soul rebels

Ecologist Eric Berlow doesn't feel overwhelmed when faced with complex systems. He knows that more information can lead to a better, simpler solution.

Via Anne Caspari

...The head-scratcher is: the measurement is made before the decision is made, and it is accurate. "Classical correlations can be decided after they are measured," says Xiao-song Ma, the writer of the study. Entanglement can be created "after the entangled particles have been measured and may no longer exist."

Via Mushin

TED Talks Lisa Gansky, author of "The Mesh," talks about a future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer.

Via TWU SOM

Five ways to drive large-scale social change by working cooperatively.

Via ddrrnt

On the roof of Zuidpark office in Amsterdam is a huge Urban Farming roof constructed by Leven Op Daken...

Via Jeroen Boon

Stadslandbouw levert in New York een belangrijke bijdrage aan het oplossen van problemen die spelen in een wereldstad. Het is niet nieuw. Al in de jaren ’70 en ’80 werden in arme wijken Community Gardens ingericht waarmee een bijdrage geleverd wordt aan het oplossen van problemen in de stad. De Community Gardens zorgen voor waterberging, sociale binding, vers voedsel voor bewoners en educatie. Programmamanager Groen en Welbevinden van het PT Niko Moerman zag tijdens zijn studiereis naar New York dat groen daadwerkelijk een bijdrage kan leveren aan het oplossen van problemen in de grote stad.

Via Jeroen Boon

What can governments learn from the open-data revolution? In this stirring talk, Beth Noveck, the former deputy CTO at the White House, shares a vision of practical openness -- connecting bureaucracies to citizens, sharing data, creating a truly participatory democracy. Imagine the "writable society" ...

Via Henk Nouwens, Jeroen Boon

Blended learning is a powerful and promising strategy, but what happens when we flip the blended learning model and think of it from the self-directed learning and the student-centered learning perspective? What happens when students choose what and how to blend?

Via David Hodgson

Jeugd wil kromme komkommersPowNedVan een groentenbezorgservice tot stadslandbouw en diensten als proviandruil.nl en thuisafgehaald.nl.

Via Jeroen Boon

Via Rick Passo

Trouw
Studenten ontwikkelen een stadsboerderij
Trouw
Stadslandbouw is hip, maar de hoofdstad heeft vooralsnog geen eigen buurtboer die haar van vers en lokaal voer voorziet.

Via Jeroen Boon

1) Embrace the Swarm. As power flows away from the center, the competitive advantage belongs to those who learn how to embrace decentralized points of control.

2) Increasing Returns. As the number of connections between people and things add up, the consequences of those connections multiply out even faster, so that initial successes aren't self-limiting, but self-feeding.

3) Plentitude, Not Scarcity. As manufacturing techniques perfect the art of making copies plentiful, value is carried by abundance, rather than scarcity, inverting traditional business propositions.

4) Follow the Free. As resource scarcity gives way to abundance, generosity begets wealth. Following the free rehearses the inevitable fall of prices, and takes advantage of the only true scarcity: human attention.

5) Feed the Web First. As networks entangle all commerce, a firm's primary focus shifts from maximizing the firm's value to maximizing the network's value. Unless the net survives, the firm perishes.

6) Let Go at the Top. As innovation accelerates, abandoning the highly successful in order to escape from its eventual obsolescence becomes the most difficult and yet most essential task.

7) From Places to Spaces. As physical proximity (place) is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space), the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-size niches expand greatly.

8) No Harmony, All Flux. As turbulence and instability become the norm in business, the most effective survival stance is a constant but highly selective disruption that we call innovation.

9) Relationship Tech. As the soft trumps the hard, the most powerful technologies are those that enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand, and develop soft relationships of all types.

10) Opportunities Before Efficiencies. As fortunes are made by training machines to be ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.

Via Xaos, Spaceweaver, ddrrnt

"...One study of 65 subjects suggests that creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence. 'The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B” when it comes to intelligence, Dr. (Rex) Jung explained. “But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.'"

