Tuesday, January 7, 2014

tweets

Rethinking the MDGS and our approach to poverty reduction - my new piece in @skollworldforum http://t.co/rL7FR4khLi

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/Ubuntujakes/status/419120844334305281

Distributing 1,000 cups of soup may, for instance, help hungry children for a day, but this strategy will never eradicate a household’s pervasive food insecurity.

so excited about what he was writing until i got to here:

It’s working. An independent study found that Ubuntu students are now more than twice as likely to grade from high school as their peers and, for every $1 that we invest in them, they will earn $8.70 in real earnings over the course of their lives. Yet, although Ubuntu’s overarching model is applicable around the world, our programs may only produce lasting change in Port Elizabeth.

graduation and roi via monetary standard... oi..

but he is spot on - that we keep not getting at the root. a root that would perpetuate itself.. rather than die out in 5 years, 5 days..

ttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/five-economic-reforms-millennials-should-be-fighting-for-20140103#ixzz2pSkxwX2Q

A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating."

resonating with 2, 3, and 4.. and 1 only if work is per choice.. not sure why we need banks...

Gunther Sonnenfeld (@goonth)
1/5/14 7:40 AM
We need to look beyond payments -> Discovering the Meaning of Money & Value in the Age of Bitcoin designingliteracy.com/literacyofthei… #economics #value

This meant that people (serfs or ‘commoners’) were pitted against each other as they fought over access to natural resources. As this occurred, Dutch, French and German groups started to see that these tensions and their volatility were good for their banking and business interests, because they could make value scarce, and could contain the labor force. So, ‘goods’ and ‘services’ were tied to the ability to distribute and manufacture, but only in limited supply and increased demand

Bankers themselves would hedge the speculative demand, placing bets on price fluctuations and essentially creating ‘profit’ from the perceived future value of the commodity, resource, good or service

Capital’ became a unit of stock and trade assigned to inventory flows, meaning that if a business could produce enough goods to stock its shelves, it had the assets to have capital value, of which banks and unions could lend and distribute currency. Issues naturally arose as to what those values actually were, especially as labor was commodified in order for businesses to remain competitive.

By the 1700s, independent groups formed to tackle the issues associated with social mores (like slavery), as well as conflicting notions of free trade and commerce practices. Ben Franklin’s Junto was created in Philadelphia in order to help the local community solve critical issues such as educational needs, food for the poor, artistic endeavors and merchant protocols. Other junto groups would form over the years to deal with similar socio-economic complexities and cultural explorations.

American independence would prove to be a boon for those running communities and secret societies, but as the Civil War rolled around, it would become evident that money, capital and currency could not offset the value of human contribution, and as such, conservative and liberal idealism would grow as mechanisms for control of labor and resources continued to divide constituencies

Central banking powerhouses such as the Rothschilds -- that have been said to be supported by the Vatican Bank and were commissioned to develop a ‘new monetary system’ -- proliferated in virtually every developed country, issuing a debt currency which was ultimately known as a ‘fractional-reserve note’. These notes were initially issued for storing gold reserves; the bank was essentially a vault that held the asset and would collect a fee to release it at a later date

As time went on, the central bank realized it could move reserves around, buy up its own gold and issue the same notes. This was basically a ‘promise to deliver a promise to deliver’ -- that sounds kind of odd, but it’s true: the bank could lend several times the amount it held in assets, while the country had to commit not only to paying back the loan, but at a fairly high interest rate. In other words, a sovereign government would be drawing down a debt note, but not necessarily an asset

In many instances, this meant that if the cost to produce and distribute was favorable, the debt could easily be repaid. If it wasn’t, the government would draw down even more debt, thinking that ‘at some point’ it would enter a surplus period and all debts would be then be paid off or absolved through offsets

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/01/05/one-year-in-asia/

We raised $33,298 for @charitywater. So I swam naked from Alcatraz to SF, obviously. http://t.co/EwvP13l0VO

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/sarahkpeck/status/419968819701223424

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2014/01/13/140113crat_atlarge_morozov

Fascinating story on how "12 Years a Slave" director McQueen was labeled as a student: http://t.co/j2FmUdY8Bj

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/nancyflanagan/status/420202899524698112

"I don't know, I'm struggling. I'm struggling here. I've never examined myself. This is hard because I'm going back to certain times in my life I haven't really thought about for a long time. And maybe I avoided that because it was always a very difficult time in a way, and a lot of people were damaged on that journey, friends of mine. And it was all because of people not giving a fuck."

