Peer production, modularity & voxels: The RepRap-based, Lego-built 3D printing-milling machine
This research project aims to shed light on the conditions of transferability of Commons-based peer production (CBPP) processes to physical manufacturing. We draw from the political economy of CBPP and its conjunction with digital, desktop manufacturing technologies, the concept of “voxels”, and the case of a hybrid RepRap-based, Lego-built three-dimensional printer-milling machine, to discuss the importance of modular design. We show that modularity, not only in terms of development process but also of hardware components, is necessary to make possible CBPP’s replication for tangible products, decreasing the need for coordination and enabling parallel developments to various directions.
Full title: “Shedding light on the transferability of Commons-based peer production to physical manufacturing: The case of a RepRap-based, Lego-built 3D printing-milling machine”. Vasilis Kostakis and Marios Papachristou. To be submitted.
Wrong tense. Search has been sucked into business intelligence as a subordinate or utility function.
Consultants and “experts” suggest that search and business intelligence are converging. Information Builders, based in New York City, suggests that the alleged convergence looks like two equally-sized markets merging like a math book’s illustration of a Venn diagram. The picture is symmetrical and appears to make sense. In my opinion, the presentation of “worlds’ merging” in an orderly manner is misleading at best and downright silly at worst.
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In the somewhat untidy worlds of search and business intelligence, not much has changed. Terminology and the fervent belief that new phrases will solve information problems is more important than tackling more fundamental, less zippy issues.
We have entered an era of same old, same old, and there is no turning back. The problem of computational limits force systems to work as they have for many years. The methods and the math is the same. The content types and the marketing lingo are different.
As part of QCRI’s Artificial Intelligence for Monitoring Elections (AIME) project, I liaised with Kaggle to work with a top notch Data Scientist to carry out a proof of concept study. As I’ve blogged in the past, crowdsourced election monitoring projects are starting to generate “Big Data” which cannot be managed or analyzed manually in real-time. Using the crowdsourced election reporting data recently collected by Uchaguzi during Kenya’s elections, we therefore set out to assess whether one could use machine learning to automatically tag user-generated reports according to topic, such as election-violence. The purpose of this post is to share the preliminary results from this innovative study, which we believe is the first of it’s kind.
My colleague Hemant Purohit at QCRI has been working with us on automatically extracting needs and offers of help posted on Twitter during disasters. When the 2-mile wide, Category 4 Tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, he immediately began to collect relevant tweets about the Tornado’s impact and applied the algorithms he developed at QCRI to extract needs and offers of help.
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.
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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.
David Feitler, PhD, Senior Program Manager, NineSigma
As White Queen remarked in Lewis Carroll’s immortal story Through the Looking Glass, “…it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” We all run after innovation just as fast as we can and sometimes we feel that it’s all we can do just to stay even with the competition. Sometimes it is good to pause for a moment and reflect on the role of innovation, what we’re doing currently and what we might do differently. The State of Ohio did exactly that in creating the Ohio Third Frontier’s Open Innovation Incentive, which they launched last year.
Open innovation (OI) is the systematic inclusion of parties outside your four walls and outside your existing networks. Companies practice open innovation because they want to reduce the time it takes to get to market, avoid getting trapped by their own thinking, and pursue with agility new opportunities outside their core expertise. Frequently the examples given for open innovation success are things like the iPod™, which wasn’t invented internally at Apple, or the Swiffer™ cleaning system that P&G acquired in its original form from a Japanese company. Those examples can cause one to lose sight of the value OI brings to non-consumer goods companies and to organizations smaller than Apple and P&G.
That was the thinking of the Ohio Third Frontier team when they considered what they could do to support economic growth in the State of Ohio. They recognized that open innovation is an important tool and a way to accelerate economic development in Ohio. The state also recognized that very large companies (greater than $1 billion in annual revenues) were doing this already, while companies in the $10 million to $1 billion range likely needed additional direction and support. They surmised that the expertise needed to incorporate these external technology searches didn’t reside in firms this size and that reliable partners were needed in the form of intermediaries with proven open innovation methods and processes. Thus was born the Ohio Third Frontier Open Innovation Incentive.
You refer several times to what you call “unethical private sector parties whose only focus is on money in, not intelligence out.” This is what corrupted Truman's initiative. Covens like this go way back in history, but in the US more recently it coalesced around the group that set up the Fed, expanded to include globetrotters like Wild Bill Donovan and the Dulles Brothers. They, in turn, brought in collusion with Meyer Lansky, a merger of Mafia with highest level Masons, and a very powerful group of attorneys (Paul Helliwell, etc), financiers (Averell Harriman, etc), who were vigorously engaged in financing the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Fascists, Imperialists, and eventually Neo-Cons. While financing these groups to put power into dictatorship-of-the-State (everyone else being disposable serfs), they profited from moving heroin and other drugs, and siphoned off all the gold they could to personal offshore caches. In effect, this created a covert government-within-a-government, enabled them to take over mass media, and to use pharmaceuticals to stupefy the general public. The formal government of the US is now 90% corrupted into what's been called “a parliament of whores”. Huge sums provided to “rescue” Greece, etc., vanish. The coven has brought together as many fascist foreign governments as possible, so in effect it is attempting to set up its “invisible government” as the new global government. In doing so it has subverted the UN, and virtually all global organizations such as the FAO. This is why OSINT is having such a difficult time, reversing the poisonous current. The last thing the coven wants is an honest, moral, and open source of truthful information for the public.
