The newest adopter of 3D printing isn't some hobbyist in a basement — it's NASA.
The agency is already building some of its customized spacecraft and instrument parts using 3D printing, and someday soon, astronauts might even make tools and replacement by 3D printing them in space.
MuSIASEM is an open framework able to take into account the economic, environmental, social, cultural, technical and political dimensions in an integrated analysis, accounting for different flows such as monetary, energy, waste or water. As a result, ultimately we can get “congruent” relations among the different set of variables.
The results of the MuSIASEM are sets of georreferenced vectorial indicators that are easy to understand, and this is one of the strengths of the method. But it is build on strong and heavy theoretical blocks. Here we summarize its roots.
Complex System Theory
From CST, MuSIASEM has taken concepts that are useful to deal with the definition of the societies as part of a broader hierarchical system and with the different levels of it that are relevant for the analysis of the sustainability.
Hierarchical levels of a Socio-Ecosystem. By Cristina Madrid.
Under the CST perspective, the Societal Metabolism is a notion used to characterize the processes of energy and material transformation in a society that are necessary for its continued existence, sustainability or Autopoiesis. In order to maintain this, those transformations cannot overpass the thresholds posed by the Ecosystem Metabolism. Both, societies and ecosystems are levels of a Hierarchical System. In them, there are relations that have to be maintained within and among the levels, including the relations that control the biophysical transformations, or metabolic patterns. The metabolic patterns of the social level of a hierarchy depend on its internal and external relations. They pose internal and external constraints to the autopoesis of the system.
Bioeconomics
From Bioeconomics, MuSIASEM has used the flow-fund model of Georgescu-Roegen. With it, MuSIASEM is able to deal with the degrees of complexity given by the different meanings a resource has in each of the levels of analysis and by the relation between them.
In MuSIASEM, flow is a semantically open definition for elements that come into or out of the relevant system level during the analytical representation. They give information about what the system level(s) does to maintain itself. Fund is a definition used for those elements that remain there during the complete time of the representation. They are the components of the system that must be maintained.
The world’s largest concentrations of slums exist in the “global south:” Africa, Asia, and Latin America; places where urbanization has not led to economic development, and are characterized by poor sanitation, crowded living conditions, low quality structures, and populations vulnerable to disease and natural disasters.
In this new work, Michel continues to propose powerful ideas that not only demonstrate his capacity for synthesis, but more importantly, his capacity to articulate ideas that facilitate points of convergence between broad sectors that are sympathetic to the ideas of production based on the commons.
Michel Bauwens sent us a work that will soon be published, in which he summarizes and clarifies what he sees as the possible evolution of the means of monetization in a world in which the P2P mode of production has gained strength.
[D]emonetization will be a good thing in many sectors under a regime of civic domination, we will also need new forms of monetization, and restore the feedback loop between value creation and value capture.
Michel Bauwens
Netarchic capitalism, the direct result of recentralization, has established a new model of value, in which capital extracts it as an intermediary in the creation of platforms for P2P interaction between individuals, gradually renouncing its role of directly controlling information production.
So, cognitive capitalism can be said to be suffering a severe “value crisis,” in which the use value of production grows exponentially, but its exchange value grows linearly, and is almost exclusively captured by capital, giving rise to exacerbated forms of labor exploitation, especially with respect to the new informational proletariat:
It could be said that this creates a sort of “hyper-neoliberalism”… in classical neoliberalism, wages stagnate; in hyper-neoliberalism, salaried workers are replaced by isolated, and mostly precarious, freelancers.
For example, Bauwens cites preliminary studies that indicate that the average hourly wage of “digital workers” doesn’t exceed two dollars an hour, citing as a prototype of this phenomenon aggregation services like TaskRabbit, in which workers can’t communicate with each other, unlike clients.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have a slight obsession with 3D printers. I wish I had one to play with! But this article tells us that the next step in 3D printing is here with multiple materials and textures. That's a huge step forward! Read on!
The world's first multi-material full-colour 3D printer has been launched by Stratasys, the owner of the MakerBot range of printers.
It features “triple-jetting” technology that combines droplets of three base materials, reducing the need for separate print runs and painting.
The company said the Objet500 Connex3 Color Mutli-material 3D Printer would be a “significant time-saver” for designers and manufacturers.
It will cost about $330,000 (£200,000).
By incorporating traditional 2D printer colour mixing, using cyan, magenta and yellow, the manufacturer says multi-material objects can be printed in hundreds of colours.
While the base materials are rubber and plastic, they can be combined and treated to create end products of widely varying flexibility and rigidity, transparency and opacity, the company said.
This is a pre-publication article. It is provided for researcher browsing and quick reference.The final published version of the article is available at:
When the world recession in 2008 began, the economy wars, which had beendormant for two decades, flared again. After thirty years of the culture wars, this came as a bit of a relief.
