“This suggests that those interested in intervening in Wikipedia, or other peer-production based projects, might be better served by focusing on changing the terms of negotiation between interested parties, rather than technologically empowering individuals.”

"However, in crafting this talk message, Messer-Kruse has unintentionally engaged in rhetorical patterns that flag him as a potential bad actor in the eyes of experienced Wikipedians. His most significant error is citing a self-published source, his Bowling Green State University blog, in support of his desired changes to the article. This is, as several Wikipedia editors quickly point out, in violation of Wikipedia’s reliable source guidelines.""Messer-Kruse, for his part, does not seem to absorb the reason why his blog is unacceptable as a source. ""However, it is important to understand that Wikipedia editors are, every day, confronted by vast numbers of self-styled experts, many claiming academic credentials, referring to a blog or other self-published source that purports to upend this field or that based on a novel review of primary evidence. Climate science, evolutionary biology, and “western medicine,” are all particularly common targets, though I have also witnessed claims to such unlikely discoveries as a grand unified field theory. While Messer-Kruse’s claims are not outrageous, his use of a self-published source, and claims to a unique interpretation of historical events flag him in the eyes of Wikipedia editors as a potentially disruptive editor. They thus use the reliable source policy to defer the responsibility for deciding whether or not his claims are true to the larger process of scholarly peer review."

"is there anything as useless as a Manchester syntax dump of an ontology converted to PDF?"

via https://twitter.com/#!/IanMulvany/status/203398544311320576

"It's a simple equation - there's a limited amount of attention in the world, if more of it is going to personal, non-commercial, un-advertised-in media, less of it will go to advertising and advertising will shrink."

via http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/03/peak_attention_and_the_dupont_equation "A key premise of the mobile-technology game industry is that the pleasure of interactivity is preferable to boredom. Who would choose simply to sit on a train or wait in a line when you could be distracting your brain and hands with a game? Idleness, slowness, contemplation, being mentally present in a situated context have no place in this wired world. But for those who were alive before this hyperactive culture grew up around us, it was during those interstices of life's activities that we breathed, relaxed, observed, thought things over. Listen up - even the smallest fragments of your idle time have now been colonized with meaningless, addictive junk. Junk that is part of the fabric of the Spectacle...

Just as games can entrain us to enact the Spectacle, they may enable us to enact its converse. Situationists call this sort of reversal a reconstruction. Game designers have it in their power to reconstruct notions of personal awareness, choice, and agency in ways that might seriously disturb the consumerist ethos that has been prepared for us. Now, that could be really fun.""

via http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/03/peak_attention_and_the_dupont_equation

via http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/03/peak_attention_and_the_dupont_equation

via http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/03/peak_attention_and_the_dupont_equation "The lesson: Return on Equity, like peacock tail splendor, is a very poor guide for allocating resources. It fails for two reasons. First, fixating on ROE fails to maximize the benefit of business to society because it measures value in terms of returns to only one stakeholder; second, it allocates human resources as if maximizing the efficiency of financial capital were critical to growth of social welfare."
"Looking at Apple, you'd conclude it had been using this equation for a long time. It has focused on building an ecology, earning its fair share of the rewards but leaving plenty for others who can earn them (at the expense of those who have historically extracted margin from market power by restricting the market). Apple's offers are more highly valued than its competitors '— largely for intangible reasons ranging from design to sustainable disposability — and have extremely broad appeal globally. And it has brought true innovation to market more frequently than perhaps any other consumer products company ever."

via https://twitter.com/#!/mstem/status/204786970793218050

via https://twitter.com/#!/MJ_Coren/status/204760702634819585

via https://twitter.com/#!/kvox/status/204619408549740547 "what I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother’s bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering—who can so conscientiously facilitate it?""Wallace had had bypass surgery four years ago and had been at a facility in Connecticut ever since.