School was painful because I just think that loads of people, so many beautiful people, didn't achieve what they could achieve because no one believed in them, or gave them a chance, or invested any time in them.

edutopia (@edutopia)
1/6/14 8:07 AM
MT @magicalmaths: 50 Ideas to Use in an Outstanding Math Lesson: edut.to/1edvPdU #mathchat

ha. fitting.

lost original tweet this goes to...

A lot of beautiful boys, talented people, were put by the wayside. School was scary for me because no one cared, and I wasn't good at it because no one cared. At 13 years old, you are marked, you are dead, that's your future."

Tom Peters (@tom_peters)
1/6/14 8:08 AM
I thought a narrator was a guy who read other people's stories aloud?

Jason Silva (@JasonSilva)
1/6/14 8:07 AM
On creativity and domesticating madness:m.on.aol.com/video/518024789

Jeffrey Cufaude (@jcufaude)
1/6/14 8:06 AM
@jhagel @tom_peters @sandymaxey Interesting discussion, one that happened while millions of people just had to get work done.

CSU News Service (@ColoStateNews)
1/3/14 6:51 PM
.@CSUVetHospital expert in emergency and critical-care medicine named director of CSU#Veterinary Teaching Hospital col.st/JPfEtB

Jason Silva (@JasonSilva)
1/6/14 8:10 AM
Explore the perimeters of possibility... Probe the adjacent possible.. Inspired by @stevenbjohnson's work: m.on.aol.com/vid eo/518034470

shrinking the lag time

sandymaxey (@sandymaxey)
1/6/14 8:10 AM
@tom_peters I don't agree with you on that point, Tom. Narrative suggests (to me) a leverage point of/for engagement/generativity @jhagel

DML Research Hub (@dmlresearchhub)
1/6/14 8:10 AM
Hope and Optimism: The Other 21st Century Skills bit.ly/1iacTzv via@jackiegerstein

The #NHR walk across New Hampshire begins in 5 days: @aaronsw, RIP. http://t.co/bdMdzRu7Tn

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/lessig/status/420210843054510081

http://www.fastcompany.com/3023591/angela-ahrendts-a-new-season-at-apple

people matter. trust isn't dependent on people being trustworthy

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/2014/01/06/update-missing-greece-man-found-but-questions-remain-/4341671/

http://www.reporterherald.com/business-top-stories/ci_24841298/longtime-personal-trainer-opens-legends-pro-gym-south

isabela (@Isa)
1/6/14 9:43 PM
@mbauwens I wrote an article about the brazilian social currency: medium.com/free-software-…

the why ness..

the middle man ness

Michel Bauwens (@mbauwens)
1/6/14 10:33 PM
RT @jdaviescoates: Hey @JanelleOrsi @CommonFutrs I've just recommended you both to@mbauwens as women who grok both #open and #coops

Love Honour Respect (@Halibutron)
1/6/14 10:35 PM
expensive boondoggle…paying bondholders who own #student #debt…NOT turning out educated, resilient & adaptable people owl.li/skCnn

shows that the total take from American universities in tuition for undergraduate programs is $62.6B, while the Federal government is spending $69 billion on grants, aid loans, tax breaks and other funding.

The implication is that it would be cheaper to give away university education than to charge for it, but that's not quite right (federal education f

maintain a cheap public system (and remember, public schools educate 75 percent of undergrads), we spill them into a fairly wasteful and expensive

Americans have an allergy to straightforward policy solutions involving the public sector. And for that, we pay a price

huge..

