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Commons Shared resources The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values (social practice) employed for a governance mechanism.[1] Commons can be also defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates .[2]
» How to Find Out if Someone is Using Your, or Your Child’s Images Online In the wake of the recent news about digital kidnapping, the odd phenomenon of adults using photos of other people’s children to role play that they’re their own, it’s important that parents know what can be done to see if anyone is using your child’s photo. Once you post a picture online, it’s hard to know where it’s going to end up. Most likely, it will be one of the millions that people scroll past on their Facebook feed everyday. Considerably less likely, it could go viral and become a meme. But somewhere in between those possibilities, is the potential for that image to be used by strangers for all the wrong reasons.
the Foresight Institute » More on the AI takeover There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names: Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such as Roomba or industrial robots or automated call-center systems or dictation programs.Robo habilis: Rosie the housemaid robot level intelligence, able to handle service level jobs in the real world but not a rocket scientist.Robo sapiens: up to and including rocket scientists, AI researchers, corporate executives, any human capability.Robo googolis: a collection of top R. sapiens wired together in a box running at accelerated speed, equivalent to, say, Google (the company and the search engine together).
Charles Eisenstein Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being. This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons.
Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings This feature is available on Firefox for desktop or laptop computers. If you're having problems with Firefox, refreshing it can help. The refresh feature fixes many issues by restoring Firefox to its default state while saving your essential information like bookmarks, passwords, and open tabs. Important: Since Firefox will revert to its original state, your own configurations and customizations, including extensions, extension data, and about:config preference configurations are removed. Create UIs Out of Anything, With This Kit From MIT Mainstream computer interfaces are tough to get right, because they have to be everything to everyone--which is impossible. Even something as "no duh" as a touch screen is going to make someone, somewhere, gripe that it’s not quite right for them. Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum of the MIT Media Lab have come up with a solution to this problem that’s so weird it just might be perfect: MaKey MaKey, a kit that lets you turn any object--food, toys, clothes, whatever--into an ultra-personalized UI. MaKey MaKey works with "any material that can conduct at least a tiny bit of electricity." For some reason, many of the suggested uses of MaKey MaKey on its website involve food: Use an apple as a computer mouse!
Free and Open Data as a Worldwide Economic Engine –Cameron Neylon is Advocacy Director at PLOS. Previously, he was a Senior Scientist at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and a faculty member at the University of Southampton. The opinions expressed are those of PLOS. What will the UK collaborative economy look like in 2025? Amid rising popularity and disruption, where is the UK collaborative economy headed? Nesta has created six possible future scenarios for the UK collaborative economy. Looking ahead to 2025, each scenario highlights some of the key trends and assumptions that are currently driving forward this space, such as micro-entrepreneurship to environmental sustainability to local economic development. By no means exhaustive or exclusive, the scenarios are intended to stimulate discussion and prompt reflection on the future of the collaborative economy – and how we can influence this future.
Sharing Revolution The recent rise of the commons and the sharing economy seems to suggest a growing recognition of the fact that our health, happiness, and security depend greatly on the planet and people around us. On the Commons highlights the many ways, new and old, that people connect and collaborate to advance the common good and develop greater economic autonomy in our new e-book Sharing Revolution: The essential economics of the commons by Jessica Conrad. You can download the free e-book here. If Sharing Revolution adds value to your life and helps you see how the commons amplifies this new economic revolution, we hope you: Consider supporting our work with a financial contribution of any amount. Help us stand up to protect all that we share together.
5 Things You Never Knew About the Sharing Economy In TIME’s new cover story, Joel Stein takes readers on a wild ride through the sharing economy—renting out his car, chauffeuring people around late into the night, making dinner for strangers and even toying with the idea of doing other people’s laundry. To read the full post, please subscribe to TIME. Here are five big takeaways about why we trust strangers with our stuff, our lives and our homes.