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YouTube - Android Demo

10 million dollars in prizes for aps built on Android platform

Tags: google, cell_phone, open_source, innovation, mobile on 2008-09-23 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Confirmed: Google Android Phone $179, Available Oct 22 in U.S. - International Business Times -

Tags: google, cell_phone, open_source, mobile, event on 2008-09-23 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Open-Source Thinking Revolutionizes Prosthetic Limbs: Scientific American

as with fuel efficiency standards, note market forces' downstream role as innovation inhibitor

Tags: engineering, innovation, entrepreneur, open_source, war, long_tail, interactive_graphic, collaboration, prosthetic on 2008-09-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (6) -About

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Because of tremendous advances in emergency medicine, as well as the use of such armor as Kevlar vests, the fighting has resulted in a far lower fatality rate among injured soldiers than it has in past wars. That’s the good news. The bad news is that many veterans whose wounds would have killed them in the past come home today with grievous injuries.
“We have to think outside the U.S.,” Curran says. “We need to look at places like Saudi Arabia, India, China, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world where, unfortunately, some of the amputations are punitive.”
“Many prosthetics manufacturers are subject to the same one-size-fits-most economics as mass-market consumer goods,” Kuniholm says. But in prosthetics, he adds, “each person’s needs and capabilities are unique.”
a relatively small market, and the resulting narrow profit margins, makes it unprofitable for most companies to invest in research and development of upper-arm prostheses. “Prosthetics is one of many underserved markets in which innovation has stagnated because the traditional incentives are lacking,” Kuniholm says. “The people who make innovations in this field are usually passionate users tinkering around in their garage.”
As of the end of 2007, about 700 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are amputees, and of those about 150 have lost a hand or an arm (or, in some cases, both arms).
Kuniholm and his partners have created a clearinghouse for prosthetic designs, an online consortium they call the Open Prosthetics Project (OPP), whose goal is to nurture useful ideas for innovations and then freely give the designs away. The idea is to benefit not only people such as Kuniholm, who already have the resources that come from living in a first-world economy, but also amputees all over the world.

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Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science

Tags: open_source, open_science, science, academia, publishing, innovation, creativity, information, wikipedia on 2008-08-31 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The adoption and growth of the scientific journal system has created a body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a collective long-term memory which is the basis for much of human progress. This system has changed surprisingly little in the last 300 years. The internet offers us the first major opportunity to improve this collective long-term memory, and to create a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid collaborative development of ideas. The process of scientific discovery - how we do science - will change more over the next 20 years than in the past 300 years.
leading edge of the greatest change in the creative process since the invention of writing.

Science is an example par excellence of creative collaboration, yet scientific collaboration still takes place mainly via face-to-face meetings.
there are major cultural barriers which are preventing scientists from getting involved, and so slowing down the progress of science.
The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.
We should aim to create an open scientific culture where as much information as possible is moved out of people’s heads and labs, onto the network, and into tools which can help us structure and filter the information. This means everything - data, scientific opinions, questions, ideas, folk knowledge, workflows, and everything else - the works. Information not on the network can’t do any good.
extreme openness. This means: making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services.
To create an open scientific culture that embraces new online tools, two challenging tasks must be achieved: (1) build superb online tools; and (2) cause the cultural changes necessary for those tools to be accepted. The necessity of accomplishing both these tasks is obvious, yet projects in online science often focus mostly on building tools, with cultural change an afterthought. This is a mistake, for the tools are only part of the overall picture. It took just a few years for the first scientific journals (a tool) to be developed, but many decades of cultural change before journal publication was accepted as the gold standard for judging scientific contributions.
a top-down strategy that has been successfully used by the open access (OA) movement [3]
second strategy is bottom-up. It is for the people building the new online tools to also develop and boldly evangelize ways of measuring the contributions made with the tools. To understand what this means, imagine you’re a scientist sitting on a hiring committee that’s deciding whether or not to hire some scientist. Their curriculum vitae reports that they’ve helped build an open science wiki, and also write a blog. Unfortunately, the committee has no easy way of understanding the significance of these contributions, since as yet there are no broadly accepted metrics for assessing such contributions. The natural consequence is that such contributions are typically undervalued.
Is it possible to scale up this conversational model, and build an online collaboration market [4] to exchange questions and ideas, a sort of collective working memory for the scientific community?
Rather than hoarding their questions and ideas, as scientists do for fear of being scooped, the programmers revel in swapping them. Some of the world’s best programmers hang out in these forums, swapping tips, answering questions, and participating in the conversation.
Innocentive’s business model is aimed firmly at industrial rather than basic research, and so the incentives revolve around money and intellectual property, rather than reputation and citation.
FriendFeed allows messages to be passed back and forth in a lightweight way, so communities can form around common interests and shared friendships.
Lacking widely accepted metrics to measure contribution, scientists are unlikely to adopt FriendFeed en masse as a medium for scientific collaboration. And without widespread adoption, the utility of FriendFeed for scientific collaboration will remain relatively low.
Expert attention, the ultimate scarce resource in science, is very inefficiently allocated under existing practices for collaboration.

An efficient collaboration market would enable Alice and Bob to find this common interest, and exchange their know-how, in much the same way eBay and craigslist enable people to exchange goods and services. However, in order for this to be possible, a great deal of mutual trust is required.
In economics, it’s been understood for hundreds of years that wealth is created when we lower barriers to trade, provided there is a trust infrastructure of laws and enforcement to prevent cheating and ensure trade is uncoerced. The basic idea, which goes back to David Ricardo in 1817, is to concentrate on areas where we have a comparative advantage, and to avoid areas where we have a comparative disadvantage.
recommend Bill Hooker’s series of essays on open science, Mitchell Waldrop’s article in Scientific American, and the Science Commons as starting places. There are some great communities of people online engaged in building a more open scientific culture - many of those people can be found in the Life Scientists and Science2.0 rooms on FriendFeed.
whenever the stakes are that high, secrecy pays off - and the science community is not alone in this. The shoe-salesman Bob may have high stakes in his business, but for Alice it is probably just one of many pairs of shoes. Analogies only go so far