The End of Cyberspace

links for 2010-05-28

• Regent University: School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship - Academics - Master of Arts in Strategic Foresight
  The Master of Arts in Strategic Foresight (MSF) exists to help fulfill Regent University's mission to "Develop Globally Competent, Christ-Centered Leaders, Who Make a Difference in the World." The primary world we prepare our graduates for is the world of work, to empower them to help their organization navigate the turbulence waters of the 21st century and create the global enterprises of tomorrow.
  (tags: education foresight)

links for 2010-05-27

• Scenario Planning -- Thomas J. Chermack -- Chermack Scenarios
  Chermack's publications on scenario planning.
  (tags: scenarios planning bibliography GPPAG)
• Bibliography on scenario planning
  Published by the Scenario Planning Institute at Colorado State University.
  (tags: scenarios planning scholarship GPPAG)
• The 'Unconference': Technology Loosens Up the Academic Meeting - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education [sub req]
  "Some humanists have concluded that there is a better way [than the traditional conference, which totally sucks in every way it is possible for something to suck]: the unconference, a meeting style that became popular in the technology world. It is "a lightly organized conference in which the attendees themselves determine the schedule," wrote Ethan Watrall, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, in a recent ProfHacker blog post at chronicle.com on the history of unconferences and how to organize one. Goodbye, program committees and formal presentations; hello, crowdsourcing and workshopping."
  (tags: conference academia)

links for 2010-05-26

• STANFORD Magazine: March/April 2007 > Features > Mind-set Research
  (tags: psychology mindset learning)
• Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities | The New York Review of Books
  "British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy."
  (tags: academia uk)
• C19 Index - Home page
  "Welcome to C19: The Nineteenth Century Index – the most comprehensive and dynamic source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. C19 Index draws on the strength of established indexes such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.5 million books and official publications, 71,000 archival collections and 18.9 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers. C19 Index now provides integrated access to 12 bibliographic indexes, including almost a million records from the ongoing digitization of British Periodicals Collections I and II, plus the new Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. See About for more information on coverage, and linking to texts available online."
  (tags: history newspapers databases culture 19c victorian)
• The Unanticipated Consequences of Technology
  "The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ubiquitous phenomenon of unanticipated consequences. We begin with a look at some definitions which shed light on the matter, and then consider the nature of change. This leads to a broadening of the definition of the word 'technology', and a look at what was one of our earliest examples of unanticipated consequences. We then address the crucial question of why we have such consequences. Some additional examples follow, and we then look at what society does in the face of unanticipated consequences. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the ethical implications of acting when we know that there can be unanticipated consequences to our actions."
  (tags: technology sts unintended_consequences)
• Unintended Consequences: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty
  "The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it."
  (tags: unintended_consequences economics politics future)
• JSTOR: American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 894-904 [sub req]
  "In some one of its numerous forms, the problem of the unanticipated consequences of purposive action has been treated by virtually every substantial contributor to the long history of social thought."
  (tags: sociology future unintended_consequences)

