The Future Of Money: Conclusions

"I had entered into this project thinking that I would find some magic wand, a spell that could revitalize local communities, increase social capital, and make communities more resilient. The answer to that is not is some alternative currency, or in small scale projects like Steffen's clothing swaps. Instead, we need grassroots activities that can scale into national policy.

We need to scream at the local level about food policy: school lunches, public support of local agriculture, and ending food deserts. But we need to do this in a form that can scale, like credit unions, and organizations where local chapters collate their efforts with others.

So I give up on the search for an abracadabra coming from future forms of cash. It is up to us to redistribute value and exchange, to decide which parts of our world should be outside of economics and which should be in."

Tagged with: futurism • economics • local • currency • money • finance • government •

[Genome] Sequencing Price Drops Even Lower

"Calculating the cost of sequencing a human genome is a tricky business–price estimates can vary depending on what's included in the calculation. One common measure is the cost of the chemicals used, and this is what Complete Genomics used. However, this measure doesn't incorporate the cost of the machines that do the sequencing, the human labor, or the computational effort required to assemble raw sequence information into a whole genome. "What's important is not just the reagent costs, but also the cost of analyzing the sequence," says Jeff Schloss, program director for technology development at the National Human Genome Research Center, in Bethesda, MD. "It's unclear how computational costs for this method compare to some of the others."" Doesn't matter for the business model; sell low to early adopters, establish market dominance. Smart.

Tagged with: science • biotechnology • genetics • DNA • sequencing • consumer • genome •

Detroit: Urban Laboratory and the New American Frontier

"In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not. It’s a sort of anarchy in a good way as well as a bad one. Perhaps that overstates the case. You can’t do anything, but it is certainly easier to make things happen there than in most places because the hand of government weighs less heavily.

What’s more, the fact that government is so weak has provoked some amazing reactions from the people who live there. In Chicago, every day there is some protest at City Hall by a group from some area of the city demanding something. Not in Detroit. The people in Detroit know that they are on their own, and if they want something done they have to do it themselves. Nobody from the city is coming to help them."

Tagged with: urbanism • economics • food • housing • innovation • reconstruction • new-southsea • futurism •

How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession

"It’s going to take a few years, but these legitimate advertisers will push out the scammers and Facebook will put more rules in place. Enforcement will tighten, but spammers are clever with shifting their entities, enough to make us all “dizzy”. We said that when these platforms first launched, earnings were in the 10 to 15 cent range. Then spammers raised the bar and could afford to pay $6 per thousand impressions (or about 20 cents a click) for the same inventory. But when the legitimate guys come with the hyper-targeted local ads, they can afford to pay $10 or even $50 per thousand impressions for that inventory. The spammers will be forced out of this particular game and onto whatever is next."

Tagged with: facebook • advertising • marketing • internet • business • model • spamming • social-networks •

How your brain sees virtual you

"When Caudle's looked for brain areas that were more active when volunteers thought about themselves and their avatars compared with real and virtual others, two regions stood out: the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. That makes sense as prior research has linked the medial prefrontal cortex to self-reflection and judgement.

Interestingly, however, there was "next to no difference" in the activity in these regions when people thought of themselves and of their avatar, says Caudle… "

Tagged with: MMO • metaverse • avatar • identity • psychology • neuroscience •

Neal Stephenson interview

"The first time [I fought William Gibson] was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us… " An oldie, but a goodie.

Tagged with: science • fiction • author • interview • Neal-Stephenson • humour • money • publishing •

The imaginary pirate of globalization

"The imaginary pirate shows us what the new geography of the world is all about: its consistency, its material, the outline of its borders. Assuming, of course, it has any borders. Pirates take advantage of this "spatial revolution"[6] brought about by globalization; that is why, instead of hounding them, we should follow their example. They have instinctively understood the new seas on which they carry out their looting. Indeed, the figures of the terrorist, the hacker and the global financier carve out and define this new geography,[7] and force legal institutions to change their responses."

Tagged with: globalisation • piracy • economics • crime • law • copyright • finance •

Chinese Agencies Fight For Control Of Web Game

"The bureau that licenses publishers said this week [WoW]'s Chinese operator failed to obtain required import approval and should stop signing up customers. Its rival, the Ministry of Culture's cultural products department, fired back that it was the regulator of online games and said the Web site's paperwork was in order.

The squabble has given the Chinese public a rare glimpse into the struggles between bureaucrats over who gets to regulate the Internet and other promising new industries and reap the added influence and revenues that can bring.

"If you supervise a more dynamic area with a lot of growth potential, you have more budget and more administrative muscle," said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, an Internet research firm in Beijing. "They see this pie is getting bigger and bigger, so it is no wonder different administrations are fighting over pieces of that territory.""