IDEO (@ideo)
1/6/14 10:35 PM
RT @Biomimicrist: Awesome. from fellow IDEO alums: Onewheel, the self-balancing electric skateboard: kck.st/19NhN5R via @kickstarter

imagine... 7 bill set free..

Exciting summary of online ed projects in Africa - even Mombasa/Kenya Coast! http://t.co/1W41pvQX6T via @FastCompany @anya1anya

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/sabrinamanville/status/420589196256882689

http://www.fastcompany.com/3023655/tech-forecast/why-the-future-of-online-education-is-in-africa

"Through this program, we will be working to match graduating students with the appropriate skill sets into known openings within our partner community."

nternational donors and investors are supporting blended learning programs in the hopes of achieving major impact quickly, by educating students directly for the workforce. The economic imperative is driving new African education ventures hard in the direction of technology and entrepreneurship--courses of study with paths to immediate employment. What doesn't, largely, get funded in this scenario are the next generation of African designers, historians, poets, artists, or political scientists, or the pure research leading to the world's next big ideas. Research output at African universities is low, but research output at University of the People, Kepler, or iHub is zero.

On the Commons@OntheCommons

Now you can dwnld your free copy of our newest ebook "The Commons Guide to Placemaking and a Convivial Life" here:bit.ly/H6dO7a

Saturday, January 4, 2014

tweets

Ignored by big companies, Mexican village creates its own mobile service - Times Of Indiahttp://t.co/7TQtPR6E5v via @ArchiveDigger

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/418944040189444096

So good. “@cvharquail: Fabulous, provocative podcast about leaders, communities and belonging. v @gpetriglieri http://t.co/1QJGaeHKST”

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/umairh/status/419000199768715264

when your mother says she's fat
https://medium.com/human-parts/bf5111e68cc1

ian interview
http://ctrnetwork.com/events/sharing-the-best-ideas

http://www.thenation.com/article/155801/city-ruins#

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/6232:the-corporate-state-will-be-broken

http://www.amazon.com/Days-Destruction-Revolt-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586434

Here's Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free -http://t.co/nkxC4w9qyJ

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/rogerschank/status/419479993819734016

George Siemens (@gsiemens)
1/2/14 7:43 AM
Reasonably short and accessible history of databases and mistakes being re-made with NoSQLopensourceconnections.com/2013/12/11/cod…

Index Dependencies: What’s an index? This data model does not mention indices. Indices are, for better-or-worse, a knob that gets tuned at a place the application does not interact with the database.

And from that apply those lessons to today’s NoSQL databases. Are today’s databases repeating mistakes of the past? Or are they filling an important niche (or both?).

Codd proposed to get around these limitations by focusing on a specific abstraction: relations. A relation is simply a tuple of elements. The ith element of each tuple is a member of some set, known as that element’s domain. Perhaps a given element’s domain is the set of users, user ids, possible movies to rent, etc. So for our videos, a tuple might look like:

 (user=u, address=a, list of movies rented=l)

Or in other words

 (doug, 1234 Bagby St, [Top Gun 3.99, Terminator 12.99])

One can interpret this relation to “mean” any number of things. We might equate this to a statement that “Doug rents Top Gun at 3.99 and Terminator at 12.99” or “Doug lives at 1234 Bagby St”.

