#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 133 – Public Intelligence Blog

Great renewable material that is also biodegradable…

Australia: New Plastic Means Almost Anything Can Be Made From Hemp

Today's plastics are made from petroleum, which means we are polluting the atmosphere and putting products that cannot biodegrade into our environment. But Zeoform, a new company based in Australia has created a new kind of plastic made only from water and cellulose taken from hemp plants — meaning the plastic is not only eco-friendly but biodegradable.

The company's patented process converts the cellulose fibers found in hemp into a super-strong, high tech molding material capable of being formed into 100 percent nontoxic and biodegradable products, reports Joe Martino at Collective Evolution.

The company hopes to expand its patented technology and start offering manufacturing licenses to larger facilities around the world. Switching over from non-sustainable and toxic forms of plastic to Zeoform plastic can be done with existing infrastructure, according to the company.

The company says their product relies only upon the natural process of hydrogen bonding that takes place when cellulose fibers are mixed with water. No glue or other bonding material is necessary, because the bond already created is so strong.

The final material can be turned into almost anything, and can be cut, routed, machined, drilled, screwed, nailed and glued in the same way wood can be. It can also be colored and finished however product manufacturers would like.

Zeoform plastic is water- and fire-resistant naturally, and can be enforced further in both categories with added ingredients. It can be made into anything from car bumpers to paper, furniture, and even musical instruments.

Learn more.

2014/02/02

Danielle Villegas: First Carbon Fiber 3D Printer

Manufacturing, Materials

Check out this next step in 3D printing! First there were plastics, then food, now carbon fiber! What will be next?

The Mark One Is World's First Carbon Fiber 3D Printer

A new 3D printer can print carbon fiber and other composite materials.

Created by Boston-based startup MarkForged, it's called the Mark One.

Company founder Gregory Mark showed off the printer at the SolidWorks World design conference in San Diego, Calif. this week.

“We took the idea of 3D printing, that process of laying things down strand by strand, and we used it as a manufacturing process to make composite parts,” Mark said in an interview with Popular Mechanics. “We say it's like regular 3D printers do the form. We do form and function.”

In addition to carbon fiber, the Mark One can print other composite materials, including nylon, fiberglass and PLA (a thermoplastic made from renewable materials).

Learn more.

2014/01/31

Jean Lievens: Article – Organization in the Crowd – peer production in large-scale networked protests

Crowd-Sourcing

Organization in the crowd: peer production in large-scale networked protests

W. Lance Bennett^a^*, Alexandra Segerberg^b & Shawn Walker^c
pages 232-260

Information, Communication & Society

Volume 17, Issue 2, 2014

Special Issue: The Networked Young Citizen

Abstract

How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these ‘production packages’ are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011–2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.

Article home page.

2014/01/30

Stephen E. Arnold: Pricing the Cloud – Amazon Web Services Not Worth It For Most

Cloud

Calculating How Much Amazon Costs

Amazon Web Services are a good way to store code and other data, but it can get a little pricey. Before you upload your stuff to the Amazon cloud, check out Heap’s article, “How We Estimated Our AWS Costs Before Shipping Any Code.” Heap is an iOS and Web analytics tool that captures every user interaction. The Heap team decided to build it, because there was not a product that offered ad-hoc analysis or analyzed an entire user’s activity. Before they started working on the project, the team needed to estimate their AWS costs to decide if the idea was a sustainable business model.

They needed to figure how much data was generated by a single user interaction, but then they had to find out where the data was stored and what to store it on. The calculations showed that for the business model to work a single visit would have to yield an average one-third of a cent to be worthwhile for clients.

CPU cores, compression, and reserve instances reduced costs, but there are some unexpected factors that inflated costs:

1. “AWS Bundling. By design, no single instance type on AWS strictly dominates another. For example, if you decide to optimize for cost of memory, you may initially choose cr1.8xlarge instances (with 244GB of RAM). But you’ll soon find yourself outstripping its paltry storage (240 GB of SSD), in which case you’ll need to switch to hs1.8xlarge instances, which offer more disk space but at a less favorable cost/memory ratio. This makes it difficult to squeeze savings out of our AWS setup.

2. Data Redundancy. This is a necessary feature of any fault-tolerant, highly available cluster. Each live data point needs to be duplicated, which increases costs across the board by 2x.”

Heap’s formula is an easy and intuitive way to calculate pricing for Amazon Cloud Services. Can it be applied to other cloud services?

Whitney Grace, January 30, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2014/01/28

Jean Lievens: Michel Bauwens on the democratization of the means of monetization — commons licenses that demand reciprocity!

Architecture, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Money, P2P / Panarchy

Michel Bauwens on the democratization of the means of monetization

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.

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.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Michel Bauwens on the democratization of the means of monetization — commons licenses that demand reciprocity!”

2014/01/28

Danielle Villegas: Multi-Material 3D Printer Launched

Design, Innovation, Manufacturing

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!

–techcommgeekmom

Stratasys launches multi-material colour 3D printer

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.

2014/01/262014/01/26

Neal Rauhauser: Global Database of Events, Language & Tone (GDELT) Is SAFE!

Data

Global Database of Events, Language & Tone (GDELT) Is SAFE!
by Neal Rauhauser

That was a long, uncomfortable silence, after I posted GDELT's Mysterious Demise, but we now have the particulars on what happened:

The bottom line is that GDELT is one of the very few event datasets in existence today that actually has all of the necessary permissions.

Continue reading “Neal Rauhauser: Global Database of Events, Language & Tone (GDELT) Is SAFE!”

Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

Sepp Hasslberger: Hemp Replaces Plastic