The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Indispensable Librarian [57 Slides]
Mary Ellen Bates
Sep 11, 2014
What's the value of priceless? Special libraries return $5.43 for every $1 invested.
See Also:
Mary Ellen Bates @ Phi Beta Iota
Cliff Notes Below the Fold
Continue reading “Mary Ellen Bates: The Indispensable Librarian”
Bilingual Search Engine YaSabe Sees Growth through Word of Mouth and Media Partnerships
The article on Elevation DC titled Herndon-Based Bilingual Search Engine Expands Reach covers the growth of YaSabe, the Spanish and English search engine helping Spanish-speaking Americans find the information they need. The search engine actually finds data that is English and translates it into Spanish before tagging it. The article states,
“Its categories are geared toward the information Spanish speakers might need: bilingual service providers, jobs for people fluent in more than one language, 18 different types of Latin cuisine. Azim Tejani, the company’s executive vice president, says that 20 percent of YaSabe’s traffic comes directly to the site, 50 percent comes from search engines where users search for terms like “pedicura” instead of “pedicure” and the remaining traffic comes from its partnerships with media companies serving Spanish-speaking Ameri[cans].”
Tejani is also quoted in the article as saying that YaSabe is mobile-centered as opposed to web-centered. According to Tejani, some 30% of YaSabe users rely mainly on their mobile phones to access the internet. He credits the growth of YaSabe both with community guides as well as strengthened relationships with Spanish-language media partners such as Univision and Mundo Hispanico. Univision in particular has seen great success since YaSabe began running the TV network’s search engines in 2013.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
An Airbnb or Uber for the Electricity Grid?
How DERs prepare the power sector to evolve into a sharing economy platform
As Thomas Friedman reported in the New York Times, the shared economy is booming, with companies like Uber and Airbnb continuing to disrupt the incumbent taxi service and hotel sectors. The Ubers and Airbnbs of the world tap the huge value of underutilized assets and create millions of dollars of value for users in the process. Shared economy companies unbundle existing assets and enable value exchange out of those assets, with close to zero marginal capital cost since the users themselves own the actual physical assets, whether a car or a home. Could the electricity grid be next to go the way of a sharing economy?
For more than a century, the electric grid has relied almost exclusively on centralized infrastructure, such as large power plants and long-distance transmissions lines. But distributed energy resources (DERs)—and the customers buying, installing, and using them—are changing the economic landscape for the power sector. Energy efficiency, demand response, distributed generation such as rooftop solar, distributed storage such as batteries, smart thermostats, and more are poised to become the front lines of a sharing economy revolution for the grid. Shared economy solutions will help to increase asset utilization rates and improve consumer and overall system economics, just as they have for other sectors.
1. Define what a “Smarter City” means to you
2. Convene a stakeholder group to co-create a specific Smarter City vision; and establish governance and a credible decision-making process
3. Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources and expertise
4. Establish the policy framework
5. Populate a roadmap that can deliver the vision
6. Put the financing in place
7. Enable communities and engage with informality: how to make “Smarter” a self-sustaining process
12 simple technologies for cities that are Smart, open and fair
So how do we design Smart City systems that employ technology to make cities more successful, resilient and efficient; in a way that distributes resources and creates opportunities more fairly than today?
One answer to that question is that the infrastructures and institutions of such cities should be open to citizens and businesses: accessible, understandable, adaptable and useful.
1.Broadband connectivity . 2. Cloud computing . 3. Mobile and Smart phones . 4. Social media . 5. The touchscreen . 6. Open Source software . 7. Intelligent hardware . 8. Open APIs . 9. Open Data . 10. Open Standards . 11. Local and virtual currencies and trading systems . 12. Identity stores
Focus on error and illusion, need to deal with uncertainty. A great deal of error arises from reductionism.
See Also:
2011 Edgar Morin on YouTube (12:23): Edgar Morin: Seven Complex Lessons in Education
The Factory of the Future Will Be Shaped by the Internet of Things
Andrew Dugenske, Alain Louchez
Manufacturing.net, August 2014
Around the globe, intelligent and pervasive industrial automation has been catapulted in recent years to a top national or regional priority. Known by different names, e.g., “Advanced Manufacturing”, “Smart Manufacturing”, “Industry 4.0” or “Factories of the Future” to highlight a few, these initiatives all bear the same characteristics, i.e., transforming the manufacturing process from a patchwork of isolated silos to a nimble and seamless whole fully integrated with the downstream and upstream production environment.
There is, in fact, a close link between modern manufacturing and the advent of the Internet of Things.
I am sending you pretty inspirational paper, “Living Roadmap for Complex Systems Science: The French roadmap for complex systems: March 2008, The Complex System Society«. It is written in scientific language. I am sometimes thinking about your concepts and try to figure out how to translate them from systemic presentation to complex one. The difference may seem scholastic, but I wish to point out that this first impression is wrong. There is much deeper reason which relates not only to consistency of your concepts with the nature of the problem, but it may also contribute to essential simplification and so make an important step towards possibility for operationalisation. System theory is appropriate tool for dealing with terribly complicated challenges like building an airplane or sending mission to moon. Your challenge is more complex than complicated; complexity involves another type of elements, who are not complicated but wicked, involving human and social (political, cultural) factors. You may wish to surf the web for Cynefin framework (by Snowden) which nicely explains this.
PDF (22 Pages): CSS 2008 (French) Roadmap for Complex Systems
