I've decided to move the Del.icio.us posts to my main blog, as they're now less exclusively end of cyberspace-related.
The End of Cyberspace
Goodbye, virtual world. Hello, new world.
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August 2010
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- Social bike sharing
- The Copenhagen Wheel
- Digital overlay on the physical world picture of the day
- The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are: "Let me think about that"
- Turning off Del.icio.us reposting
- links for 2010-07-19
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- Memory arts and mindware
- links for 2010-07-15
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192 posts categorized "Del.icio.us"
Turning off Del.icio.us reposting
20 July 2010 at 13:38 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-19
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George Loewenstein argues against over-reliance on behavioral economics in public policy-- and especially using it to evade difficult decision-making. "Behavioral economics should complement, not substitute for, more substantive economic interventions. If traditional economics suggests that we should have a larger price difference between sugar-free and sugared drinks, behavioral economics could suggest whether consumers would respond better to a subsidy on unsweetened drinks or a tax on sugary drinks. But that’s the most it can do. For all of its insights, behavioral economics alone is not a viable alternative to the kinds of far-reaching policies we need to tackle our nation’s challenges."
19 July 2010 at 18:35 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-18
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On Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, and his interesting, complex relationship with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. "Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace."(tags: books)
18 July 2010 at 18:34 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-16
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Profile of the 1970 World Game and esp. SIU's group, "a company of future oriented, inter-disciplinary technological explorers who are participating in the World Game, a unique experiment to develop a computer coordinated model of planet earth—complete with resources, history, human attitudes and social trends—that can be used to "play the world" and develop ways of running the future for the benefit of all mankind. The experiment is being conducted in more than 20 universities and colleges in the United States, Canada and Europe but its center is housed in the basement and first floor of a monotonous two-story brick building surrounded by a dusty, graveled parking lot, about six blocks off-campus from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois."
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The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark has argued that humans have always been ‘natural-born cyborgs,’ that is, they have always collaborated and merged with non-biological props and aids in order to find better environments for thinking. These ‘mindware’ upgrades... extend beyond the fusions of the organic and technological that posthumanist theory imagines as our future. Moreover, these external aids do not remain external to our minds; they interact with them to effect profound changes in their internal architecture. Medieval artificial memory systems provide evidence for just this kind of cognitive interaction. But because medieval people conceived of their relationship to technology in fundamentally different ways, we need also to attend to larger epistemic frameworks when we analyze historically contingent forms of mindware upgrade.
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New journal, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.
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"Welcome to myForesight -- Malaysia’s first national-level initiative dedicated to the study and application of Foresight. Besides prospecting technology for business. it provides a common platform for shared experiences, insights and expertise on futures studies -- both at the local and global levels. At this initial stage, myForesight will focus on awareness and the participation of Malaysian stakeholders on Foresight current programmes. myForesight is a joint initiative by various parties who have a dedicated stake in Malaysia’s future.Click on the tabs below for a synopsis of myForesight."
16 July 2010 at 18:35 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-15
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To gain more insight into the extent to which foresters experience uncertainty in their work field, a content analysis has been carried out to reveal how foresters from the United States and (Germanic) Central Europe (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) experience uncertainty. The outcomes were compared with the experiences of uncertainty in a more short-term oriented sector, namely the agricultural sector (also in the United States and in Central Europe). Although the findings must be interpreted carefully, the research reveals that, in contrast to what was expected, foresters experience the future as the most certain time period. Decisionmakers in forestry, as in other business sectors, seem to ignore the uncertainty and pretend that the future is certain. This strategy implies considerable risk and, therefore, for forest management to be effective, there is no other way than actively confronting the futurity dilemma.
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"The importance of strategic planning as an instrument to cope with the uncertain future has been long recognized, especially in forestry which is characterized by its relationship with the distant future. Surprisingly, the question to what extent the future is indeed considered in forestry decision-making has received only limited attention. It is therefore the objective of this paper to explore empirically foresters' relation with time (called time perspectives), and more specifically their future orientation, as a basic prerequisite for strategic planning in forestry."
