1The steady rise of Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement has been one of the big surprises of the 21st century, threatening stalwarts such as Microsoft and Britannica, while simultaneously offering insights into the emergence of large-scale peer production and the growth of gift economies.
2Many questions arise when confronted with the streamlined efficacy and apparent lack of organisation and motivation of these new global enterprises, not least “how does this work?” Stigmergic collaboration provides a hypothesis as to how the collaborative process could jump from being untenable with numbers above 25 people, towards becoming a new driver in global society with numbers well over 25,000.
Kurator is a web service which allows you to easily customize one or more visual magazines that automatically aggregate the hashtags, lists, Twitter users, Facebook pages and RSS feeds you specify.
Specifically, you can aggregate from the following sources:
Twitter User
Twitter List
Twitter Keywords
Twitter Hastags
Twitter Mentions
Twitter Top Followers
Facebook Page
Facebook Keywords
RSS Feed
You can also filter and specify specific keywords that you want to be included/excluded.
Kurators offers the ability to title each stream, and to customize somewhat the look of the final magazine by providing a few templates and layouts and access to the controls to adjust the font style, size and color.
The final stream can be published as a web page on Kurator or exported directly to WordPress as a “page”.
In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads.
Those ideas cannot be forcibly extracted.
All one can do is mobilize collective intelligence and knowledge. If knowing how to produce and sell has become a basic necessity, it no longer constitutes a sufficiently differentiating factor in international competition. In the past, enterprises were industrial and commercial; in the future, they will increasingly have to be intelligent.
The intelligent enterprise stands on three pillars: collective intelligence, knowledge management and information and collaboration technologies and needs the vital energy of intellectual cooperation.
Managing collective intelligence implies a radical change that will naturally elicit a lot of resistance. But we’re talking about a social innovation. Once it is in place, once the resistance has subsided, no one will want to go back to the way it was! As always, the problem lies “not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.” Keynes.
A little-known plant with a truly bizarre name is now making headlines as a cancer killer, with the compound of the plant vanishing tumors in mice with pancreatic cancer.
Known as the ‘thunder god vine’ or lei gong teng, the Chinese plant is actually integrated into Chinese medicine and has been used for ages in remedying a number of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis.
According to the new research out of the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center, the thunder god plant compound led to no signs of tumors after a 40 day period — even after discontinuing the treatment. Published in the journal Science Translational Medicine and funded by the National Institutes of Health, even the scientists working on the project were stunned by the anti-cancer properties of the compound. Known to contain something known as triptolide, which has been identified as a cancer fighter in previous research, it is thought to be the key component that may be responsible for the anti-tumor capabilities.
Study leader and vice chairman of research at the Cancer Center explained to Bloomberg how he was blown away by the effects of the simple plant:
“This drug is just unbelievably potent in killing tumor cells,” he said. – See more.
Click on Image to Enlarge
And just like with numerous other powerful substances like turmeric and ginger, mainstream science is still slowly confirming what many traditional practitioners have known for their entire lives. This is, of course, due to the fact that there is simply no money for major corporations in researching the healing powers of natural herbs and compounds such as the compound found in the thunder god vine. Turmeric and ginger, for example, have been found to be amazing anti-cancer substances that are virtually free compared to expensive and dangerous cancer drugs.
Nevertheless, the Big Pharma sponsored corporate scientists have managed to ignore these spices as much as possible. In fact, they have even been caught time and time again faking thousands of studies to fraudulently demonstrate the supposed value of pharmaceutical drugs pushed by major pharma juggernauts — many of which are later forced to pay millions in fines which only slightly stack up against their billions in profits.
Profits that are threatened by the many real studies that were performed by scientists examining the rejeuvenating power of cheap ingredients like turmeric, which has been found by peer-reviewed research available on PubMed to positively influence over 590 conditions.
Here is an extraordinary physics story, moving us just a little closer to the nonlocal. I think the last five hundred years will one day be seen in one important sense as the evolution from materiality to the nonlocal.
Why does humanity consensually measure seven days to a week? We use the model so universally that it is invisible as a shared intention. Breaking up time this way is entirely arbitrary. Here's why we do it. It is a perfect illustration of how nonlocal information architectures are created, and come to constitute reality.
Here is an extraordinary physics story, moving us just a little closer to the nonlocal. I think the last five hundred years will one day be seen in one important sense as the evolution from materiality to the nonlocal.
I'm offering Think-Know Tools again June 19 -July 26. All the details about what we'll co-learn, the schedule, missions, how we go about participative and collaborative learning, can be found at http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/think2/ Price is $300 via PayPal. $250 if you've taken a Rheingold U course before ($200 if you've taken two courses, etc.). $500 if your company reimburses.
It's all about the theory and practice of personal knowledge management. We'll look at the theory and conceptual frameworks around intellect augmentation and the extended mind. We'll also actively practice social bookmarking as a collective intelligence activity, concept mapping, and building knowledge-plexes with Personal Brain (you can see the web-brain version of the syllabus at http://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/EB72D74A-199F-8994-4938-88ACDA8049EF )
Feel free to contact me about questions. Participation is limited to 30 co-learners, so let me know soon if you want me to reserve a place for you.
Please feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested.