Adding to this, Codd proposes an idea known as normalization. Codd only touches on the basics of normalization in this first paper. Suffice it to say, one important goal of normalization is to create flatter and less-redundant relations, creating simpler sentences from our relations. In Codd’s first-order normalization, what he introduces in his paper, we’d rather say “Doug rents Top Gun at 3.99” and “Doug rents Terminator at 12.99” instead of including both movies in the sentence. In relation terms, this would look like:

Users Relations
(user=doug, address=1234 BagbySt)

Movies-Rented Relations
(user=doug, movie=Top Gun, price=3.99)
(user=doug, movie=Terminator, price=12.99)

With simpler and normalized relations, we can use Codd’s new JOIN operator that can derive relations from other, simpler and normalized relations. This is extremely powerful. In other words with JOIN we can construct knowledge from smaller units of knowledge

In short, Codd created a beautiful abstraction that turned out to be reasonable to implement. Instead of building on what had been done with databases, he went to the roots of predicate calculus and created a clean and beautiful way of interacting with data.

spot on.. for what we need to be doing in the world..

new deal.. deal over..

all cards/sectors back in.. fresh/old eyes/sesnses...

no...?

It’s a pretty singular and daring achievement in fact to assert “this is the abstraction we should use” and have it be largely successful. There was not much anticipating Codd’s invention of relational databases. It wasn’t, as is common today, a minor innovation on previous innovations. Instead it was simply Codd’s vision. Pretty cool stuff!

huge.

ginormously small.

doable.

what we need/crave...

no...?

t wasn’t, as is common today, a minor innovation on previous innovations. Instead it was simply Codd’s vision. Pretty cool stuff!

The wrench-in-the-spokes of-course came when we decided to build horizontally scalable systems “webscale” as all the kiddies say. Doing a JOIN over a distributed system turns out not to scale well. Because of this, we started to see old themes reintroduced, specifically the denormalized, hierarchical databases of yore in the form of many of today’s NoSQL stores.

Most importantly, when using a NoSQL store, your opportunities for ad-hoc querying becomes much more limited. Whereas relational databases hold sacred the goal of allowing you to define more complex information from more primitive information, NoSQL databases require performing massive batch processing through map-reduce to create derived information.

Moreover, the lack of normalization requires potentially large amounts of data duplication. If tracking users renting videos in a hierarchical data store, how does one update the inventory successfully? If users own videos, does this require a map reduce job to visit every user record and update the count. Will this occur atomically across all the records?

In short, denormalization stinks!

Whereas relational databases hold sacred the goal of allowing you to define more complex information from more primitive information, NoSQL databases require performing massive batch processing through map-reduce to create derived information.

ie... people depending on and/or oppressed by elite/aged/history/comfort....

databases.. huge to deep address ness moving us back to a culture of trust.. - no-strings/unconditional ness

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/01/renounce-term-the-mentally-ill?utm_content=socialflow&utm_campaign=nprfacebook&utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook

more deep address ness.. avoiding danger of just one story ness

Seth's Blog: The hard work of understanding

Thursday, January 2, 2014

tweets

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military

My minor heresy was #1 on Guardian Comment today. Kind of troubling, in that this far more important piece was #2. http://t.co/CNA6dLJNQF

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/bratton/status/417910210707996673

Thanks for all the comments today, I’ll hopefully be able to reply. in the meantime, One Vision!http://t.co/LXTeu6pdgZ

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/bratton/status/417907288037273600

http://charleseisenstein.net/2013-a-year-that-pierced-me/

Beyond these personal gifts, it is the beauty, courage, and goodness of human beings that sustains me. It is my wife, Stella, in childbirth, utterly in the process, never despairing, never even complaining. Here is a what a human can be. It is the piano player at Gezi Park, miraculously halting the violence with the power of music. It is my son, Jimi, starting a “feelings group” after school and an appreciation box in the cafeteria. It is the Idle No More movement seeking to end ecocide, the striking non-unionized workers of Wal-Mart and McDonalds, the whistleblowers Manning and Snowden, the people on the streets in Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, Spain… It is the especially the people I meet who perform the most humble, invisible acts of service, caring thanklessly for children or the sick or aged or disabled.