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Long range (or strategic) planning is an important tool for forest management to deal with the complex and unpredictable future. However, it is the ability to make meaningful predictions about the rapidly changing future that is questioned. What appears to be particularly neglected is the question of the length of time horizons and the limits (if any) to these horizons, despite being considered one of the most critical factors in strategic planning. As the future creation of values lies within individual responsibility, this research empirically explored the limits (if any) of individual foresters’ time horizons. To draw comparisons between countries with different traditions in forest management planning, data were collected through telephone surveys of forest managers in the state/national forest services of the Netherlands and Germany. In order to minimize other cultural differences, the research in Germany concentrated on the federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, which has consider
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More of this, please: studies of how communities view the future. This studies foresters in Europe. "The study takes a different approach than previous research: it takes an actor-oriented perspective and focuses on the question of how foresters actually cope with the uncertain future in their actions. This requires not only a shift in the understanding of time from a physical entity to that of a social realm but – even more importantly – a shift from interpreting uncertainty from some form of independent variable to viewing uncertainty as a cognitive and psychological state – a social construct about the availability and “makeability” of the future."
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" the increasing pace of change has made the future more interesting.
The question "Who owns the future?" has become more urgent. At the same time, in the information society, there is an increasingly varied multitude of answers to this question. Hence, the key becomes asking well-targeted questions. If you ask who owns the future, a lot of answers crop up.... The moment you own the future, it has become the present. Eternally owned is only that which is lost."
(tags: future)
Methods of foresight and future studies are no longer limited to business, government and other organizations. The study of personal futures is still in its infancy, but holds potential not only for you but also for your company. Learn how you can be your own futurist through personal research, and thereby achieve your preferred future.
The Performance Agency, Fiction Pimps, manifest ‘Cracks’ in everyday life – Sensory fictive parallel universes that aim at activating the aesthetic dimension of experience and reflection, to enrich any given situation and the persons involved in it. They fiction pimp and will Crack your World!
…
We are hybrids of performers, sirens, agents, poets, futurists, activists, visionaries, mystics and scientists.
This contribution deals with the problems in thinking and communicating about the future which are due to the variety and complexity of the types of futures, i.e. possible, potential, probable, desired, surprising, creatable future and the like. A set of resulting so called futures confusions is revealed, the goals confusion, the roles confusion and the methods confusion. The types of futures used in practice and discussed in the academic literature are presented comprehensively in order to identify the reasons for the difficulties leaders and managers experience when dealing with long term futures.
The struggle for the future is very much about communication. They who manage to set the agenda will also be those who dominate the decisions and behavior of many others. So we see more and more messages about the future that go hand in hand with media expertise. Even so, we have never been more shortsighted in our view of the future.
(tags: future communication)
Foresight processes and activities are confronted with the task of making sense of the present, in particular by interpreting weak signals of change in the organizational environment. Although trends are considered to be important drivers of environmental discontinuities which may lead to strategic surprises, there is no operationalization from a strategic point of view. In this paper we are going to conceptualize trends as (socio-cultural) innovations. This leads to important implications. If the nature of innovation is taken seriously, then strategic trend diagnosis has to deal with two different aspects, invention and diffusion.
(tags: forecasting weaksignals)
15 July 2010 at 18:34 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-14
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Scenarios are claimed to support strategic decision makers. They are especially effective in dealing with uncertainties. This paper addresses some drawbacks of the conventional scenario method, which is especially directed at handling these uncertainties, and indicates possible avenues for methodological adaptations.
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Foresight processes and activities are confronted with the task of making sense of the present, in particular by interpreting weak signals of change in the organizational environment. Although trends are considered to be important drivers of environmental discontinuities which may lead to strategic surprises, there is no operationalization from a strategic point of view. In this paper we are going to conceptualize trends as (socio-cultural) innovations. This leads to important implications. If the nature of innovation is taken seriously, then strategic trend diagnosis has to deal with two different aspects, invention and diffusion.