links for 2010-05-25

• Jürgen Neffe: The disembodied book (14/05/2009) - signandsight
  In the shadows of the global financial crisis of the early 21st century, another revolution is gathering pace, whose repercussions reach far beyond the current correctable economic buckling. It impact on the world will compare with Gutenberg's. And with it, the era of the printed book will come to a close. Dissolved digitally like sound and image beforehand, limitlessly copyable, globally downloadable by the million with the click of a mouse, the book is entering the world of multimedia like its disembodied cousins from film, photography and music. This is the disintegration of the oldest serially produced data carrier in terms of form and content.
  (tags: books publishing culture reading future technology printing)
• Eurozine - Written in the stars? - Brian Holmes Global finance, precarious destinies
  This essay describes the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the centre of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience. It begins not with the azurean blue, but with the curve of a dark horizon.
  (tags: finance globalization technology)
• Eurozine - Can democracies deal with climate change? - Claus Leggewie, Harald Welzer
  Rising energy costs and the eco-social consequences of climate change are causing anxieties about the future to increase, while trust in the ability of political elites to solve these problems is evaporating. Reaching eco-political targets calls for more participation of citizens as active architects of their society, write Claus Leggewie and Harald Welzer.
  (tags: environment climate energy politics citizenscience)
• Harald Welzer, Claus Leggewie: Jolly eschatology (21/10/2009) - signandsight
  "[W]hat they sell us as realpolitik these days is a complete illusion, because it doesn't address any the problems of the future – climate change, dwindling resources, mounting water and food deficits, the escalating global conflict potential, the exploitation of our children's future. If you look at it this way, it's the realpoliticians who seem who have a fondness for crises. Crises also provide an excellent opportunity to score points for tireless crisis management. This is good for distracting from the fact that there is nothing on the political agenda."
  (tags: ecology politics)
• Our Giant Banking Crisis—What to Expect | The New York Review of Books [sub req]
  Important review of a VERY important book. "[W]hat is the message of This Time Is Different? In a nutshell, it is that too much debt is always dangerous.... Yet people—both investors and policymakers—tend to rationalize away these dangers. After any prolonged period of financial calm, they either forget history or invent reasons to believe that historical experience is irrelevant.... There were superficial differences between debt now and debt three generations ago: more elaborate financial instruments, seemingly more sophisticated techniques of assessment, an apparent wider spreading of risks (which turned out to have been an illusion). So financial executives, policymakers, and many economists convinced themselves that the old rules didn’t apply.... Encouraged by these rationalizations, people run up ever more debt—and in so doing set the stage for eventual crisis."
  (tags: economics forecasting psychology future risk)
• How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review
  Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.
  (tags: productivity multitasking management work)
• Mindful Eating is Attention Management | 360 Degrees of Mindful Living
  On mindful eating.
  (tags: mindfulness diet)
• App Choice Fail
  The problem of oversharing in the age of the Internet of Things....
  (tags: endofcyberspace humor internetofthings exercise)

The Internet of Things, amusement edition

This caught on Failbooking.

links for 2010-05-24

• Center for Catastrophic Risk Management
  The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) is part of the University's response to recent disasters—and efforts to anticipate future calamities. CCRM was started by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, and has become part of the Institute of Business and Economic Research to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of its research team.
  (tags: risk catastrophe UCBerkeley)
• Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft’s Main Role - NYTimes.com
  A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.
  (tags: surveillance space amateur)
• Socio-Digital Systems - Microsoft Research
  Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) aims to use an understanding of human values to help to change the technological landscape in the 21st century. Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.
  (tags: research microsoft sociology creativity culture design psychology)

links for 2010-05-23

• The Revs Institute
  Welcome to the Revs Institute for Automotive Research, Inc., library and archive Web site. We are an educational organization that advances the scholarly study of automotive history at The Collier Collection in beautiful Naples, Florida. Numbering more than one million items, these distinctive and highly specialized research books, documents and images are collected by Mr. Miles C. Collier to record the history of the automobile and the individuals and organizations associated with it. Scholars, journalists, automotive connoisseurs, hobbyists and preservationists will find our holdings formidable—an automotive history library and archive with few peers.
  (tags: automobile museum history technology)

links for 2010-05-21

• New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
  This pretty much sums up my feeling about Foursquare: "Foursquare is a little bit of everything—a friend-finder, a local city guide, an interactive mobile game," said company cofounder Dennis Crowley, as if reading from the same tired script used by every one of these Web 2.0 or whatever-the-****-they're-called startups. "But more than that, Foursquare is an [endless string of meaningless buzzwords we just couldn't bring ourselves to transcribe]."
  (tags: humor media socialsoftware geoweb)
• Living in denial: When a sceptic isn't a sceptic - opinion - 18 May 2010 - New Scientist
  "WHAT is the difference between a sceptic and a denier? When I call myself a sceptic, I mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims.... Scepticism is integral to the scientific process, because most claims turn out to be false. Weeding out the few kernels of wheat from the large pile of chaff requires extensive observation, careful experimentation and cautious inference. Science is scepticism and good scientists are sceptical. Denial is different. It is the automatic gainsaying of a claim regardless of the evidence for it - sometimes even in the teeth of evidence. Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact."
  (tags: environment psychology science)
• Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth - opinion - 19 May 2010 - New Scientist
  "What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial? Here's a hypothesis: denial is largely a product of the way normal people think. Most denialists are simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right. If this seems discouraging, take heart. There are good reasons for thinking that denialism can be tackled by condemning it a little less and understanding it a little more."
  (tags: science politics psychology)
• Is Wharton Ruining American Business? - Philadelphia Magazine - phillymag.com
  In the wake of Enron and ­other corporate ­scandals, America’s best-known business school, the place that produced Michael Milken and Frank Quattrone, is under siege. Our writer spent a year there figuring out what’s going on
  (tags: business)

