Daniel C. Wahl: Design for Human and Planetary Health – A Holistic Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability
Architecture, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, InnovationPhi Beta Iota: One of the most useful important PhDs done in modern times.
See Also:
Stephen E. Arnold: A Non-Profit Search Engine
Data, Design, Knowledge, SoftwareA Not-For-Profit Search Engine? That’s So Crazy It Just Might Work
The Common Search Project has a simple and straightforward mission statement. They want a nonprofit search engine, an alternative to the companies currently running the Internet (ahem, Google.) They are extremely polite in their venture, but also firmly invested in three qualities for the search engine that they intend to build and run: openness, transparency, and independence. The core values include,
“Radical transparency. Our search results must be explainable and reproducible. All our code is open source and results are generated only using publicly available data. Transparency also extends to our governance, finances and day-to-day operations.
Independence. No single person, company or special interest must be able to influence the order of our search results to their benefit. …
Public service. We want to build and operate a free service targeted at a large, mainstream audience.”
Daniel Araya: The Promise of Bitcoin (and Blockchain) – An Interview with Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Data, Design, Governance, Innovation, MoneyThe Promise of Bitcoin: An Interview With Andreas M. Antonopoulos
My recent interview with Andreas M. Antonopoulos, information security expert and tech-entrepreneur, and the author of “Mastering Bitcoin”.
EXTRACT:
2. Bitcoin is simultaneously a currency, a financial asset, and a technology protocol. Underlying bitcoin is the blockchain, a distributed public ledger. For people who are not intimately familiar with either bitcoin or blockchain, could you briefly explain what these technologies consist of?
The blockchain is a distributed database. The magic of bitcoin comes from sharing control over that distributed database through a consensus mechanism called “Proof of Work”. This ensures that no one is in control of bitcoin and that it operates based on predictable rules.
Jean Lievens: Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures – Entropy and Societal Change
Design, Economics/True Cost, ResilienceEntropy calculation to help understand societal change
Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, The University of Sheffield
A missing ingredient in our understanding of human influence on global environmental change is the quantitative measure of the energy interactions of societies operating under varied technological and geographical conditions. This project seeks to employ the archaeological and historical data for the comparative investigation of energy use in different societies.
The project lies at the interfaces between physics, archaeology and ecology and it will be addressed by developing models to calculate entropy generation rates within the case study systems. Entropy generation (as opposed to energy use) allows the “quality” or “usefulness” of different energy resources to be measured. Learn more.
Jason Livesay: Tiny Villages – Horizontally Scaling Society
Architecture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, ManufacturingTiny Villages: Horizontally Scaling Society
Cloud computing is about horizontally (as opposed to vertically) scaling systems. Instead of building one super-powerful server, you create many inexpensive servers that each contain a small part of the system. There are multiple advantages to “scaling out” rather than “scaling up”, such as incrementally improved capacity with little or no downtime and less expensive, more maintainable servers.
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Marcin Jakubowski: Open Food — Hacking the Farm
01 Agriculture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Manufacturing, MaterialsHacking the farm with low-cost, open source tool designs
Don Watkins, opensource.com, 15 February 2016
Phi Beta Iota: MUST READ. Kudos to Don Watkins for the questions and opensource.com for paying attention outside the IT arena. This is a very positive development.