14 July 2010 at 18:36 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-13
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In this paper we will study “weak signals” by concentrating on the journalistic texts of The New York Times before the stock market crashes of 1929, 1987 and 2000. The paper argues that, even if information and communication technology advanced dramatically from the 1920s to 2000, the flaws of business journalism in writing about stock markets have remained almost the same: their reporting is too enthusiastic (or positive) and uncritical, and therefore incapable of effectively detecting the weak signals of impending collapses on the Stock Exchange. Thus we might conclude that neither the increase in the speed of spreading the information nor the accessibility to such information necessarily leads to greater efficiency in using it. The New York Times itself stated repeatedly that the policy of the newspaper has always aimed at “not making financial crises worse”. Thus the pages of the newspaper contain more positive than negative articles on stock exchanges.
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Research interests: The subjective value of information; Economics of information goods; Information markets (fee-based, free, social, public goods, prediction, aggregation); Information business models; Voluntary payments for information; Motivations for information sharing; Information overload.(tags: research predictionmarkets)
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…are ideas, trends, technologies or behaviour changes that are as yet unrecognised by mainstream society. They might have a big impact or they might disappear. We monitor them to help our partners challenge their assumptions about the future, navigate risk and seize new opportunities.
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Scanning for Emerging Science & Technology Issues aims to develop a mechanism for the early identification of newly emerging issues of importance to the European research infrastructure. By collecting weak signals and developing anticipatory intelligence, SESTI will provide the means for proactively addressing these challenges at European and national level.
The project builds on and adds value to existing national structures and competences in foresight and horizon scanning to create synergies and exploit complementarities. SESTI aims to provide a transnational “foundation” to horizon scanning to enable efficient use of anticipatory intelligence in both EU and national policy.
The 2-day kick-off conference of the European Foresight Platform has been held on June 14 and 15, 2010 at the Vienna French Cultural Institute in Austria. With over 80 attendees and about 20 presenters the event has been a huge success by bringing together international professional foresight communities, representatives from the European Commission and policy as well as the EFP consortium and the interested general public.A variety of different foresight and forward-looking projects and institutions have been presented at the conference. It has been a tour through all different perspectives of future-related activities which included quantitative forecasting and modeling, scenario development, technology forecasts and roadmaps, societal and cultural oriented future studies, participatory elements in foresight, weak signal and wild card research, foresight databases and ideas about new methods like using gaming and social networks for foresight and forward looking activities.
"It seems an odd thing to me that though we have thousands and thousands of professors and hundreds of thousands of students of history working upon the records of the past, there is not a single person anywhere who makes a whole-time job of estimating the future consequences of new inventions and new devices. There is not a single Professor of Foresight in the world. But why shouldn’t there be? All these new things, these new inventions and new powers, come crowding along; every one is fraught with consequences, and yet it is only after something has hit us hard that we set about dealing with it."
Presentation by Data Rangers, a Finnish software company, about TrendWiki.
Weak signals can range from small changes in behaviour and technology, to signs that a significant shift in a system might be imminent [see box ‘Weak signals, strong undercurrents’ below]. Often it can just involve a hunch that something different is underway, rather than a clear indication of predictable change. An individual signal might make little sense at the time; it might require a number of other similar signals, or a creative leap to realise just what it could be pointing to. It can be infuriatingly abstract. But you have to make a note just in case…
iKNOW has developed conceptual and methodological frameworks to identify, classify, cluster and analyse wild cards and weak signals and assess their implications for, and potential impacts on, Europe and the world. To do so, the iKNOW project has developed well-defined scanning strategies, such as the inward-looking top-down (ILTD), which is carried out by the iKNOW Consortium and involves the scanning of over 2,000 EU-funded research projects; and the outward-looking bottom-up (OLBU), which required the creation of the iKNOW Community (including policy-makers, decision-makers, researchers and foresight practitioners) to scan a wide range of knowledge sources (e.g. journal articles, blogs, news, etc.).As a result, iKNOW puts forward a novel ‘horizon scanning 2.0’ approach which, on the one hand, promotes participatory and bottom-up scanning supported by web 2.0 technologies, and, on the other hand, improves information collection, filtering, communication and exploitation.