Tagged with: WoW • commerce • MMO • China • control • regulation • bureaucracy • corruption • nation-states •

Bizarre legal defense after EMI sues over Beatles MP3 sales

"The MP3 format uses psycho-acoustic models to do its compression in such a way that it doesn't throw out the bits that are most important to the human ear. MRT may simply be claiming that the act of ripping and compressing a song—perhaps using a tweaked psycho-acoustic model—creates a new sound recording in which it owns the copyright. If true, then copyright in sound recordings is meaningless—and I may set up an online shop to start selling all those recordings "I made" by ripping my Wilco CDs." Man, this is going to be one entertaining lawsuit.

Tagged with: music • piracy • BlueBeat • ripping • encoding • psychoacoustics • law • business •

Contraptor

"Contraptor is a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication, desktop manufacturing, prototyping and bootstrapping." Sweet.

Tagged with: hardware • prototype • fabbing • manufacturing • electronics • prototyping • open-source • 3d-printing •

Resisting Representation: The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janiero

"When it comes to favelas, which by definition evade or exceed administrative or bureaucratic oversight, both the efficacy and the politics of conventional mapping (and of statistics and demographics) must be questioned. Statistics, etymologically a “science of the state,” have historically been an instrument of power. The indeterminacy of data on informality makes it particularly vulnerable to fabrication and manipulation. Census taking in favelas provides a notorious example. Population estimates for individual favelas vary widely, with differences between what the city declares the population to be and what the citizens themselves claim—usually a larger number that would give them a greater opportunity for political agency."

Tagged with: technology • urban • mapping • favela • brazil • culture • cartography • politics • economics • representation •

Are Hackers Essential to Resilience?

"In almost every resilience scenario I can imagine, there seems to be an intense need for people that can fix, repurpose, replicate, or build from scratch machines, systems, and tools. They are needed in roles from maintenance of existing social activity to externally focused trade to local defense/offense. The implication is that if you don't have people in your community, group, gang, or tribe that can do this, you only have two options: either a bare bones existence (hardscrabble) or a predatory one. The reverse is also true. The better and more innovative your hackers are, the wealthier and safer your community will be."

Tagged with: John-Robb • resilience • scenario • hacking • innovation • grassroots • new-southsea •

Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate Collaborative Web Site

Beginner's guide; could come in handy.

Tagged with: website • mediawiki • diy • tutorial • webdev • setup •

Weaponsgrade Kavelaars – Open Source Sentry Gun

"If you’re like me and wanted to make one of these you would probably ran into the same issues I have. So to help all you poor suckers out the software we developed is open source and freely available on the website. The only reservation we have is that you make it a point not to hurt anyone or anything, we take no responsibility for anything.

The point of making it open source is to encourage joint development of the software and hardware possibilities." No kidding; complete hard- and software specs for your very own sentry machine-gun pod, just like the ones outta Aliens.

Tagged with: hardware • software • electronics • project • autonomous • sentry • gun • open-source •

Implantable Silicon-Silk Electronics

"By building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates, researchers have made electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body. So far the research group has demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk. While electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don't need protection, and the silk means the electronics conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don't cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick."

Tagged with: cyborg • electronic • circuit • implant • substrate • technology • cyberpunk • body •

Thinking the Unthinkable

"How bad is the situation 'out there' really? In my view, things are veering toward such extreme desperation that the US government might fall under the sway, by extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such, sometime in the near future. I'm not promoting a coup d'etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources. The 'corn-pone Hitler' scenario is still another possibility – Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want 'to keep gubmint out of Medicare!' – but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what's more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within."

Tagged with: US • politics • military • coup • economics •

Global Guerrillas: BASIC SYSTEMS DISRUPTION

"Here's a simple overview of what is increasingly becoming the dominant method of offensive warfare in the 21st Century. Early applications of this methodology to modern conflict have been very successful. In short, it's better to understand its dynamics than to assume it doesn't exist."

Tagged with: 4th-generation • warfare • guerrilla • systems-disruption • terrorism • civil-unrest • conflict • strategy •

Mining for Algae: Could Abandoned Mines Help Grow Biofuel?

"Growing the photosynthetic algae underground also addresses concerns about invasive species of algae escaping, Vidt said. Even if the species escape containment from the photobioreactors, they pose little threat as invasive species because they could not survive for long in the dark.

The setup also provides a perk for mining companies faced with the task of cleaning up in the wake of excavation.

"Algae are exceptional at sequestering metals," Vidt said, adding that the biodiesel produced on site could be used in additional mining operations. "This is a [public relations] boon for these guys: It works for them, they get some fuel, and on the flip side, they don't have to pay reclamation.""

Tagged with: algae • biofuel • subterranean • abandoned • mines • farming • metals • sequestration •