Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics

46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Infographics are interesting–a mash of (hopefully) easily-consumed visuals (so, symbols, shapes, and images) and added relevant character-based data (so, numbers, words, and brief sentences). The learning application for them is clear, with many academic standards–including the Common Core standards–requiring teachers to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency. It’s curious they haven’t really “caught on” in schools considering how well they bridge both the old-form textbook habit of cramming tons of information into a small space, while also neatly overlapping with the dynamic and digital world. So if you want to try to make infographics–or better yet have students make them–where do you start?

Climate change: Red alert in the Anthropocene It is fitting that “Anthropocene”, the term coined just more than ten years ago by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, denotes the new ecological period, following the end of the Holocene, when humans became the principal force driving changes in the planetary system. I say this because the Holocene (“New Whole”), or stable geological period of about 12 000 years between ice ages, came to an end around the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s, which is exactly the time when humans moved into the position where they are capable of affecting life on earth as we know it. Unfortunately the Anthropocene may turn out, if scientists working in the area of the geo-sciences are correct in their assessment of what are now called “planetary boundaries”, to be a mere flicker in terms of geological time. For example, the pre-industrial value of climate change was 280 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration.

O.System - The future of personal electronics - RCA IDE “In 2025, consumer electronics will no longer be the same.” Purchased through the O.System they will allow each and every one of us to customise our electronic products online, adding personal touches. This is a project by Peter Krige, Alexander du Preez and Hannes Harms, students of Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art. Using printable electronics and rapid manufacturing, the project proposes a local consumer electronics industry addressing the obsolescence of electronic goods and the subsequent problem of e-­waste. It is an exciting future scenario where consumers are involved in the making of their electronic goods thanks to flexible, low cost, printable electronic components.

Critics say IBM patent giveaway is not enough By Ann Bednarz, Network World Fusion | Network World US | Published: 11:00, 17 January 2005 IBM last week unlocked access to 500 of its software patents for the open source community, generating mixed reactions from industry watchers. While IBM's move could help users get new open source products faster by removing development roadblocks, open source advocates and patent watchers ultimately would like to see companies such as IBM change their overall software patenting strategies. At the centre of the issue is current US patent practice, which grants what critics say are overly broad patents on trivial or abstract processes.

The Right To Privacy by Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis "It could be done only on principles of private justice, moral fitness, and public convenience, which, when applied to a new subject, make common law without a precedent; much more when received and approved by usage." Willes, J., in Millar v. Taylor, 4 Burr, 2303, 2312. PICNIC ’08: The Visible City session Wednesday Sept. 24 I went to one of the sessions at PICNIC ’08 called “The Visible City”. This session was about ways of visualizing mobility patterns in the city. From the announcement: What if an entire city could be visible from above, like we see it from an airplane? Not simply buildings and squares, but also the aggregation of people who populate it, outdoor as well as indoor.

A specific business ecology Over the last few years, China and India have emerged as the twin hot spots of emerging tech innovation. Now IBM (IBM) is betting that one of the next big technology stars will be Brazil. In the latest sign of Brazil's rising power, Big Blue is announcing on Aug. 18 a new initiative to stimulate the development of the country's technology sector. To kick off the effort, IBM is hosting its first-ever forum for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in São Paulo along with FINEP, the Brazilian government agency that finances technology development. The daylong event will bring together more than 100 investors and dozens of new companies looking for investment and business advice. IBM is also launching a Portuguese version of its developerWorks Web site, which provides free programs and online teaching guides that help programmers build skills in the Java programming language, the Linux operating system, and IBM products such as Lotus.

Science Pope Okay, if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably thinking to yourself either “What can I do to help?” or “Holy shit, I’m so scared I think I peed a little. From M2M to The Internet of Things: Viewpoints From Europe As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Rogers CEO Nadir Mohamed was featured in The National Post and believes in a future of machine-to-machine technology as a massive revenue generator over the next three to five years, much like the rest of the telecom industry. M2M is loosely defined in my opinion as just one aspect of the Internet of Things as it is computers communicating with one another to perform tasks at hand, just as we use computers to communicate socially with one another, while another side is “smart objects” communicating with various forms of mobile media to devices and with each other. I touched on this some months ago that mobile media was enabling product or object media to occur.

IBM's Crafty Intellectual Property Strategy IBM came up during a discussion at the Salzburg Global Seminar, a five-day conference in Austria on new models in intellectual property. IBM is known, of course, for innovation. That may be best reflected in the number of patents it nabs: The company has ranked first in the world for the last 15 years, with more than 3,100 last year alone. But IBM, according to one of the seminar’s co-chairmen, is just as creative in the inventions it gives away. The generosity may make IBM look like a good guy championing the open source movement. Why permaculture needs to expand systems thinking to handle natural disasters Climate change may ultimately force us to live in more resilient, ecocity-like settlements. What are the chances that the New Jersey shoreline hit by Hurricane Sandy gets rebuilt along your design ideas? What would you tell the local planners if they asked you for help?

Essay: 21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection 21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection 1. A text file For some years I’ve been collating a list in a text file, which has the banal filename “21st_century_gestures.txt”. These are a set of gestures, spatial patterns and physical, often bodily, interactions that seemed to me to be entirely novel.