13 July 2010 at 18:35 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-12
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Inside the WI-WE Bank, so far we have mapped 282 Wild Cards, 175 Weak Signals (total of 457 WI-WE) and 64 active members. You will be able to view Wild Cards (WI) and Weak Signals (WE), create your own Wild Cards and/or Weak Signals, answer to Wild Cards and Weak Signals Deplhi. You can also contribute to other member's Wi-We as they can contribute to yours.
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"[N]anotechnology policy is not determined by government nor by industry or science, it evolves in a contingent – but nevertheless structured – process of governance where multiple actors interact in a dynamic setting. Within this processes, signals indicating the possibility of future change – “weak signals” – attracted increasing attention. Regarding weak signals in a positivistic tradition as given entities that indicate future change, one could say that the former weak signals were (‘correctly’) identified by scientists, industry, policy-makers and so NST became an emerging issue in science and innovation policy. Regarding weak signals in a post-positivistic way (and emphasizing that governance studies need to analyze how fields of emerging technologies are constructed through discourse), weak signals can be understood as “boundary objects” that link different social worlds, such as science, politics, industry, NGOs and media."
12 July 2010 at 18:35 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-11
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The unintended consequences were catastrophic and yet the doctrine of neoconservatism survives like a zombie in Washington.(tags: politics unintended_consequences)
11 July 2010 at 18:35 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2010-07-06
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Pam is one of scores of simulations, drills and exercises that take place every year at all levels of government and in the private sector with the intention of testing and preparing everyone from first responders to senior-level decision-makers for crises. Critics say real-life events often show the practices don't adequately prepare these critical players.... Hopmeier and others say many preparedness exercises are not nearly as valuable as advertised, or as they could be. Simply holding them is not sufficient; the exercises must be evaluated to ensure they are testing the system enough to expose vulnerabilities and problems that must then be repaired.
"Exercises are not all created equal," says Michael Wermuth, director of homeland security programs at the nonprofit RAND Corp. "There are a lot of different kinds of exercises, a lot of different methodologies used to conduct exercises."
Since 2001, state and local health departments in the United States (US) have accelerated efforts to prepare for high-impact public health emergencies. One component of these activities has been the development and conduct of exercise programs to assess capabilities, train staff and build relationships. This paper summarizes lessons learned from tabletop exercises about public health emergency preparedness and about the process of developing, conducting, and evaluating them.
Legal preparedness is a critical component of comprehensive public health preparedness for public health emergencies. The scope of this study was to assess the usefulness of combining didactic sessions with a tabletop exercise as educational tools in legal preparedness, to assess the impact of the exercise on the participants’ level of confidence about the legal preparedness of a public health system, and to identify legal issue areas in need of further improvement.
(tags: tabletop)
All phases of the disaster response must be addressed in a disaster plan. Functional job descriptions and responsibilities of all agencies and organizations involved should be delineated clearly. More importantly, these plans should be exercised and rehearsed. The ideal exercise includes participation by all parties involved. Since these exercises, by their very nature, disrupt normal operations and are costly in personnel and material utilization, disaster agencies frequently conduct a proxy exercise on the "tabletop." This is a simulation of an emergency situation for training and testing plans and procedures that does not involve movement of response resources. Tabletop exercises are good training tools because they allow people in leadership positions to work through major problems without the cost of running vehicles, using staff and volunteer time, or using supplies. They can quickly highlight areas of weakness where additional support may be needed.
