Michel Bauwens: Abandoning Checks & Balances

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Impotency
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Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

Question authority!

‘We are abandoning all the checks and balances’

WASHINGTON – Evgeny Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the United States. His first book, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the Internet] … entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder — not easier — to promote democracy.” The New York Times described it as “brilliant and courageous.”

In his second book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Follow of Technological Solutionism, Click Here, Morozov critiques what he calls “solutionism” — the idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and problem-free.

Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov

Morozov argues that this drive to eradicate imperfection and make everything “efficient” shuts down other avenues of progress and leads ultimately to an algorithm-driven world where Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future.

. . . . . . . . . .

All solutions come with cost. Shifting a lot of the responsibility to the individual is a very conservative approach that seeks to preserve the current system instead of reforming it. With self-tracking we end up optimizing our behavior within the existing constraints rather than changing the constraints to begin with. It places us as consumers rather than citizens. My fear is policymakers will increasingly find that it is much easier, cheaper and sexier to invite the likes of Google to engage in some of this problem-solving rather than do something that is much more ambitious and radical.

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I have a lot of respect for these people as engineers, but they are being asked to take on tasks that go far beyond engineering — tasks that have to do with human and social engineering rather than technical engineering. Those are the kind of tasks I would prefer were taken on by human beings who are more well rounded, who know about philosophy and ethics, and know something about things other than efficiency, because it will not end well.

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The newspaper offers something very different from Google’s aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

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There are many problems I have with TED. It has created this infrastructure where it very easy to be interesting without being very deep. If TED exercised their curatorial powers responsibly, they would be able to separate the good interesting from the bad interesting. But my fear is they don’t care as long as it drives eyeballs to the website. They don’t align themselves with the thinkers, they align themselves with marketing, advertising, futurists who are interested in ideas for the sake of ideas. They don’t care how these ideas relate to each other and they don’t much care for what those ideas actually mean. TED has come to exercise lots of power but they don’t exercise it wisely.

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Yoda: New Pope — Argentine, Trained in Philosophy & Psychology

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
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Got Crowd? BE the Force!
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

May the force be with him.

The new Pope is the oldest of the seven cardinals identified by Phi Beta Iota as being of interest in relation to the educational table prepared by Anthony Judge.  Argentine, trained in philosophy and psychology as well as theology, he is, as with the others selected by Phi Beta Iota, NOT DOGMATIC.

Latinos have always been the heart of the Catholic Church, and one of the greatest misteps of prior Popes was the rejection — the condemnation — of liberation theology.  The Most Holy Father is the first Latino and the first Jesuit to be appointed leader of the Catholic Church.

It will be most interesting to see if the new Most Holy Father elevates the other six cardinals Phi Beta Iota studied, particularly Cardinals Fernando Filoni of Italy, now Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples; Cardinal George Alencherry of India; and Cardinal John Njue of Kenya.

Anthony Judge: Scrutinizing the Cardinals by Educational Disciplines

pope francisAbout the New Pope:

Cardinals Pick Bergoglio, Who Will Be Pope Francis

Pope Francis takes Vatican trappings to a new plain

Pope Francis, a new era: Editorial

Pope Francis: Argentina's Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is new Catholic leader

Why the election of Pope Francis matters to developing countries

See Also:

Berto Jongman: Catholic Church — Dead or Just Comatose? + Catholic / Pedophilia RECAP

Catholic Church Getting Serious About “Truth”

Egypt & Jordan: Muslim & Christian Side by Side

Event: 26 Oct 2011 Assisi Italy Pope, Peace, & Prayer — 5th Inter-Faith Event Since 1986 — Terms of Reference…

 

Koko: De-Extinction of Extinct Species

Academia, Ethics
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Koko
Koko

Diversity good.

What's De-extinction and Should Scientists be Dabbling in it?

De-extinction – reviving once extinct animals using technologies like cloning and genome sequencing – is sending scientist to either corners of the debate. Some are vehemently against it, saying its natural process, while others say we have an “obligation” to do it.

Stuart Pimm of Duke University argued in an opinion piece in National Geographic that these efforts would be a “colossal waste” if scientists don't know where to put revived species that had been driven off the planet because their habitats became unsafe.

“A resurrected Pyrenean ibex will need a safe home,” Pimm wrote. “Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list: Where do we put them? Hunters ate this wild goat to extinction. Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten.”

de-extinctionMeanwhile Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales who has championed de-extinction for years, stands firmly against this. “If we're talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this.” Some people say that scientists will be playing God if they go ahead with de-extinction. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.”

A public forum was held today at the National Geographic's Washington headquarters for the TEDxDeExtinction conference where speakers came to share their views on the matter.

De-extinction has been in the works for more than a decade, ever since Dolly the Sheep demonstrated in 1996 that mammals could be cloned from cells in a lab dish. Spanish and French scientists worked for years on an effort to bring the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, according to the National Geographic, by cloning cells that had been preserved from the last known animal of the species. However, this did not succeed as she gave birth to a deformed kid who died 10 minutes after birth.

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Michel Bauwens: Applying Sharing Economy to Education — Comment from Robert Steele and 21st Century Education RECAP

Education
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Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

How We’re Applying the Sharing Economy to Education

By Andrew Grauer

A sustainable economy requires that both the supply and demand sides benefit from a transaction. In education, we see so many inefficiencies between those supplying the knowledge and those consuming it. Teachers feel like they’re being underpaid and students feel like they are overpaying for the education they are receiving.  This system is broken, presenting an opportunity to recalibrate and bring better equilibrium to the market. We’ve already seen the collaborative consumption business model transform industries from hospitality (Airbnb) to transportation (Lyft), and we believe that education is ripe for a similar disruption.