This is not just a drawn-out, stoic, and heroic long good-bye. This is human carnage. Seventy percent of those older than 80 have a chronic disability, according to one study; 53 percent in this group have at least one severe disability; and 36 percent have moderate to severe cognitive impairments; you definitely don’t want to know what’s considered to be a moderate impairment.""An independent life goes into receivership—and you think, How did we miss all the failing indicators? My mother, like a rogue accountant, had been hiding much of the evidence: She could no longer tell time, nor count, nor keep track of dates.""It is among the most reductive facts in this story: Women take care of the old. They can’t shake it because they are left with it. In the end, it is a game of musical chairs. The girl is the one almost invariably caught out.""The absurdity of where we are, here on death row, measured not just in our heartache but nationally in hundreds of billions of dollars, can only be missed by the people who have no experience with the true nature and far-flung extremes of quality of life."

via http://twitter.com/robotchampion/status/204891883305058304

via https://twitter.com/#!/mstem/status/204620313533759490 "Achievement Unlocked: Thesis
On May 21, 2012, in MIT, Truth Goggles, by slifty
Remind me to never do that again.""When people consume information they are struggling hard to maintain their identity. That’s all there is to it. There is plenty of evidence that people consume information with ideological motivations. Those motivations often cause them to accept or reject information based on how well it aligns with what they already believe. I have a theory that if you could just remind someone that there’s nothing to fear — that you aren’t trying to change who they are — you will suddenly be able to actually communicate with them.""Credibility breeds respect, and respect breeds open minds. Several participants in the Truth Goggles user study commented that having a credibility layer made them more willing to consider perspectives and messages that they might have normally ignored completely. "

"There's so much stuff being generated and tested automatically it's hard to keep an intellectual grip on it. One of the papers was generated entirely as a side effect of an old paper which got rerun automatically with a new dataflow and a new algorithm, another came out of the crowd-sourced analysis that I launched a month ago (expensive though it is now to get a timeslot slot on the best "human computers"!) And I don't particularly know the authors of any of them.

So what are we researchers to do with the automated research deluge... what is Paradigm n+1? We've Taylorised the bulk data processing, we have a bunch of tools to help us do our individual pieces of insight and innovation, we get paid directly on outputs. We're taming the sociotechnical science machine but how do we get new intellectual insights at the higher level? My dashboard is all very well, I love the viz of my work over space and time, and I know my specialist pieces inside out. But I want to work at a level of abstraction that builds on all this, where I can be insightful and play in this amazing new laboratory/sandpit that we've co-evolved with machines, and to do that I need something different - a new form of scholarship perhaps? I think we're just beginning to discuss, describe and choreograph the problems in a new way and perhaps this is a glimpse of the next shift."

"To manufacture a one inch gobstopper takes two weeks!

It probably takes seven minutes to eat one. Every minute you suck that's two days. An hour a second!"

"macro-economics, on which topic Ray Dalio's paper A Template for Understanding What is Going on is an astoundingly good explanation of the current global credit crisis. Dalio explains:

the difference between credit and money: credit is the promise to deliver money, and credit spends just like money. While credit and money spend just as easily, when you pay with money the transaction is settled; but if you pay with credit, the payment has yet to be made.
that while money exists, credit is created and disappears simply by belief: most of what people think is money is really credit, and it does disappear. For example, when you buy something in a store on a credit card, you essentially do so by saying, 'I promise to pay.' Together you created a credit asset and a credit liability. So where did you take the money from? Nowhere. You created credit. It goes away in the same way. Suppose the store owner justifiably believes that you and others might not pay the credit card company and that the credit card company might not pay him if that happens. Then he correctly believes that the 'asset' he has isn't really there. It didn't go somewhere else.
and finally, in two paragraphs so deft that they have to be read to be believed, a description of the game of Monopoly firstly in terms of property vs cash, and secondly a version modified to allow the bank to create credit, in which case the game starts exhibiting the same credit cycles as our actual economy.""I now understand credit as transferring no risk. The bank may front me cash now, but I give them security in the form of my house or something else. I retain all risk, nothing is transferred. There is no risk to the bank in issuing the credit. What I'm paying the bank for is access to their proprietary marketplace to exchange forms of capital - in the case I mentioned, cash and houses - together with a promise that the exchange won't be finalised so long as certain conditions are met. So credit is possible not because the bank is able to absorb risk, but because:

the bank has an internal marketplace in which it is able to hold open many capital exchanges; and,
the bank is able to enforce - using the legal system itself - the fungibility of capital and obligation: if it gives me cash, it can get my house in return.
Yes, the bank does have risk here, but it's not the same risk as my risk. It's new risk.

Interestingly what this leaves available is a system in which risk and cash are exchanged, where risk is transferred. This is what investment is, and this is what Kickstarter does."

