#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 155 – Public Intelligence Blog

Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows

By Melissa Hogenboom

BBC News, 2 August 2013

Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.

This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.

Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of “the prisoner's dilemma”, a scenario of game theory – the study of strategic decision-making.

Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.

. . . . . . .

Crucially, in an evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you, Dr Adami explained.

This is exactly what his team found, that any advantage from defecting was short-lived. They used a powerful computer model to run hundreds of thousands of games, simulating a simple exchange of actions that took previous communication into account.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Dolphin: Selfish traits not favoured by evolution, study shows”

2013/08/022013/08/02

Jan Lievens: 3D Printing an Aston Martin

Design, Innovation, Manufacturing, Software

3D Printing an Aston Martin

We recently heard about a Solidoodler in Auckland, New Zealand, named Ivan Sentch, who’s building an entire car from scratch with the help of his Solidoodle, 2nd Gen 3D printer. When we saw photos of his project in progress, it was a bit hard to believe that this was his first time using 3D printing or that anyone would undertake something so massive with a desktop 3D printer. Leave it to one of our users to baffle our minds. We’re not sure if it’s insane, brilliant or both, but it’s certainly impressive.

Read rest of article.

2013/08/022013/08/02

Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter Seven

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, Politics

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Seven

Swarm Management: Following a high-profile event, your swarm just tripled in size in a week. You have twenty thousand new activists — new colleagues — that are all waiting for instructions from you, personally. They’re waiting for instructions from you because your name is the only one they know of. There are no MBA classes on how to handle this situation: those people talk about the challenges you encounter when growing by more than 10 percent a year. This is how you handle 200 percent growth in a week.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats
4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message
5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily (this chapter)
6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God
7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (this chapter)
8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)
9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)
10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)The whole book is available for purchase from Amazon.

Full text of chapter below the line — this is a world-changing book.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter Seven”

2013/08/012013/08/01

Patrick Meier: 100 Resilient Cities — Data Science and Tactical Resilience

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Data Science for 100 Resilient Cities

The Rockefeller Foundation recently launched a major international initiative called “100 Resilient Cities.” The motivation behind this global project stems from the recognition that cities are facing increasing stresses driven by the unprecedented pace urbanization. More than 75% of people expected to live in cities by 2050. The Foundation is thus rightly concerned: “As natural and man-made shocks and stresses grow in frequency, impact and scale, with the ability to ripple across systems and geographies, cities are largely unprepared to respond to, withstand, and bounce back from disasters” (1).

VIDEO

Resilience is the capacity to self-organize, and smart self-organization requires social capital and robust feedback loops. I’ve discussed these issues and related linkages at lengths in the posts listed below and so shan’t repeat myself here.

How to Create Resilience Through Big Data [link]
On Technology and Building Resilient Societies [link]
Using Social Media to Predict Disaster Resilience [link]
Social Media = Social Capital = Disaster Resilience? [link]
Does Social Capital Drive Disaster Resilience? [link]
Failing Gracefully in Complex Systems: A Note on Resilience [link]

Instead, I want to make a case for community-driven “tactical resilience” aided (not controlled) by data science.

Read full post and watch vidoe (2:49).

2013/08/012013/08/01

SmartPlanet: Sourced Products, Rating Everything, Saudi’s Spending Billions on Oil-Free Rail

SmartPlanet

Forget ‘fast fashion'. How about apparel with an ethical pedigree?

In Zady-land, style rules — but so does a well-edited closet, containing carefully sourced apparel.

. . . . . . .

What technology has wrought: the rise of the ‘rateocracy'

Technology may increase corporate transparency overnight, in a way that decades of laws and regulations have not been able to accomplish.

. . . . . . . .

Saudi Arabia is building a massive $22 billion metro to cut oil use

Saudi Arabia's largest city is getting its first metro rail system in a city where only 2 percent of population uses public transportation.

2013/08/012013/08/01

Berto Jongman: 3_D Map of the Universe

Design, Earth Intelligence, Extraterrestial Intelligence

3-D Map Of Universe Shows Positions Of Known Galaxies In Unprecedented Detail (VIDEO)

An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists have created a video spotlighting their new 3-D map of the known universe. The map was created from a collection of galaxy redshifts — observations of light emitted from galaxies as they move away from the earth.

“In terms of moving — pardon the pun — pictures, this is by far the best I have seen among numerous motion pictures showing where we are at, literally and figuratively, in the biggest picture of all,” Ian Steer, co-leader of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database of galaxy Distances, commented on the video on Vimeo.

As seen in the video, the map shows the location of all the visible galaxies in our universe as far away as 340 million light-years.

Read article and see multiple videos.

2013/07/29

Patrick Meier: First Spam Filter for Disaster Response — Multiple Humans, Automated Cross-Checking

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

The First Ever Spam Filter for Disaster Response

While spam filters provide additional layers of security to websites, they can also be used to process all kinds of information. Perhaps most famously, for example, the reCAPTCHA spam filter was used to transcribe the New York Times’ entire paper-based archives. See my previous blog post to learn how this was done and how spam filters can also be used to process information for disaster response. Given the positive response I received from humanitarian colleagues who read the blog post, I teamed up with my colleagues at QCRI to create the first ever spam filter for disaster response.

. . . . . . .

The desired outcome? Each potential disaster picture is displayed to 3 different email account users. Only if each of the 3 users tag the same picture as capturing disaster damage does that picture get automatically forwarded to members of the Digital Humanitarian Network. To tag more pictures after logging in, users are invited to do so via MicroMappers, which launches this September in partnership with OCHA. MicroMappers enables members of the public to participate in digital disaster response efforts with a simple click of the mouse.

Read full post with more graphics.