Oct 25, 2011
In Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world the New Scientist cites a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study, opening with this:
“AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.”
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Aug 21, 2011
IBM have announced the development of a cognitive computing chip. This new technology is designed to transcend the current limitations of supercomputers, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, more closely replicating complex brain function. For what, I don’t know.
I was surprised that the news created quite a stir in me until I reflected on my own simple being. After all, I am primitive psycho-neuro-physical mechanism given to emotional outbursts and flights of fancy, not the stuff that tomorrows IBMers will be made of, or personal computers for that matter.
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Aug 13, 2011
I have been tracking the recent London riots with some interest. Having spent the first half of my life in London, keeping up with the comings and goings there seems like the right thing to do.
Particularly under circumstances such as these, when old haunts are seen being blitzed again, I take leisurely strolls down memory lane preferring my own sentimental journey to the path of degradation which has led to the present day blighting of Blighty.
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May 29, 2011
There’s something about lofty reports published by scholars with names like Lusardi, Schneider and Tufano that smack of an authority only a fool would challenge.
Well, I’m a fool and the paper in question, Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications is authored by the aforementioned trio of financial laureates.
In short, the paper “examines households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days”.
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Mar 22, 2011
Ever since I started using WebCite a couple of years ago I have been interested in the idea of online curation. It seems that there has been a proliferation of curator services of late and a heightened sense of the potential benefits that come with the extraction and aggregation of content from tweets, Facebook, blog posts, RSS feeds and what-have-you.
Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format. I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?
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Feb 25, 2011
While it seems that many are tinkering around with measuring the ROI for their investments in social media, some have turned their attention to the waste associated with search. Naturally, just as the former eludes most of us, the latter is hard to avoid.
Experts like Thomas Vander Wal, a scholar and a poet, while advocating the virtues of tag augmented social search, leave us speechless when we find they don’t tag shit.
No matter. This slide deck redeems our favorite technosocial architect who not only sees the irony in not wanting to be labeled, but may well not give a tinker’s cuss if we do.
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Dec 14, 2010
Imagine this: An expectant mother decides she will go to the hospital because it seems that the baby is coming, no time to wait. Her sister carries the bags to the car, helps her sibling get in and they leave for the medical center.
So it was with Rose Mirielle Exumé and her sister Alta Grace Garcon who one Monday afternoon left their home in Deerfield Beach, Florida to travel the 15 miles or so to Broward General.
What is normally a routine journey on I-95 was for this family anything but and Olivier Jean Paul Exumé was born in the fast lane in the back seat of his auntie’s SUV.
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Sep 4, 2010
I remember watching Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us and feeling at the end that something profound had just happened. That was in 2007, not that long ago really. Around the same time I watched Shift Happens and was left similarly inspired by the rate at which my world was changing.
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Oct 30, 2009
I could not let the one millisecond anniversary of my not posting here — or the one year mark of my posting last, as you like it — pass without some remark. Call me sentimental, I don’t care.
Since my last writing I have started, stopped and abandoned one post too many. Among my tomes of “unpublished rhyme” I have a fair bit that reflect on time and such things. For example…
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