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Edge: ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE By Douglas Rushkoff
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It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running on all our computers and, worse, we didn't realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other way around.
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In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a wholly designed marketplace: self-interested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm — or at the very least, reinforce — the false idea that the laws of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced with gunpowder. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions.
How to cure diseases before they have even evolved - health - 10 August 2009 - New Scientist
Goldblatt and a few other researchers think they have the answer. They are working on an entirely new class of antiviral drugs that should do something seemingly impossible: work against a wide range of existing viruses and also be effective against viruses that have not even evolved yet.
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What if, Goldblatt wondered, some host proteins are essential for viral replication but not for the survival of the host? If so, disabling these proteins should block viral replication without killing healthy cells.
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It remains early days for host-targeted antiviral therapy, as this approach is known. Indeed, many experts are sceptical about the entire notion. "People in infectious disease are comfortable with targeting the pathogen. They're not comfortable with targeting the host," says Goldblatt. One reason is the higher risk of side effects, especially with infections that require lengthy treatment.
"Until we can get these things into humans and test them, it's a little bit of a crapshoot as to whether they will work," says Michael Kurilla, who coordinates biodefence research at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.
Gregory Clark -- As Economic Disparity Grows, Higher Taxes May Be Only Solution
..the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.
/Message: What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?
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The first paragraph in the selection above is something I was talking about the other day in an interview on this topic. The industrial era, integrated newspaper -- with horoscopes, wedding announcements, politics, sports, comics, movies reviews and restaurant profiles -- is going away. It may have made sense, as a convenience, when papers were delivered to your driveway, or read on the subway. But moving online, that model is rapidly changing.
And who thinks that it makes sense? Are all papers equally good at all sorts of journalism? Do I need the NY Times to have a sports section? Or review movies?
We are seeing the vertical supply chain of newspapers being blown apart into horizontal focus areas. That's why the most interesting journalism start-ups are focused on one area, like politics, sports, or social change.
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I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city newspapers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and stories about pirates in Somalia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really.
I suggest that what emerges from Shirky's media revolution will be something profoundly unlike big city newspapers, today. They may jettison a lot of what is taken for granted, as well as inventing something that will attract people's attention in this 21st century. It may be television blended with the web in some addictive way, like the Twitter mashups we are seeing on network news shows. But it won't come from newspapers fighting rear guard actions like paywalls.
Future Knowledge Ecosystems: The Next Twenty Years of Technology-Led Economic Development - elearnspace
Commentary on IFTF report about research parks.
"This report is an extrapolation of how current trends might impact research parks. What is really needed is a creative considerations of what research parks (and universities for that matter) could be if they were seen as active, reciprocally-impacting agents in an environment: shaping and responding to emergence, rather than trying to predict the future."
Will Feudalism Fade from Knowledge Exchange? « The Scholarly Kitchen
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Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman, the authors of this paper, talk about how intellectual feudalism is defended because it defends against error — either errors of commission or errors of omission. Yet in the information ecosystem we have now, are these bastions of quality just slowing things down, and for the sake of a 10% savings on errors of commission? Has the inherent premise of a feudal scarcity economy led to high rejection rates, equated these to quality, all the while leading to errors of omission?
Stumbling and Mumbling: Being on the left
This optimism about human nature, however, seems to coexist with a pessimism about the scope for institutional change....This “human nature-optimism, institution-pessimism” is, if anything (and to simplify), the mirror image of my view.
Future Technology Blog | Jump The Curve | To Prepare for the Future Take a Course on Unlearning
Dismantling the Temple
The remote technocrats at the Fed who decide money and credit policy for the nation are deliberately opaque and little understood by most Americans. For the first time in generations, they are now threatened with popular rebellion.
Paul Hawken's 2009 Commencement Address | Commencement | University of Portland
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
The Drum Beat of a New Nation | Corrente
The truths outlined here: that a cold peace has descended, the mandate of 2008 is expended, and the results are a pathetic failure of wit, wisdom, and will -- stand by themselves. That the coalition of catastrophe is gathering, preaching burn and churn as its new policy -- burn carbon, churn land --- is evident to anyone who can read Dick Morris' new book, or watch MSNBC. Hooverism hovers close. Don't believe me, believe Paul Krugman.
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