links for 2010-05-19

• Carmen M. Reinhart, Eight Hundred Years of Financial Folly [pdf]
  The economics profession has an unfortunate tendency to view recent experience in the narrow window provided by standard datasets. With a few notable exceptions, cross-country empirical studies on financial crises typically begin in 1980 and are limited in other important respects. Yet an event that is rare in a three decade span may not be all that rare when placed in a broader context. In my paper with Kenneth Rogoff we introduce a comprehensive new historical database for studying debt and banking crises, inflation, currency crashes and debasements. The data covers sixty-six countries in across all regions. The range of variables encompasses external and domestic debt, trade, GNP, inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices. The coverage spans eight centuries, going back to the date of independence or well into the colonial period for some countries.
  (tags: economics forecasting foresight finance)
• This Time Is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises
  "This paper offers a “panoramic” analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England’s fourteenth-century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis. Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions. It incorporates a number of important credit episodes seldom covered in the literature, including for example, defaults and restructurings in India and China..... [O]ur aim is to illustrate some of the broad insights that can be gleaned from such a sweeping historical database. We find that serial default is a nearly universal phenomenon as countries struggle to transform themselves from emerging markets to advanced economies. Major default episodes are typically spaced some years (or decades) apart, creating an illusion that “this time is different” among policymakers and investors. A recent example of the “this time is different” syndrome is the false belief that domestic debt is a novel feature of the modern financial landscape."
  (tags: economics finance history research forecasting foresight)
• Why Snap Decisions Work
  "Intuition, it seems, is not some sort of mystical chemical reaction but a neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma (e.g., fight or flight). Too much data, however, throws a monkey wrench into the process. The more variables we consider, the harder it is to make the "right" decision--as anyone who has faced an aisle full of shampoos knows.

  Our brains have evolved to take the quickest and most efficient route to a decision, based on experience and a set of innate and unconscious rules developed since birth to negotiate our physical and social environment. Start considering lots of other information and variables, and the brain slows down or falters. Simplicity, writes Gigerenzer, is an evolutionary adaptation to uncertainty: "A complex problem demands a complex solution, so we are told. In fact, in unpredictable environments, the opposite is true.""

  
  
  (tags: psychology strategy neuroscience decision-making)
  
  
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  Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility - New York Times
  
  
  Gerd Gigerenzer on gut feelings. "It comes quickly into a person’s consciousness. The person doesn’t know why they have this feeling. Yet, this is strong enough to make an individual act on it. What a gut instinct is not is a calculation. You do not fully know where it comes from. My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term “heuristics.” These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations, when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues and ignoring other unnecessary information."
  
  
  (tags: cognition neuroscience psychology decision-making)
  
  
• 
  
  Gerd Gigerenzer: I Think, Therefore I Err
  
  
  "Why do we make errors? are they blunders caused by the limitations of our cognitive system? Or are errors indispensable parts of every intelligent system? From the first perspective, all errors are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful.... From the second perspective, there are errors that need to be made—that is, errors that are indispensable and functional.... The characteristic of a good error is that a person is better off making the error than not making it—for reaching a goal more quickly, or attaining it at all. In this view, every intelligent system has to make errors. Making no errors would destroy the intelligence of the system."
  
  
  (tags: cognition intelligence error psychology prediction)
  
  

links for 2010-05-18

• Second Thoughts About the Autopilot - NYTimes.com
  "[A]re airliners so automated that pilots are becoming complacent? ...'The introduction of automation did good things,' said Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors at NASA. But it changed the essential nature of the pilot’s role in the cockpit. 'Now the pilot is a manager, which is good, and a monitor, which is not so good.' "
  (tags: technology ergonomics interaction_design aviation design psychology attention)
• Fears of brain drain as renowned British scientists move to Canada | Science | guardian.co.uk
  And I thought the Canadians were supposed to be so nice... "Britain is to lose several of its foremost scientists next year following a recruitment drive to attract top brains to Canada. The four researchers will leave their posts at UK universities for better-funded positions in institutions across the country. The British researchers won four C$20m (£13m) awards created by the Canadian government, the most by any country outside the US, which is to lose nine scientists to the scheme."
  (tags: neuroscience science brain_circulation globalization competitiveness)