The Wolfson Economics Prize and the Euro-Zone Breakup A breakup in the euro zone just got more real with the announcement of the short list for the Wolfson Economics Prize, a prestigious economics award that has the biggest payout (£250,000, or about $400,000) after the Nobel Prize. This year’s Wolfson-challenge question was: “If member states leave the Economic and Monetary Union, what is the best way for the economic process to be managed to provide the soundest foundation for the future growth and prosperity of the current membership?” The fact that we now have several published answers to that question written by serious economists makes the breakup issue all the more pressing. The basic problem hasn’t changed since I first wrote about it in TIME’s cover story “The End of Europe” last summer. (MORE: Is Germany’s Euro-Crisis Strategy Actually Working?) The good news is that the ECB’s cash infusion has probably staved off, at least for the next year or so, a full-on European banking crisis, which would almost certainly infect the U.S.
The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy And the Society of the ... - Jonathan Beller Daniel Estrada on Philosophy of Technology: Part 1 - hwcd Recently I’ve met two compatriots, fellow philosophers of technology. At some point we’ll get around to the second, but for now I’d like to introduce the first, Daniel Estrada. I met Estrada through mutual friends on Google+, and his informed commentary and fascination with ants and robotics and Turing quickly won me over. His stream is flagged as “Essential” he keeps it fairly active. But what interested me most was when he described his involvement with the Center for Talented Youth, particularly a course he leads on philosophy as it relates to technology. He agreed to discuss his curriculum in an email interview, the first part of which is below. Jordan: You’ve been teaching a course on Human Nature and Technology this summer. Daniel: I’ve actually been teaching the course since 2005, for a program called the Center for Talented Youth run out of Johns Hopkins university. The details here shouldn’t concern us too much; this obviously isn’t the best theory of biology we have going.
Peer-to-Peer Equity: Crowdcube With the introduction of p2p lending some lenders wrote that the concept enabled everyone to feel as banker. Now, newly launched Crowdcube.com enables any UK resident to feel as venture capitalist for a financial commitment as low as 10 GBP. Investors can browse pitches which usually include business plans and financial projections and sometimes even video pitches. In return for the investment, investors get shares of the company. There are 6 entrepreneurs pitching for funding at the moment. Crowdcube, founded by Darren Westlake and Luke Lang, launched 2 weeks ago. Investors are charged a processing fee by Crowdcube for each transaction equal to the sum of 0.20 GBP plus 4% of the value of the transaction. While the platform enables mini-investments for very small amounts that would not be possible/feasible without such a p2p equity platform, there are a few downsides for investors to consider: Actually foreign investors *can* invest and some have. Did you use Crowdcube?
The Attention Economy The watchword of the twentieth century might have been: if you wish to capture the hearts and minds of a generation, dazzles its eyes. Nowadays, track the gaze. Nineteenth century: industrial economy. Twentieth century: economy of the spectacle. The critic Louis Althusser proposed a short fable about political participation that was often referred to by academics in the twentieth century. We might say that in the twentieth century, the political subject came into being at the moment he responded to the police—being seen seeing. What about this century? At least in the last century you could still recognize the political consumer as an integer. Attention is a kind of tribute exacted in increments small enough and dispersed enough that we often fail to notice the loss. There are two important principles for negotiating the attention economy, and they only appear to be contradictory. The attention economy is like a computer that tracks your eye movements as a trace.
Who Can Name the Bigger Number? [This essay in Spanish][This essay in French] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the contestants take turns. But what if the contestants write down their numbers simultaneously, neither aware of the other’s? So contestants can’t say "the number of sand grains in the Sahara," because sand drifts in and out of the Sahara regularly. Are you ready? The contest’s results are never quite what I’d hope. And yet the girl’s number could have been much bigger still, had she stacked the mighty exponential more than once. , for example. or Place value, exponentials, stacked exponentials: each can express boundlessly big numbers, and in this sense they’re all equivalent. —yet the first number is quotidian, the second astronomical, and the third hyper-mega astronomical. .) . Fee. Nope. Conclusion?
