The Attention Economy The #attentioneconomy is a unified model of social organization. In the previous post, I described some very general features of the attention economy, and hinted at your role in it. In this post, I will describe a simple thought experiment for thinking about how the attention economy might serve as a general organizational infrastructure. 10: The Marble Network Imagine that everyone straps a little box on their foreheads. These little boxes produce tiny invisible marbles at some rate, say: 10 marbles every second. While you are wearing the box, it shoots invisible marbles out at the objects you happen to be looking at. Those objects along with everything else in the environment are equipped with little devices that register and absorb the incoming marbles, so that all your marbles get absorbed by something. These marbles are a crude approximation of the attention you pay. Every time you pay attention to some object, it gets bombarded with the marbles shooting from your forehead. The idea seems silly because it is. I’d never suggest we actually fling high speed projectiles in arbitrary directions from boxes mounted on people’s foreheads, that would be dangerous and irresponsible. If this is to be implemented at all, it would of course be rendered digitally and transparently as best as our technology will allow. Moreover, the direction a person’s head is facing is a terrible indicator of where their attention is being paid; to do this precisely, we’d need something far more sophisticated. But leave these technical details aside for the moment. This is a toy model, and I’m describing it in some detail to help us think about what the attention economy is doing, and what we are doing in it. So boxes on foreheads with marbles shooting out with some frequency and […]

h/t +Gideon Rosenblatt Tyger AC originally shared this post: Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens. All this to say: our collective memory of past is astoundingly inaccurate. Not only has the number of people reading not declined precipitously, it’s actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters. The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart Not only has the number of readers not declined since the golden age of American letters, it has gone up.

neurovisualization originally shared this post: this is a really interesting interview with prof. olaf sporn about computational neuroscience. also check out the other great podcasts at brainscience. NETWORKS OF THE BRAIN – OLAF SPORN Interview with Dr. Olaf Sporns, author of Networks of the Brain, which is a comprehensive introduction to the application of Network Theory to Neuroscience. Network Theory is an important tool for dealing with the massive amounts of data being generated by our current technology. We discuss basic concepts and also explore some of the interesting discoveries that are being generated by this approach.For detailed show notes, including links and episode transcripts go to http://brainsciencepodcast.com. h/t +Brain Science Podcast Home – Brain Science Podcast Brain Science Podcast show notes and blog

This is an important social innovation, because, unlike classic non-profits or non-governmental institutions, they do not operate from the point of view of scarcity. Classic NGOs still operate much like other industrial institutions, such as the corporation and the market state, as they believe that resources need to marshalled and managed. By contrast, the new for-benefits have only an active role in enabling and empowering the community to co-operate – by provisioning its infrastructure, not by commanding its production processes. These associations exist for the sole purpose of benefitting the community of which they are the expression. This is good news, as they are generally managed in democratic ways. And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would discourage contributions by the community of participants. Here is the kicker. What would you call an institution that is responsible for the common good of all the participants? I would argue that this type for for-benefit institution has a very similar function to what we commonly assign to the state. h/t +David Guthrie http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123111423139193.html The ‘welfare state’ is dead – long live the ‘partner state’? As the welfare state declines, what’s needed are democratically-run, civic institutions that protect the common good.

John Verdon originally shared this post:

Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Complex systems: Spotlight on mobility Complex systems: Spotlight on mobility Nature 484, 7392 (2012). doi:10.1038/484040a Authors: Dirk Brockmann The complexity in patterns of human mobility, migration and communication has been difficult to unpack. Researchers have now come up with a simple theory that captures the intricacy of such phenomena. See Letter p.96

In America we have a motivation problem : money. I’m not a communist. I love capitalism (I even love money), but here’s a simple fact we’ve known since 1962: using money as a motivator makes us less capable at problem-solving. It actually makes us dumber. When your employees have to do something straightforward, like pressing a button or manning one stage in an assembly line, financial incentives work. It’s a small effect, but they do work. Simple jobs are like the simple candle problem. However, if your people must do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives hurt. The In-Box Candle Problem is the stereotypical problem that requires you to think “Out of the Box,” (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?). Whenever people must think out of the box, offering them a monetary carrot will keep them in that box. A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. ^When you’re focused you are less able to think laterally. You become dumber*. This is not the kind of thing we want if we expect to solve the problems that face us in the 21st century. Is your job like that of a button pusher? or do you have to think creatively? What about a CEO? The results above apply more to a CEO than almost anybody, yet CEOs receive greater financial incentives than anyone. This practice is self-destructive. Now I understand why the CEO of Company X killed his golden goose. I understand why he decimated R&D. I understand why he upped the number of spurious lawsuits against competitors instead of investing in long term growth. He was incentivized. He was focused. The stock price was the most important metric of judgment. The same is true for many other companies. http://blogs.nature.com/a_mad_hemorrhage/2012/04/02/ceos-and-the-candle-problem CEOs and the […]

Gerd Moe-Behrens originally shared this post: Leukippos Institute Evolutionary Synthetic Biology by Sergio G. Peisajovich “Signaling networks process vast amounts of environmental information to generate specific cellular responses. As cellular environments change, signaling networks adapt accordingly. Here, I will discuss how the integration of synthetic biology and directed evolution approaches is shedding light on the molecular mechanisms that guide the evolution of signaling networks. In particular, I will review studies that demonstrate how different types of mutations, from the replacement of individual amino acids to the shuffling of modular domains, lead to markedly different evolutionary trajectories, and consequently to diverse network rewiring. Moreover, I will argue that intrinsic evolutionary properties of signaling proteins, such as the robustness of wild type functions, the promiscuous nature of evolutionary intermediates, and the modular decoupling between binding and catalysis, play important roles in the evolution of signaling networks. Finally, I will argue that rapid advances in our ability to synthesize DNA will radically alter how we study signaling network evolution at the genome-wide level.” http://bit.ly/Hd65fd #syntheticbiology #synbio #syntheticbio Evolutionary Synthetic Biology – ACS Synthetic Biology (ACS Publications) Signaling networks process vast amounts of environmental information to generate specific cellular responses. As cellular environments change, signaling networks adapt accordingly. Here, I will discus…

Matt Uebel originally shared this post: #RaceAgainstTheMachine . Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK | how to survive the economic collapse and be happy You are about to become obsolete. You think you are special, unique, and that whatever it is that you are doing is impossible to replace. You are wrong. As we speak, millions of algorithms created by …