11/27/10
11/23/10
Gamepocolypse - a list
11/21/10
Access Economy / Collaborative Consumption
Great article. Here are my favorite snippets
Bruce Sterling, “visionary in residence” at Art Center College of Design and founder of the Viridian Design Movement (precursor to the weblog Worldchanging) suggests in his Last Viridian Design Lecture that our obsession with stuff has deep socioeconomic roots, but that we may have turned the corner to a new age:
“In earlier, less technically advanced eras…material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship…They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors…So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.
That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.”
Combined with a healthy questioning and reexamination of objects themselves, is deciding when and how we are willing to interact. Buying sometimes can lead to a sort of indentured servitude to the inanimate. As Bruce Sterling puts it:
“The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.”
Micki Krimmel, founder of NeighborhoodGoods, has created a community lending site that allows people to lend and borrow things from friends and friends-to-be. This borrowing movement, profiled in a fairly recent NYT article, has been dubbed by author Rachel Botsman as “collaborative consumption,” or by co-founder of firm, SnapGoods, an “access economy” where “access trumps ownership.”
The beauty of these ventures lies in the fact that they all start with very pragmatic motivations, like “I need a blender for that BBQ on Saturday, but I don’t want to go out and buy one,” or “Maybe I could make a little extra cash lending out my forklift,” but then spin out to loftier benefits, like a strengthened communities and resource conservation.
This idea that stuff is an impediment to a more happy and fulfilling life is something we’ve been wrestling with, on and off, for a while. After all, Thoreau’s two-year experiment in self-sufficiency and a simple life in Walden was quite a while back, in 1845. Though the world is no longer big enough for all of us to have our own pond, what we’ve been seeing recently have been some increasingly elegant alternatives.
11/13/10
Introduction to Complexity Science
This video (and slides) introduces the core concepts of complexity in the context of both natural and engineered systems, and explores the ways in which new computational systems, models, and simulations are taking part in complexity science.
Exponential and Scale-Free Networks
Complex systems which are composed of many interacting entities can be represented, analyzed and better understood using a network representation, where the entities are represented by nodes and the interactions by links. In recent years it was realized that the topology of many real networks is very different from that of the classical graph theory. In particular, while classical graphs were assumed to be homogeneous with every node having a typical number of links (degree) real networks are usually heterogeneous (e.g., the Internet) with nodes having very different degrees. Shlomo Havlin discusses these developments as well as many recent applications, such as robustness, effective immunization strategies and optimal transport in real world networks.
Screen Shots
11/8/10
AEIOUT
All the necessary elements to build a process model of an ecosystem:
Activities
Environments
Interactions
Objects
Users
Time