All of these people confirm my intuition of what human beings really are, and what the world could be. That same intuition is fed by the occasional bits of good news that seemed especially significant in 2013. For the first time, public opinion stopped the U.S. from going to war (in Syria and maybe Iran). A sacred plant medicine, cannabis, became fully legal in Uruguay, Colorado, and Washington. Thanks to public outcry, the EU Seed Law was halted.

http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/breaking-the-cycle-of-poverty-98664515606

Fred Bartels (@fredbartels)
1/1/14 5:24 AM
With #cityMOOC1 I'm attempting to connect those who study #cities, #communities, #networks,#neurons, #schools, #evolution and the #brain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism#Libertarian_education_and_freethough

Max Stirner wrote in 1842 a long essay on education called The False Principle of our Education. In it Stirner names his educational principle "personalist," explaining that self-understanding consists in hourly self-creation. Education for him is to create "free men, sovereign characters," by which he means "eternal characters ... who are therefore eternal because they form themselves each moment".

Schools and districts jumping through hoops to create a set of meaningless documents. An incredible waste of time and resources.

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/funnymonkey/status/418491325789396992

https://plus.google.com/106481679227287369472/posts/fuN4RcQ4A27

posted on fb by howard with this..

Something problematic is definitely happening in San Francisco, and gentrification is part of it, but the focus on the Google Bus and tech workers, the vast majority of whom are not entitled loudmouths like Peter Shih and Greg Gopman, is a good "trend" story and bad social criticism. Robert Rossney takes on Rebecca Solnit. He's a clear thinker and an excellent writer.

If you really want to know how San Francisco became unaffordable, don’t ignore the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency - decades ago

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/418580637948194816

.@_jden @burritojustice “Ten years that shook the city” & “Imperial San Francisco” cover how, who, why of San Francisco urban shaping

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/418587204747677697

Parents' Message to de Blasio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7h732u7s4I#t=45

The future of higher education shouldn't be reduced to a series of bizarre turf wars. There is a bigger game afoot.

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/Jessifer/status/418596072890445824

Idiots. Institutional arrogance. http://t.co/dFPFlGijrQ”

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/WestWingReport/status/418613465277005826

http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/10/the-man-who-lives-without-money.html

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/peter-sloterdijk-on-the-acceleration-of-the-pace-of-social-change/2014/01/01

posted on fb by anne and michel

http://nypost.com/2014/01/01/homeless-youths-sue-city-for-not-providing-enough-shelter/

Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald)
1/2/14 7:28 AM
Former Obama State Dept official RT @SlaughterAM I agree with @nytimes on Snowden. "Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower" nyti.ms/KlskJv

Global Voices (@globalvoices)
1/2/14 7:33 AM
Hundreds of Local Chinese Lawmakers Dismissed Over Massive Bribery Scandal bit.ly/JKlPiI pic.twitter.com/IXC4QGMabb

According to social media, the Hengyang bribery scandal was not a secret. Earlier this year, the case was circulated among some investigative journalists in China, but they weren't able to publish due to pressure and censorship. Doctor Liu Yun from the Haikou College of Economics wrote:

湖南衡阳人大代表贿选案值得注意的是除了大面积大规模贿选暴露的人大选举制度的弊端，还有此案是在中央最高层的多次直接干预下才得以查清并做出处理的。

In addition to exposing the drawbacks of the electoral system, it's worth noting that such a large-scale bribery case was only able to be identified and exposed with the highest level of direct intervention from the central government.

Spencer Ante (@Spencerante)
1/2/14 7:33 AM
Big Data: NY eclipses Valley as startup incubator. “@dtapscott: The New Global Start-Up Citiesow.ly/s8QYq”

Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida)
1/2/14 7:38 AM
Here's the full text of Bill de Blasio's inauguration speech - via the NYT -nytimes.com/2014/01/02/nyr…

Jason Silva (@JasonSilva)
1/2/14 7:38 AM
Thanks for the interview! RT “@iamthatgirl: Meet the guy changing the face of digital storytelling: THAT GUY iamthatgirl.com/that_guy_jason…”

The Armory Workspace (@armoryworkspace)
1/2/14 7:41 AM
Pretty excited to show off the redesigned website thearmoryworkspace.com#coworking #Loveland