Niall Ferguson has a bet each way, one on Corunucopianism, described here:
Voices on the resource revolution – Energy, Resources, Materials – Strategy & Analysis
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Boycott SOPA: An Android app that terrifies publishers and politicians
Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.
via extremetech.com
Once we can find out, it’s hard to hide.
Kodak
Have you been following the war on Netflix and Redbox/Blockbuster? The film companies and HBO believe if they make war on these distributors DVD sales will rise and happy days will be here again. This is like the record labels believing they can make CD sales rise if they make war on Best Buy and Wal-Mart and put a shiv into the independents while they’re at it.
Huh?
The future is inevitable. Reading is moving to electronic devices and physical media is dead in the music business, despite all the hosannas about vinyl. Sure, vinyl is fun and warm, and who doesn’t love those giant covers, but saying vinyl is making a comeback is like touting the sales of typewriter ribbons, it’s a drop in the bucket, it’s irrelevant nostalgia, a footnote by the side of the road on the way to what comes next.
And who taught us about the future?
THE PUBLIC!
The public embraced digital photography as well as MP3s. The public has no investment in infrastructure, it just latches on to what’s cool and efficient and goes there.
via lefsetz.com
I’d call the incumbents Canute-like, but Canute was the one who knew the sea wouldn’t be held back by his command, it was his “flattering courtiers” who claimed he possessed that power. So are the incumbents deluded, and denuded, by the tailors who present new clothes, empty promises of a rosy return of the past. Almost tragic.
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Too Big to Know
“Too Big to Know is a stunning and profound book on how our concept of knowledge is changing in the age of the net. It honors the traditional social practices of knowing, where genres stay fixed, and provides a graceful way of understanding new strategies for knowing in today’s rapidly evolving, networked world. I couldn’t put this book down. It is a true tour du force written in a delightful way.”
– John Seely Brown Co-author of The Social Life of Information (2000) and of a New Culture of Learning (2011); Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost, USC; Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)“Too Big To Know is Weinberger’s brilliant synthesis of myriad debates—information overload, echo chambers, the wisdom of crowds—into a single vision of life and work in an era of networked knowledge.”— Clay Shirky author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus
via toobigtoknow.com
Can’t wait.
Congress wants to limit open access publishing for the US government’s $28B/year subsidized research – Boing Boing
A new bill in Congress, H.R. 3699 (“To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”), creates a regulation that make it hard-to-impossible to publish open access scholarly journals. These are journals that are paid for directly by researchers, who pay a fee that helps pay for peer review, and are then made available free of charge to all comers. They don’t make a profit the way that the incumbent commercial journals do, but they have surpassed many of the old journals for quality and “impact factor” (how often articles are cited in other articles) and are used by scholars and institutions who believe them to be better for contemporary science and scholarship than the 18th-century model of the old commercial journals.
via boingboing.net
The old lies are the best. The “integrity” argument is as old as the Statute of Anne, and just as fallacious, particularly in a world of global instantaneous review and fact checking.
Urban Dictionary: Brony
Brony
A name typically given to the male viewers/fans (whether they are straight, gay, bisexual, etc.) of the My Little Pony show or franchise. They typically do not give in to the hype that males aren’t allowed to enjoy things that may be intended for females.
Every nerd has a favorite TV show they watch religiously and know inside and out. But My Little Pony seems like an unlikely object of fanboy love. Since the show debuted last fall on cable channel Hub TV, it???s attracted a growing number of male fanatics. Their love of the show is internet neo-sincerity at its best: In addition to watching the show, these teenage, twenty- and thirtysomething guys are creating pony art, posting fan videos on YouTube and feeding threads on 4chan (and their own chan, Ponychan).
via wired.com
“internet neo-sincerity,” something to watch.
Doc Searls Weblog ?? Leveraging Hal [Crowther]
The cannibal capitalism that produced a Goldman Sachs and a Bernie Madoff is subhuman and obscene. There’s no form of government more inherently offensive than plutocracy—only theocracy comes close. When a citizen comes of age in a plutocracy, he has no moral choice but to slay Pluto or die trying.
The history of American plutocracy is shockingly simple. The Industrial Revolution fueled the metamorphosis of capitalism into a ravenous monster that devoured resources, landscapes and human beings on a scale no wars or natural disasters had ever approached. The wealth generated by this devastation created colossal corporations and financial operations far more powerful than elected governments; long ago the individuals who controlled these giants learned that it was cost-effective to buy up the politicians and turn governments into virtual subsidiaries. Along with the unprecedented wealth of the new ruling class came two protective myths, transparently false but widely accepted: one, that the feeble, compliant federal government was somehow the enemy of free enterprise; two, the outrageous trickle-down theory, which urged us to choke the rich with riches in the hope that they would disgorge a few crumbs for the peasants.
The News in Limericks: See Ya Later, Ex-Dictator
It’s Very Clear That was Some Year
2011 was so packed
Revolutions and riots, phones hacked
Protesters v army
World crisis, tsunami
I can’t really think what it lacked.
Fraunhofer-Verbund Mikroelektronik: Data from an LED ceiling light
Commercially available light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can do more than just generate light. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI have succeeded in transmitting broadband data streams within visible light via LED lamps to computers or other end devices that can receive data. ???Visible light communication??? is the name of this new transmission technology
Vint Cerf: Internet access isn’t a human right
There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.
via news.cnet.com
Abstract the right to information.
Hamish MacEwan 