Culture – Page 24 – Public Intelligence Blog

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

A Pre-Fab Sustainable Village To Create Smart Growth

EXTRACT:

The community, Rimbunan Kaseh, is in the Malaysian state of Pahang and it runs off energy supplies that are largely solar-generated, supplemented by biomass and hydropower. Its agriculture system grows both animals and crops: A four-level aquaculture system nurtures farmed tilapia–a high-protein fish–and then the wastewater is filtered and put to use to irrigate grain fields, trees, and other crops. The system has proven robust enough to create food to feed the residents and then some, providing villagers with an additional $400 to $650 of income each month.

Read full article with photographs.

2012/08/052012/08/05

Robert Steele: Two Hour Radio Interview Now Online

#OSE Open Source Everything, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, SmartPlanet

Robert David Steele Former CIA The Open-Source Everything Manifesto Cohost Ted Torbich

Open Source Everything — Electoral Reform – extraterrestrials (At Very End)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:35 — 24.0MB) | Embed

Hosted by Jeffery Pritchett

Co-Host Ted Torbich of the Stench of Truth radio show

http://www.thestenchoftruth.com/home/

The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust by Robert David Steele and Howard Bloom

We the People Reform Coalition . Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial) (20)

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2012/08/012012/08/01

Mini-Me: It’s Official – Open Source Everything is a Religion in Sweden

Culture

Huh?

In Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V we trust: File-sharing made an official Swedish religion

And lo’ they shared the files, and ’twas good. Anti-piracy efforts may soon be labeled as religious persecution as the Swedish government has apparently recognized file sharing as an official religion.

Meet Philosophy student Isak Gerson, who is the mind behind the Church of Kopimism. Gerson founded the Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010, and filed a request with authorities to officially accept his belief system in order for Kopimism to avoid persecution.

It took three request over the past year to finally convince the Administrative Services Agency to recognize the church. According to Torrent Freak, after the first two attempts, the Church was asked to formalize its way of prayer in order to be recognized.

Koptimism roughly translates to ‘copy me’. The tenets are simple: Control-C and Control-V are sacred symbols. Kopimists believe that the copying and sharing information is ethically right, and knowledge should not be hoarded. Information’s value increases as it is shared. Remixing content is a sacred kind of copying the Church terms ‘Remix Spirit’.

The religion has a priest class called the Oparnas, who exemplify Kopimist virtues and assist others to follow the Kopimist path. Those that wish to become part of the Kopimist faith must undergo a rite of disclosing their personal data to the organization, profess faith in information and copying and download the logo from the site.

Currently, the Church has around 3,000 official members, tripling from 1,0000 in the last half of the year. Though the Swedish state has recognized Kopimism, copyright infringement is still not legally permitted. Isak Gerson said in an interview, “there’s still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”

Tip of the Hat to Super-Blogger David Ing in Google Circles.

See Also:

TWITTER HASH: #openall

ARCHIVE OF DAILY HIGHLIGHTS: http://tinyurl.com/OSE-ALL

ROOT POST: http://tinyurl.com/OSE-ROOT

THE BOOK: http://tinyurl.com/OSE-Steele

THE PERSON: http://tinyurl.com/Steele2012

2012/07/27

Alex Reid: On the Necessitiy of Digital Humanities

Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

on the necessity of digital humanities centers | Digital Research for Humanities | Scoop.it

on the necessity of digital humanities centers

In The Chronicle, Williman Pannapacker writes about the importance of receiving digital humanities training.

