The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
ECUADOR INITIATIVE: Transition Proposals Toward a Commons-Oriented Economy and Society
Sponsored by the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Ecuador, carried out by the Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society.
Michel Bauwens
PPT (8 Slides): Bauwens on Ecuador Open Commons
Eight Slides Below the Line for Direct Viewing
ECUADOR INITIATIVE: Transition Proposals Toward a Commons-Oriented Economy and Society
Sponsored by the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Ecuador, carried out by the Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society.
John Restakis and Michel Bauwens on the FLOK Society Transition Project in Ecuador
My talk for the democracy conference in Amsterdam, Crosstalk 2013 | Borders to Cross, on the p2p transition process in Ecuador.
It is followed by the first installment of a diary by co-researcher John Restakis.
Watch the video here:
John Restakis writes:
“It is now six weeks since I arrived in Ecuador as part of an international team of researchers and activists that are working with the government to radically transform the nation’s economic model.
John Restakis
In what may be one of the most innovative change programs in Latin America, the administration of Rafael Correa is proposing to transition from a neo-liberal, free market economic model to what they are calling a social knowledge economy based on a combination of commons-based economics and the promotion of open knowledge systems. It’s heady stuff and the project is placing Ecuador at the forefront of global efforts to advance human knowledge as a commons and to apply this knowledge to the creation of a new economic model based on the commons, co-operative models of production, open-source systems of sharing, and free access to information.
Continue reading “Ecuador Initiative: Going Open Source Everything”
Isaac Wilder – The Internet is for Everyone
Internet Society New York Chapter President David Solomonoff interviews Isaac Wilder and Marcus Eagan of the Free Network Foundation at the FreedomBox Hackfest at Columbia Law School NYC on Feb 18 2012
http://freenetwork foundation.org
gfdl isoc-ny.org 2012
PUNKCAST#2004-03
Webcast support: NYI http://nyi.net
Eben Moglen – Freedom in the Cloud
ISOC-NY1710-02 Eben Moglen's “Freedom in The Cloud' presentation at NYU Feb 5 2010.
A conversation with Kevin Kelly
You have a choice dear reader: spend 3 seconds scanning this blogpost, or spend the full 1:11:28 minutes listening to the interview John Brockman did with technology philosopher and founding editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly.
The interview touches upon the nature of technology, big data, surveillance society, money as a medium, techno-literacy and the question whether the universe is analog or digital.
The video is best experienced as radio, or you can read the transcript here.
Huh?
Development data: how accurate are the figures?
The numbers we use in development, and most of what we think of as facts, are actually estimates. It's time for a data revolution
Claire Melarned
The Guardian, 31 January 2014
You know a lot less than you think you do. Around 1.22 billion people live on less than a $1.25 (75p) day? Maybe, maybe not. Malaria deaths fell by 49% in Africa between 2000 and 2013? Perhaps. Maternal mortality in Africa fell from 740 deaths per 100,000 births in 2000 to 500 per 100,000 in 2010? Um … we're not sure.
These numbers, along with most of what we think of as facts in development, are actually estimates. We have actual numbers on maternal mortality for just 16% of all births, and on malaria for about 15% of all deaths. For six countries in Africa, there is basically no information at all.
In the absence of robust official systems for registering births and deaths, collecting health or demographic data, or the many other things that are known by governments about people in richer countries, the household survey is the foundation on which most development data is built. Numbers from the surveys are used to estimate almost all the things we think we know – from maternal mortality to school attendance to income levels. Household surveys are run by governments or by external agencies such as the World Bank, USAid or Unicef.
But it's a shaky foundation. First, to make the survey representative of the population, you need to know a lot about the population to make a good sampling frame. This knowledge comes from a population census. But only around 12 of the 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have held a census in the past 10 years. So there might be large population groups missing – especially in countries undergoing rapid change. There are likely to be big urban informal settlements, for example, which are not included in the most recent census, and therefore don't exist for sampling purposes. They also don't happen very often – 21 African countries haven't had a survey in the past seven years.
And they're not all done in the same way, which makes comparing countries or combining data from different countries very difficult – and illustrates how hard it is to know the “real” number. There are, for example, seven perfectly acceptable ways of asking questions in surveys about how much people eat. A recent experiment by World Bank researchers in Tanzania, comparing results from the different methods, found that estimates of how many people in the country are hungry varied from just under 20% to nearly 70%, depending on the method chosen.
A Great Alternative to RebelMouse: Curate Your Social Media Hub with Pressly
Pressly is a new web app which allows you to create a social hub, similar to what you can do with RebelMouse or Tint, where you can aggregate and curate your favorite content from your social media channels, web site as well as from your fans content.
The app can aggregate and curate content coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo and from any RSS feed.
You can easily search for specifick keywords, hashtags and users across any of your “connected” feeds and save any specific search for future use. You can also preview the results of any search and curate the items that you want to curate and publish in your hub in real-time or automatically.
Similarly to its growing number of competitors Pressly automatically generates a social hub that can be easily viewed across web, tablets and smartphones and that it's very easy to navigate.
Differently than RebelMouse, the content aggregated is not just excerpted or simply pointed to, but it is actually imported, stripped of anything outside the original text and images and presented in a new clean and highly readable format.
