Category: Innovation

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Howard Rheingold: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes – Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective

Innovation, Knowledge
Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold

How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective

by

“A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

“The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts,” wrote James Webb Young in his famous 1939 5-step technique for creative problem-solving, “becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.”But just how does one acquire those vital cognitive customs? That’s precisely what science writer Maria Konnikova explores inMastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (UK; public library) — an effort to reverse-engineer Holmes’s methodology into actionable insights that help develop “habits of thought that will allow you to engage mindfully with yourself and your world as a matter of course.”

Phi Beta Iota:  Clarity, Diversity, Integrity.

See Also:

INTELLIGENCE with INTEGRITY: Enabling Hybrid Public Governance with Open-Source Decision-Support

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

 

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Rickard Falkvinge: Four More Reasons Open File Sharing is a Virtual Public Library

Access, Culture, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Software
Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

Four More Reasons The Pirate Bay Is Effectively A Public Library – And A Great One

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 06:57 AM PST

Infopolicy:  File sharing fulfills the exact same need and purpose as public libraries did when they first appeared, and is met with the exact same resistance – even in the same words. This article follows the previous observation that The Pirate Bay is the world’s most efficient public library.

Zacqary Adam Green’s piece comparing The Pirate Bay to the New York Public Library the other day was spot on, and we’ve seen it travel a lot around the world – in excess of 3,000 shares and counting. File sharing (and The Pirate Bay) is the most efficient public library ever invented, and its invention is a quantum leap for civilization as such. Imagine every human being having 24/7 access to humanity’s collective knowledge and culture!

Moreover, it’s not even a pipe dream that needs to be funded with forty gazillion eurodollars. All the technology has already been developed, all the infrastructure has already been rolled out, and the tools already distributed. All we have to do to realize this is, frankly, to remove the ban on using it.

In the book The case for copyright reform (download here), we can read the following:

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SchwartzReport: Growing Food in Desert with Solarized Seawater — AND Stabilizes Sea Level

Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, Resilience

Growing food in the desert: is this the solution to the world's food crisis?

Philipp Saumweber is creating a miracle in the barren Australian outback, growing tonnes of fresh food. So why has he fallen out with the pioneering environmentalist who invented the revolutionary system?

Jonathan Margolis

The Observer, Saturday 24 November 2012

Desert blooms: Philipp Saumweber, the founder and CEO of Sundrop, with a tray of his “perfect” produce. Photograph: Jonathan Margolis for the Observer

The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.

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Rickard Falkvinge: PayRight to Replace CopyRight?

Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge
Rickard Falkvinge

PayRight: A CopyRight / Patent Reform Proposal to Make Piracy Obsolete

Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.

The full proposal is available here, but at 35 pages it’s a lengthy read. I’ll do my best to sum it up here.

Erik Zoltan
Erik Zoltan is the mastermind behind the Payright System; I only served as a contributing editor. Zoltan is the Massachusetts Pirate Party‘s co-founder and representative to the US Pirate National Committee. He can also divide by zero, count to infinity, and roundhouse kick Chuck Norris.

Copyright concerns the right to copy. Payright concerns the right to get paid. Under Payright, a creative work or invention can be distributed, modified, reappropriated, and built upon with no restrictions. If you monetize a work, you just have to share a predetermined percentage with the original creator(s).

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Yoda: Digital Communications Revolution

Access, Education, Innovation, Politics
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Open Internet, Force Is….

Digital Communications Revolution

The importance of a revolution in digital and communications technology has risen in importance since 2011. Interestingly, the most significant proportion of respondents came from Latin America, who particularly emphasised explosions in social media and mobile phones. Respondents from this region had a particularly higher focus on this issue when compared with those from Europe and Asia.

Keeping the digital revolution on track.

A top trend that emerged from the 2012 World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council Survey (which received almost 1,000 responses from the world’s leading thinkers) was the “digital and communications revolution.” But who laid the conditions for this revolution? And how are we going to continue to reap the benefits from this new era?

The answer may surprise you. The people who established the standards and rules allowing 99% of the computer servers worldwide to speak to each other, freely and openly, were not in the US government, Google, or even the UN. Rather, they belonged to civil society – academics and technologists – such as Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Tim Berners-Lee, the participant in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics who few people recognized.

Let’s recap that revolution. Over the past five years, 21% of GDP growth in mature economies came from the open Internet. Growth will spread east and south as broadband connections via mobile in emerging economies smash through developed world’s subscriptions in 2013, as reported in the World Economic ForumGlobal Information Technology Report 2012. If the members of Facebook were part of a single sovereign state, it would be the third-largest country in the world; and its terms of service is looking more like a constitution determining people’s rights than an ignored contract with a service provider.

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Owl: $20 Table Storms the World — Four Million Back Ordered

#OSE Open Source Everything, Hardware, Innovation, Software, Spectrum
Who? Who?

How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it

“This is going to be revolutionary for the developing world”

On Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, will have unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to 100,000 university students and professors. (If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.) In the meantime, Tuli is deluged with calls from reporters, and every day his company receives thousands of new orders for the commercial version of the Aakash 2. Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.

In developing countries, a $20.00 tablet is going have a profound impact:

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