In The Chronicle, Williman Pannapacker writes about the importance of receiving digital humanities training, which he summarizes in a tweet: no dh, no interview. At the end of this piece he backs away from this provocation, writing “even though I've been excited about the digital humanities since my first visit to the summer institute, I want to urge job candidates: Don't become a DH'er out of fear that you won't get a position if you don't.” And I would certainly agree with that, though it always comes back to this matter of defintion. Even in the narrowest of defintions of DH, the field is beginning to spin out a range of sub-specializations. Pannapacker compares the current interest in DH to the focus on “theory” in the nineties, but mostly as a cautionary tale. Indeed DH has had an ambivalent (at best) relationship with theory, which makes sense in a way as two competing methods, which might become complementary (and may be complementary in some scholars' work) but are largely seen as incongruous at this point. Of course the primary difference between DH and other humanities methods is the infrastructure required to support the endeavor. As Pannapacker points out:

Continue reading “Alex Reid: On the Necessitiy of Digital Humanities”

2012/07/23

Mini-Me: NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

Academia, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Idiocy

Huh?

NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — The NCAA crippled Penn State football for years to come and practically tore Joe Paterno's name out of the record books Monday, erasing 14 years of victories and imposing an unprecedented $60 million fine and other punishment over the child sexual abuse scandal.

“Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people,” NCAA President Mark Emmert declared in announcing the penalties.

The governing body of college sports shredded what was left of the Hall of Fame coach's legacy – the sanctions cost Paterno 111 wins and his standing as the most successful coach in the history of big-time college football – while dealing a severe blow to the university's gold-plated gridiron program.

The NCAA ordered Penn State to sit out the postseason for four years, slashed the number of scholarships it can award and placed football on probation, all of which will make it difficult for the Nittany Lions to compete at the sport's highest level.

Raising the specter of an exodus of athletes, the NCAA said current or incoming football players at Penn State are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.

For a university that always claimed to hold itself to a higher standard – for decades, Paterno preached “success with honor” – Monday's announcement completed a stunning fall from grace.

Read full article with video and photos.

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2012/07/232012/07/23

Michel Bauwens: Amplify Brooklyn – Designing A Sustainable Economy At The Community Level

Culture, Economics/True Cost, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy

Amplify Brooklyn: Designing A Sustainable Economy At The Community Level

EXTRACT:

This fall, graduate students in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons, in New York City, worked with Penin and her co-director, Eduardo Staszowski, to create Amplify, an exhibit currently on display at Brooklyn’s Arts at Renaissance, which demonstrates existing and potential design solutions to local issues related to everyday experience. The project’s aim was to re-think service design in terms of sustainability. Duane Bray, Sarah Soffer and Tom Eich from the design firm Ideo facilitated the Amplify workshop.

Read full article.

2012/07/232012/07/23

Jacques Ellul: On Technology and Human Morality

Culture, Economics/True Cost, P2P / Panarchy, SmartPlanet

French Historian Jacques Ellul Talking — Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time

“People see him as just a bringer of bad news, but the two most important things in his writing aren’t taken into account. One is the comprehensiveness of his explanation of the technological phenomenon. The second is his powerful moral concern. Those two aspects of Ellul’s thought are not as influential as I’d like them to be.”

“Technology becomes our fate only when we treat it as sacred,” says Darrell J. Fasching, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of South Florida. “And we tend to do that a lot.”

Via Manuel Pinto, Artur Alves

Read full article.

EXTRACT:

His central argument is that we’re mistaken in thinking of technology as simply a bunch of different machines. In truth, Ellul contended, technology should be seen as a unified entity, an overwhelming force that has already escaped our control. That force is turning the world around us into something cold and mechanical, and—whether we realize it or not—transforming human beings along with it.

Phi Beta Iota: All of these authors overlook the role of corruption — the lack of integrity and intelligence among decision-makers allocating financial resources. The fact is that technology is like complex financial instruments: a means of defrauding various parties for the benefit of the few. This is one reason why Open Source Everything must apply to all technologies as well as all financial dealings.

See Also:

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage, 1967)

Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (Vintage, 1973)

Jacques Ellus, The Subversion of Christianity (Eerdmans, 1986)

Jacques Ellul, Reprint: Money and Power (Wipf & Stock, 2009)

Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (Peter Smith, 1999)

Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New Catalyst, 2007)

John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Vintage, 1993)

Robert Steele, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust (North Atlantic Books, Evolver Editions, 2012)

Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (Anchor, 1996)