3D Printing is Merged with Printed Electronics (NASDAQ:SSYS) Revolutionary "Smart Wing" Created for UAV Model Demonstrates Groundbreaking Technology From Stratasys and Optomec --(BUSINESS WIRE)-- (Nasdaq: SSYS) and Optomec Inc. today announced that the companies have successfully completed a joint development project to merge 3D printing and printed electronics to create the world's first fully printed hybrid structure. Additive manufacturing first: Electronic circuitry was printed onto a model of a UAV wing, which itself was 3D printed. The first project, the development of a "smart wing" for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) model with functional electronics is a revolutionary event that has the potential to change product development in industries including medical device, consumer electronics, automotive and aerospace. "Bringing together 3D printing and printed electronic circuitry will be a game changer for design and manufacturing," says , VP of direct digital manufacturing at . Forward Looking Statements Source: News Provided by Acquire Media
Attention Economy: The Game In my course Friend Request Denied: Social Networks and the Web I have my students play a game I developed to let them explore the dynamics of building a reputation online by giving and capturing attention. It’s also a fun way for students to get to know each other. I’m posting the game instructions and materials here (under a Creative Commons license) for anyone who wants to try it. If you make any improvements, please share! Attention Economy: The Game Ulises A. How do new bloggers gain recognition? This game is an accelerated simulation of the process of gaining attention online (acquiring more readers, friends, hits, etc.). Number of players: around 10-25 Time for activity: 45 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending on number of players) Background Attention is “the action that turns raw data into something humans can use” (Lanham, in Lankshear and Knobel, 2003, p. 111). Game Set Up Goal: Collect the most attention. Players: Newbies: Individuals who just joined the online community. Materials:
Geographic History Enjoys a Renaissance The first history we write is a history of races. Our tribe’s myth is here, yours is over there, our race is called “the people” and blessed by the gods, and yours, well, not so blessed. Next comes the history of faces: history as the epic acts of bosses and chiefs, pharaohs and emirs, kings and Popes and sultans in conflict, where the past is essentially the chronicle of who wears the crown first and who wears it next. But beyond, or beneath, these histories is the history of spaces: the history of terrains and territories, a history where plains and rivers and harbors shape the social place that sits above them or around them. Two new books meant for a popular audience lay out this geographic turn in eloquent and encyclopedic form, though with two different purposes: Robert D. “Mountains and the men who grow out of them are the first order of reality,” Kaplan writes now. The West made history, but the East drove it. Are there any rules to this game?
bifo says relax by malcolm harris | thestate Of the anti-capitalist scholars and intellectuals who prescribe a political program, Franco Berardi might have the most counter-intuitive ideas. In his many articles, books, and lectures, Berardi pushes a curious line against a mind-warping market culture. During the current period of youth-led urban unrest, Berardi has consistently preached a resistance strategy that emulates the process of aging. While capital says go faster, make more, consume more, his call for “senilization” says slow down, work less, consume less. Berardi wants a detox from capitalism’s psyche-damaging relations, and it’s not just a metaphor. In a new formulation he calls “post-futurism,” Berardi poses the Futurist fetishization of muscular youth against “the force of exhaustion, of facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom.”1 We have enough things, he writes; what we really want is more time in which to flourish. .
A persistence paradox Paperwork Against the People Paperwork Against the People Photo by redjar, 2000, Flickr creative commons The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork by Ben Kafka Zone Books, 2012, 182 pp. We are all familiar with tales of inept clerks wasting people’s time, focusing on inane procedural concerns at the expense of common sense and elevating the protocols of paperwork for their own sake over the functions bureaucracy is ostensibly intended to perform. How did such horror stories of clerical uselessness become so socially useful, so tellable? The range of examples Kafka marshals demonstrate how these seemingly inevitable tales of bureaucratic incompetence and subversion have been put in service across the political spectrum. This wasn’t the intent, of course. The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence. Perhaps, but to what end?
Small-Town Solar Revolution Has Created Jobs Galore & Driven Down Price of Power in Germany Clean Power Published on March 19th, 2012 | by Zachary Shahan Solar energy policies in Germany have resulted in a jobs boom and have driven down the price of power on the EPEX Power Exchange. More people work in Germany’s solar energy sector than in its coal and nuclear sectors combined. (Don’t tell this year’s GOP candidates — they somehow think clean energy and green jobs is all just talk.) Solar Energy Is (or Can Be) Community Energy Solar energy can allow “the little guy” to power the country (well, a lot of little guys). “Yes. This is how clean energy can help individual citizens, of course, but it’s not necessarily how it’s done everywhere (i.e. in the U.S.). “The US is slowly switching to renewables, but it is nearly completely shutting out the little guy, with only two percent of installed wind power capacity not owned by giant corporations. Hmm, something to think about. Solar: Bringing Down Power Prices (or Keeping Them from Going Up Too Fast) About the Author
The Attention Economy Forget money; recognition is the new motive force. We’re happy to be paid in attention, social recognition. Attention is currency — advertisers make it so — and thus garnering personal attention starts to feel more significant, for its own sake. Hence reality-TV narcissism and public journaling and rampant exhibitionism in our culture.