Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 1685 – Public Intelligence Blog

“Africa in Review 2013, Part II: Unity and Economic Development Essential for Genuine Progress”

From Malawi to Niger imperialist states continue to hamper sovereignty and peace

President Joyce Banda of the Southern African state of Malawi is currently facing a crisis quite similar to her predecessor, the late Bingu wa Mutharikia, in that western capitalist governments are consistently attempting to influence the policies of African countries. Under President Mutharika the so-called donor states withheld assistance to his government resulting in hyperinflation, food shortages and political unrest.

Continue reading “4th Media: African Development versus Debt, Rule of Law versus Western Subversion”

2013/12/252013/12/25

Jean Lievens: What are the Economics of the Creative Economy (New York City Specifically — YouTube)

Cultural Intelligence

Graduate Center geographer David Harvey, author of Rebel Cities; Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City; and Seth W. Pinsky, former president of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, debate the economic realities of New York's creative and knowledge-based industries. Adam Davidson, host of NPR's Planet Money, moderates.

2013/12/252013/12/25

Sepp Hasslberger: Hand-Held Ingredient Scanner

IO Sense-Making

I have no idea whether this is real or not, but the idea is certainly neat… advancing the idea of the tricorder, the universal instrument the heroes of Star Trek always had with them…

Buyer beware – it could be one of those things that get funded never to be heard of again. If it's real, we will know fairly soon. A few months of wait.

Next Big Future Thing

$250 handheld laser spectrometer food scaner will connect to your smartphone and servers in the cloud to tell you what allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, ingredients are in your food

Continue reading “Sepp Hasslberger: Hand-Held Ingredient Scanner”

2013/12/252013/12/25

Rickard Falkvinge: File-Sharing Hunt Violates Human Rights (Per European Court)

Civil Society, Commerce, Ethics, Government

Reminder 2: Hunt For File-Sharers Violates Fundamental Human Rights (Says The European Court Of Human Rights)

Copyright Monopoly: Happy Yule, everybody! In our series of reminders about important talkbacks, we’ve come to the reminder that the act of hunting for people who share culture and knowledge online violates their fundamental human rights, as doing so wiretaps private communications.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: File-Sharing Hunt Violates Human Rights (Per European Court)”

2013/12/242013/12/24

Jean Lievens: R. C. Smith Alternative Philosophy of Social Change – On the Basic Income Law, Economic Democracy, Participatory Economics, and the Importance of the Commons in the 21st Century

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

On the Basic Income Law, Economic Democracy, Participatory Economics, and the Importance of the Commons in the 21st Century

R. D. Smith

Introduction

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the privilege of engaging with a number of people both in formal discussions and on Heathwood’s comment boards regarding a range of issues. These issues span from the structural problems of capitalism and the idea of the basic income law through to an alternative philosophy of social change, the questionable meaning of ‘social progress’, and potential social-economic alternatives. The following article, which I’ve broken down into a few different sections, carries forward these discussions in light of arguments made in: Gunn & Wilding, ‘Occupy as Mutual Recognition’, ‘Revolutionary or Less-Than-Revolutionary Recognition’; Gunn, Wilding & Smith, ‘Alternative horizons – understanding Occupy’s politics’; Michael Ott, ‘Something’s Missing: A Study of the Dialectic of Utopia in the theories of Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch’; as well as R.C. Smith, ‘A series of essays on an alternative philosophy of social change’, ‘In defense of Occupy’s politics’, ‘Russell Brand, the question of revolution and why we need more than an abstract, grand narrative of social change‘.

I. One of the most fundamental philosophical problems of the 21^st Century

II. Economic Democracy and Participatory Economics: Complimentary systems in the transitory, historical process of societal change?

IIII. The basic income law

III. Economic Democracy and Participatory

IIII. Economics: A question of implementation

V. ‘Social progress’ is not limited to the horizon of capitalism

Read full essay online.

PDF (17 Pages): RC Smith Alternative Philosophy of Social Change – On the Basic Income Law, Economic Democracy, Participatory Economics, and the Importance of the Commons in the 21st Century

2013/12/242013/12/24

Howard Rheingold: Information Overload

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency

I've scooped before about Ann Blair's book of pre-modern info-overload — and what was done about. This is a nice short musing about today's information overload discourse.

Information Overload, Past and Present

Dan Cohen

The end of this year has seen much handwringing over the stress of information overload: the surging, unending streams, the inexorable decline of longer, more intermittent forms such as blogs, the feeling that our online presence is scattered and unmanageable. This worry spike had me scurrying back to Ann Blair’s terrific history of pre-modern information stress, Too Much to Know. Blair notes how every era has dealt with similar feelings, and how people throughout the ages have come up with different solutions:

. . . . . . . .

Blair identifies four “S’s of text management” from the past that we still use today: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing. She also notes the history of alternative solutions to information overload that are the equivalent of deleting one’s Twitter account: Descartes and other philosophers, for instance, simply deciding to forget the library so they could start anew. Other to-hell-with-it daydreams proliferated too:

Read full post.

Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: Information Overload”

2013/12/242013/12/24