I founded the online education company Course Hero when I was a student at Cornell. I was frustrated that so much knowledge was bottled up in private hard drives and individual brains without a convenient, accessible forum to share and distribute this knowledge. At the same time, the student lifestyle—balancing homework, jobs and extracurricular activities—wasn’t necessarily conducive to accessing professors, tutors or other help they may need during designated office hours.  I saw an opportunity to connect this bottled up knowledge with the students who needed it and create a better learning experience—one that benefits both the expert and the learner.

Digital services are ready for a business model change, which is why Course Hero is working to build an online “knowledge marketplace” where experts can make money sharing their expertise, and learners can consume that content when and where they need it. By incentivizing experts of all forms to interact with Course Hero’s existing user base of learners, the knowledge marketplace is able to scale while providing consistent, quality content that meets the demands of learners. Like the retired miner who signed up with Lyft to earn extra cash shuttling city-dwellers around San Francisco, Course Hero is empowering a new class of microentrepreneurs who are financially rewarded for sharing their knowledge on their own time in the form of courseware, documents and tutoring advice.

A knowledge marketplace can provide a powerful supplement to the traditional learning experience. For example, since professors, TAs and tutors have limited availability, we developed Course Hero’s online tutoring platform that invites students to ask questions, and experts to get paid for answering as many or as few student questions as they want. Office hours can be impossible to make, however an open tutoring platform ensures that an expert will be able to assist a student even at 2:00 am the night before a final — often when the student needs it most.

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Applying Sharing Economy to Education — Comment from Robert Steele and 21st Century Education RECAP”

Dana Theus: Yahoo, Change, and Cultural Design

Cultural Intelligence
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If you somehow missed it, a media frenzy erupted after Yahoo announced that it will bring telecommuters home to the office.

Much of the noise came from the working-mom contingent upset at Marissa Mayer, a new mother and CEO in charge of bringing Yahoo back to life. However, for leaders to learn the true lessons of this brouhaha, we have to look beneath the headlines.

While I don’t hold Mayer accountable for representing the interests of all working moms, it’s fair to hold her accountable for shaping Yahoo’s corporate culture, which is what the move is intended to do. Yahoo’s policy memo made an attempt to explain that ending telecommuting is balanced by other policies designed to give employees perks and streamline the organization.

However, the memo’s greatest irony — which explains perhaps better than any other reason this move might have been necessary — are the words blazing across the top of the leaked memo: “DO NOT FORWARD.”

Maybe the leak was the result of one or two disgruntled employees — The New York Times reported that the memo was aimed at 200 employees — but it still speaks to a culture in need of tightening up.

Yahoo has been tight-lipped about the memo, saying only that the policy isn’t an industry referendum on work-at-home policies. However, sifting through the media-explosion fallout, it’s clear that this is one of many moves by Mayer to bring a more focused corporate culture to Yahoo. That said, it seems pretty ham-fisted. Looking at the memo from the point of view of corporate-culture design, here are some insights that other companies might want to emulate — or not.

Three things Yahoo is doing right

Continue reading “Dana Theus: Yahoo, Change, and Cultural Design”

Call for Papers: Future of Multilateralism in Governance and Regulation of Communications

Advanced Cyber/IO
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Opportunity to showcase your research on the Future of Multilateralism in the Governance and Regulation of Communications

Special issue call for papers from Info

Special call for papers on Multilaterism in the governance and regulation of communications

More about the special issue

The editor of info invites you to submit a paper to a forthcoming special issue on the topic of the future of multilateralism in the governance and regulation of communications. This special issue proposes a scholarly exploration of the topic.

Schedule and deadlines

Submission deadline: 16 June 2013
Tentative publication date: February 2014

More about the speical issue

The failure at the WCIT meeting in Dubai to reach consensus over updating the International Telecommunication regulations reveals more starkly than ever the growing fault lines in the international governance and regulation of communications. This special issue proposes a scholarly exploration of the topic.

  • Papers are therefore invited on the specific issues raised by WCIT but also on the wider theme of multilateral governance and regulation
  • This could include, for instance, articles on subjects such as the impact of trade negotiations and agreements (regional as well as global/WTO); the impact of the EU jurisdiction (not only within the EU itself, but also in the EEA countries and in countries at various stages of the accession)
  • Or it could encompass a variety of aspects with regard to the ITU (eg the continuing impact of ITU processes and institutions on management of the radio spectrum and satellite orbital characteristics).

Contact the editor Dr Colin Blackman for more information to discuss your proposed paper and abstract.

Click here to see the journal's submission guidelines and notes for authors

Paul Craig Roberts: When Truth is Suppressed Countries Die

03 Economy, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
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Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts

Over a decade during which the US economy was decimated by jobs offshoring, economists and other PR shills for offshoring corporations said that the US did not need the millions of lost manufacturing jobs and should be glad that the “dirty fingernail” jobs were gone.

America, we were told, was moving upscale. Our new role in the world economy was to innovate and develop the new products that the dirty fingernail economies would produce. The money was in the innovation, they said, not in the simple task of production.

As I consistently warned, the “high-wage service economy based on imagination and ingenuity” that Harvard professor and offshoring advocate Michael Porter promised us as our reward for giving up dirty fingernail jobs was a figment of Porter’s imagination.

Over the decade I repeated myself many times: “Innovation takes place where things are made. Innovation will move abroad with the manufacturing.”

This is not what corporations or their shills such as Porter wanted to hear. Corporations were boosting their profits by getting rid of their American employees and replacing them with lowly paid foreigners. Porter’s job was to reassure the sheeple so that no outcry would materialize against the greed that was hollowing out the US economy.

Now comes a study conducted by 20 MIT professors and their graduate students that concludes on the basis of the facts that “the loss of companies that can make things will end up in the loss of research than can invent them.”

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