 

Eide Neurolearning Blog

13 Sep 2010

Via ddrrnt

"I believe that we will need to produce food in our urban centres, because I can’t figure out how else we are going to meet an increased demand from our cities. With over 50% of the world’s population living in them, currently relying on an unsustainable agricultural system to deliver all the nourishment they need, it’s not hard to understand that something will need to change.

In order to meet this need in the ways of a permaculturist, I have dedicated my working hours to the concept of Edible Cities."

Via David Hodgson

Snippets from Christine Milne's speech at the National Press Club in Canberra.

26 Sep 2012

 

"The economy is a tool; a tool we humans invented - like democracy and politics - to help govern our relationships between each other, and between ourselves and the world we live in. If our economic tools are not getting the outcomes we want, making us happy, safe, healthy, better educated and fulfilled and protecting and preparing our country for an increasingly uncertain future in a world on track to be 4 degrees warming, then it is time our economic tools changed."

 

"Most of the battles of political philosophy over the last two centuries have been about competing views of how to run an economy. Where the old economic right, broadly speaking, has sought to create a 'strong' economy and the old left sought to create a 'fair' economy, neither has grappled with how an economy can be strong or fair when ecological limits are being reached: 'without environment there is no economy'."

 

"What is not excusable is that the old parties continue to do so. They have failed to keep up over recent decades when the huge ecological challenges of the 21st century - from accelerating global warming to food and water shortages, from air and water pollution to energy crises and resource depletion in a world headed to 9 billion people - have become overwhelming. How can we say we are working towards a strong or fair economy when we aren't addressing these challenges? Just as we hit the limits, the big old parties are moving closer to each other and further out of touch with what people and the real world need."

 

"To set us on our new path, a path to an economy which serves the needs of people and nature, both for today and for tomorrow:

We will need new economic tools;We will need to learn to do more with less;We will need to reprioritise our investments; andWe will need sensible management of taxation and revenue to fund these investments.It is a case of rethink, reduce, reuse and recycle"  

"What will be different is that we will have replaced the idea that Australia's wealth is dependent on digging-it-up, cutting-it-down and shipping-it-overseas with the knowledge that our prosperity depends at a personal and collective level on our brains, on our health, on our creativity and on a healthy environment."

 

"But are the Greens actually anti-growth? That depends on what you are growing and how it is measured. I am for growing natural, human, social, manufactured and financial capital and I am against growing global warming, species extinction, poverty, poor health, inequality, conflict and corruption."

 

"The Greens want to see everyone given the opportunity to "practise the Art of Living", we want to see people lifted out of poverty, and we know that unless this is done while protecting the environment which sustains us it can only last a very short time. That is what growth is supposed to achieve. The problem is, we measure it with the wrong tools; tools which tell us we're growing when in fact we're not.

If economic growth as it is currently measured isn't actually making us happier, healthier, cleverer or safer then it isn't real growth. If we are growing our economy in defiance of physical limits, that isn't real growth: it's a confidence trick."

Via ddrrnt

Psychologists from the University of Toronto and Harvard University have identified one of the biological bases of creativity.

 

... the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment.

Other people’s brains might shut out this same information through a process called “latent inhibition” – defined as an animal’s unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs.

“This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment,”

“If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or you’ll get swamped.”

... during the early stages of diseases such as schizophrenia, which are often accompanied by feelings of deep insight, mystical knowledge and religious experience, chemical changes take place in which latent inhibition disappears.

“We are very excited by the results of these studies,” says Peterson. “It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological bases of creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception.” 

 

01 Oct 2003

Via ddrrnt

Introduction In recent decades there has been a renewed interest in the social underpinning of economic life (Nee and Swedberg 2005), with debates focusing on phenomena such as embeddedness and the role of networks (Granovetter 1985), and the social-...

Via Flora Moon, David Hodgson

Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.

Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts. They’ve even come up with language to address the problem between perception and belief. Their word for self is anatta, which is usually translated as ‘non self.’ One might try to refer to the self, but the word cleverly reminds one’s self that there is no such thing.

David Weisman
SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

Via ddrrnt