Strategic negotiations in digital tabletop displays have not been well understood. There is little reported in the literature on how users strategize when group priorities and individual priorities conflict and need to be balanced for a successful collaboration. We conducted an observational study on three digital tabletop systems and a real-world setup to investigate similarities and differences in real-world and digital tabletop strategic collaborations. Our results show that in the real world, strategic negotiation involves three phases: identifying the right timing, using epistemic actions to consider a task plan and evaluating the value of the negotiation. We repeated the real-world experiments with different digital tabletops and found several differences in the way users initiate and perform strategic negotiations.
There is a dire need to have complementary form of disaster training which is cost effective, relatively easy to conduct, comprehensive, effective and acceptable. This will complement field drills training. A classroom-based training and simulation module was built by combining multiple tools: Powerpoint lectures, simulations utilising the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) schematic module into ‘floortop’ model and video show of previous disaster drill.
Tabletop exercises are often used for learning purposes in the area of crisis management, yet their potential for this is far from clear. The study examines the learning outcomes achieved by a group of persons taking part in tabletop exercises in which they assess the crisis management capabilities of the organisation to which they belong and suggest possible improvements. Interviews with the participants provide evidence of positive learning effects. Although the effects are in line with generally accepted normative principles of crisis management, the degree of understanding that the participants gain about it appears to vary considerably. The underlying reasons for this are discussed.
Effective Department of Defense (DoD) response to pandemic influenza requires robust and well-exercised plans at the installation level. This article describes proceedings and key findings from a half-day “train-the-trainer” pandemic influenza tabletop exercise for Tri-Service installation public health emergency officers (PHEOs) at the August 2008 Force Health Protection conference. Exercise participants were expected to facilitate the execution of a pandemic influenza exercise at their respective installations within 6 months of attendance. On a 6-month follow-up survey (N = 50), 68% indicated their installations had since created a new pandemic influenza plan or revised an existing one, whereas 44% indicated that their installation had since conducted a pandemic influenza exercise.
Training exercises are now frequently used in health disaster and emergency medicine to train first responders,1 including the use of tabletop exercises.2–4 Nevertheless, these kinds of drills are not well described in occupational and industrial safety and health literature. They represent an interesting alternative to simulated disaster plans, which require considerable human and technical resources disrupt a company's daily business. Our purpose was to develop a special tabletop exercise training program for health and safety professionals such as occupational physicians and hygienists.
HSPH-CPHP supplies the content expertise relevant to simulating a public health emergency; develops the exercise scenario, Master Scenario Events List (MSEL), and supporting documentation; creates the evaluation plan and instruments; and provides trained personnel to facilitate exercise play and evaluate collective performance.
Since 2005, we have conducted 21 exercises and have direct access to 14 after-action reports (AARs) produced. For this study, we conducted a content analysis of the AARs written following 14 exercises conducted as part of the HSPH-CPHP exercise program, to identify recurrent themes related to the systems challenges faced by the responders during the simulated emergencies. This article describes the most common challenges identified during our exercises, and illustrates how exercises can act as an innovative way for academic partners to collaborate with public health practitioners to improve preparedness.
The threat of pandemic disaster has motivated many collaborative exercises for the purpose of preparation and evaluation. The nature of these exercises depends upon the status of pre-existing expectations for system behavior and the aims of the exercise stakeholders. The contents of this article argue that these exercises may be developed using the same approach as simulation modeling to advantage. Four levels of maturity are outlined as a guide to understanding reasonable expectations for such activity.
06 July 2010 at 18:35 in Del.icio.us | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
What is the End of Cyberspace?
- About the end of cyberspace
Cyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.
- About this blog
This blog is about what happens next. It's about the end of cyberspace, but more important, about what new possibilities will emerge as new technologies, interfaces, use practices, games, legal theory, regulation, and culture adjust-- and eventually dissolve-- the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds.
- About the author
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is an historian of science and futurist.
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