"One of the things that has intrigued me is how the pursuit of profit by a corporation - the concept of which is bizarre, by the way, that "pursuit" is a something that can be done by a "corporation," a thing/idea partially comprising but also transcendent from the humans who can actually pursue - anyway, how the pursuit of profit by a corporation leads to the very many (but not all) frankly shitty organisations that exist in the world today, organisations which

neither make the people in them happy;
nor make the people who interact with them happy;
are none-the-less profitable!
but dealing with them feels a bit like dealing with a person whose memory is sub 3 seconds, and whose left hand and right hand are controlled by separate bodies who fell out once over a silly and probably avoidable situation and a decade later now won't even go to the same parties, the misunderstanding having calcified and cooled into a mutual avoidance which is no longer seething - it would show up as dark blue on one of those thermal imaging cameras - but is utterly fixed."

via http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/16/fuelband_for_alpha_waves

"I'd like to wear this the whole time, and become more mindful of how much time - and for how long - I'm concentrating, reflecting, etc. And over time, being mindful of this, could I see whether I'm happier/more productive/more creative when I spend (say) regular time each day reflecting, or long periods of time on a single day concentrating, and so on.""The models currently in this space are exemplified by two companies, both based on Neurosky's technology:

Home of Attention, which caters to managers for trainers and managers for education and self-improvement. In their literature there are phrases like : You learn to relax at any time, You learn how to use your concentration to access any required performance at an instant. Other companies focus brain training on different sectors, and adjust their branding accordingly.
Toys and games, of which my favourite is the Necomini cat ears headset. These ears perk up when you see something interesting (food, a pretty boy), and fall when you relax. A neat toy... and done right it would be entertaining to see these in bars, although I have a feeling they're really a Hypercolor for checking people out.
Neurosky themselves have an app store.

But I think these companies are missing a trick. I'd like to introduce focus, good design, and vertical integration, and take lessons from successes like Nike+ and Foursquare.

I would love to take the Neurosky MindWave technology, have it store data for later syncing as a Bluetooth Smart Device, make it look great, wrap a FuelBand self-awareness and goals iPhone app around it, build in a mood tracking feature for feedback - maybe correlate it with email and calendar/todo list activity, Twitter/Facebook updates (for another mood datapoint), and Foursquare (for location) - and sell it as a headband."

"The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active.""The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life""Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers."

via https://twitter.com/#!/MJ_Coren/status/204170424924372993

via https://twitter.com/#!/kvox/status/204002652865052674

via http://twitter.com/samplereality/status/203838629511053312

via http://twitter.com/namenick/status/203803109884051456

"Even less people will download physibles from The Pirate Bay than download ebooks, but those who do will shape the world for the rest of us. They will be that hot nozzle, spraying our sense of physical existence into reality according to precisely calculated coordinates."

"Decisions are made by those who show up""What I desperately want is a move toward an evidence-based culture in politics. Politicians are free to say: "I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral." That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: "I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that." That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."

via https://twitter.com/#!/mrgunn/status/203511340478906369

via https://twitter.com/#!/MJ_Coren/status/203515535982477312 and https://twitter.com/#!/MJ_Coren/status/203507274109558784 "Once you start looking at news media through the lens of fungibility and with sort-of-media in mind, it’s actually quite easy to see where opportunities remain.

Amp up storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable. This American Life, for instance, or The Awl.
Acknowledge that you provide less value than you used to, downsize and capitalize on scale. What national newspapers are doing, albeit unwittingly.
Join the revolution. Adrian Holovaty comes from journalism, but EveryBlock isn’t journalism.
People read because they’re bored. Un-bore them, like Gawker does.
Write to people’s passion, and they will gobble up just about anything. MacRumors and many other niche sites do this.
Do stuff that does still matter. People are happy to support ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.
Notice that I didn’t mention digital-first or social data crowdjournalism or anything like that? Wonder why? Because the entire point is that journalism is not being disrupted by better journalism but by things that are hardly recognizable as journalism at all. Stepping up your game is always a good idea, but it won’t save you."

via http://twitter.com/ericrumsey/status/203566589700866048 "The most vociferous of Facebook’s detractors contend that it has a long track record of aggressive, if not downright abusive, privacy policies."

via http://twitter.com/augustmuench/status/203566651973709824 "Mr. Gray was 63 when he disappeared. His death certificate, though, will be dated Jan. 28, 2012, when he would have been 68."