The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Graduate Center geographer David Harvey, author of Rebel Cities; Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City; and Seth W. Pinsky, former president of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, debate the economic realities of New York's creative and knowledge-based industries. Adam Davidson, host of NPR's Planet Money, moderates.
I have no idea whether this is real or not, but the idea is certainly neat… advancing the idea of the tricorder, the universal instrument the heroes of Star Trek always had with them…
Buyer beware – it could be one of those things that get funded never to be heard of again. If it's real, we will know fairly soon. A few months of wait.
$250 handheld laser spectrometer food scaner will connect to your smartphone and servers in the cloud to tell you what allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, ingredients are in your food
Continue reading “Sepp Hasslberger: Hand-Held Ingredient Scanner”
Copyright Monopoly: Happy Yule, everybody! In our series of reminders about important talkbacks, we’ve come to the reminder that the act of hunting for people who share culture and knowledge online violates their fundamental human rights, as doing so wiretaps private communications.
Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: File-Sharing Hunt Violates Human Rights (Per European Court)”
Each map has an illustration of the map type, and additional links.
The Most Innovative Maps of 2013
1. The cloudless map.
2. The personalized map.
3. The real-time map.
4. The animated map.
5. The map that compares our present to the past.
6. The map that simulates the future.
7. The laser map.
8. The meta-map.
9. The 3D map.
10. The dot map of everyone.
Emily Badger is a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities. Her work has previously appeared in Pacific Standard, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in Washington, D.C
R. D. Smith
Introduction
Over the past few weeks I’ve had the privilege of engaging with a number of people both in formal discussions and on Heathwood’s comment boards regarding a range of issues. These issues span from the structural problems of capitalism and the idea of the basic income law through to an alternative philosophy of social change, the questionable meaning of ‘social progress’, and potential social-economic alternatives. The following article, which I’ve broken down into a few different sections, carries forward these discussions in light of arguments made in: Gunn & Wilding, ‘Occupy as Mutual Recognition’, ‘Revolutionary or Less-Than-Revolutionary Recognition’; Gunn, Wilding & Smith, ‘Alternative horizons – understanding Occupy’s politics’; Michael Ott, ‘Something’s Missing: A Study of the Dialectic of Utopia in the theories of Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch’; as well as R.C. Smith, ‘A series of essays on an alternative philosophy of social change’, ‘In defense of Occupy’s politics’, ‘Russell Brand, the question of revolution and why we need more than an abstract, grand narrative of social change‘.
I. One of the most fundamental philosophical problems of the 21st Century
II. Economic Democracy and Participatory Economics: Complimentary systems in the transitory, historical process of societal change?
IIII. The basic income law
III. Economic Democracy and Participatory
IIII. Economics: A question of implementation
V. ‘Social progress’ is not limited to the horizon of capitalism
I've scooped before about Ann Blair's book of pre-modern info-overload — and what was done about. This is a nice short musing about today's information overload discourse.
Information Overload, Past and Present
Dan Cohen
The end of this year has seen much handwringing over the stress of information overload: the surging, unending streams, the inexorable decline of longer, more intermittent forms such as blogs, the feeling that our online presence is scattered and unmanageable. This worry spike had me scurrying back to Ann Blair’s terrific history of pre-modern information stress, Too Much to Know. Blair notes how every era has dealt with similar feelings, and how people throughout the ages have come up with different solutions:
. . . . . . . .
Blair identifies four “S’s of text management” from the past that we still use today: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing. She also notes the history of alternative solutions to information overload that are the equivalent of deleting one’s Twitter account: Descartes and other philosophers, for instance, simply deciding to forget the library so they could start anew. Other to-hell-with-it daydreams proliferated too:
A Special Tribute to Gandhi:
In my view, four aspects of Gandhi's legacy remain relevant, not just to India, but to the world.
First, non-violent resistance to unjust laws and/or authoritarian governments.
Second, the promotion of inter-faith understanding and religious tolerance.
Third, an economic model that does not rape or pillage nature.
Fourth, courtesy in public debate and transparency in one's public dealings.
Ramachandra Guha on why Gandhi remains globally relevant
Other Links Today:
