus on harnessing the distributed intelligence of the public. That will be the next big leap for “national intelligence.”
Released on 11.29.11, http://internetRISING.net is a digi-documentary investigating the evolving relationships between the Internet and collective consciousness of humanity. It provokes many questions about ancient and modern paradoxes of life, its pleasures and pains… and the gray area contrasts in between – but most of all it is meant to be an inspiring conversation starter
“”The premise is pretty straightforward: There are plenty of passionate, driven people who want to make cool ideas and projects happen. Access to resources (especially, money) is often a large barrier to actualizing them. So why not create physical locations that don’t require money as a chief organizing energy source, where enthusiastic entrepreneurs, artists, designers and other creatives can come together and prototype their dreams?
The way I previously described the flavor of it was:
the superhero school. a center for disruptive innovation. continuous learning zone. collective intelligence. live/work startup incubator. community center. hackerspace. makerlab. autonomous zone. permaculture and sustainable food production. cooperatively owned communications infrastructure. resilience. r&d lab. a place for creative troublemakers.
The idea wants to happen, so without waiting for conditions to be ‘perfect’ to start, we’ve decided to just go ahead and help build it.
Stephanie Hamilton is part of something larger than herself. She's part of a computer program.
The 38-year-old resident of Kingston, Jamaica, recently began performing small tasks assigned to her by an algorithm running on a computer in Berkeley, California. That software, developed by a startup called MobileWorks, represents the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts.
By assigning such tasks to people in emerging economies, MobileWorks hopes to get good work for low prices. It uses software to closely control the process, increasing accuracy by having multiple workers perform every task. According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to “behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings.”
For years I've known people who gave away their professional services as a gift, explicitly encouraging (though not requiring) gifts in return to allow them to continue their work. I've also loved the idea of “paying it forward” – enjoying as a gift what one has received from others and still giving them money so that people in the future can receive such gifts.
I've also known that the “gift economy” is already a gigantic (though seldom acknowledged) part of the overall economy of the world. When children come of age they do not receive a bill from their parents for “services rendered”. Countless home cooked meals, mowed lawns, and love are neither traded nor paid for. Neighbors and strangers regularly “lend a hand” to each other, donate to causes and volunteer in their communities. Invisible in the midst of all this, plants pump out oxygen for us, and we exhale carbon dioxide for them, without any dollars moving from hand to leaf or leaf to hand.
For hundreds of thousands of years gift economies have formed the foundation of families, friendships, tribes and communities. Generosity, kindness, love and gratitude have been the fabric of belonging and the sources of untold abundance. Reputation and power equity have been guardians of the web of interdependence – relational feedback loops that minimize freeloading and hoarding that can be toxic to community. As gifts move through the community, its true wealth grows – not only the common wealth of shared resources and mutuality but also the individual wealth of reputation, appreciation and richness of life.
Laid over this profusion of gifting is the logic of exchange – you give me this and I give you that of equal value – and the abstraction we call money that enables us to expand beyond tit-for-tat barter and relationship-bound exchanges. The less intimacy we have with the people and life around us, the more we need money to ensure proper balance of giving and receiving. But a shadow of this great gift is that the more we use money, the less intimacy we need with the people and life around us.
Many Links and Posting by Charles Eisenstein on Gift Circles Below the Line.
Here’s the scene: you’re traveling, and you walk into a little restaurant and the menu is entirely in a language you don’t understand, without pictures. You’ve got a couple of choices. You can leave, and try to find a place with English translations. You can try to hack your way through a conversation with the waiter, who also doesn’t speak your language. Or, you can point randomly at the menu and live with the consequences.
Well, in the future there will be another, better, answer. Live, realtime translation built into your glasses. Enter: Project Glass. British hacker and DIYer Will Powell has built a pair of glasses that can (albeit roughly) project a translation of your conversation onto your glasses. Here’s what it looks like:
