This is a summary of Marshall McLuhan's work applied to understanding the past, present and future. It covers - the medium is the message, the medium as content, hot and cool media, our change from a pre-literate to literate to post literate society, characteristics of the post literate society, and the four laws of media. It will close with a discussion of the wave of the future.
The benefits of understanding this approach are that you:
• Will understand why our present environment is the way…
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Added by Paul Schumann on October 14, 2009 at 11:30am —
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Recently at
church, I heard that everything from
Dental plans to
Angioplasty results will be made into a data base or something online that people, preferably medical providers, will be able to access. T…
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Added by Lee W. on October 13, 2009 at 5:58pm —
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“Tao is a concept found in Taoism, Confucianism, and more generally in ancient Chinese philosophy. While the character itself translates as 'way', 'path', or 'route', or sometimes more loosely as 'doctrine' or 'principle', it is used philosophically to signify the fundamental or true nature of the world. The concept of Tao differs from Western ontology, however; it is an active and holistic conception of the world, rather than a static, atomistic one.” - Wikipedia
Katya Walter has written an in…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 24, 2009 at 1:40pm —
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This is an excellent book to study if you are just beginning to read about complexity and are interested in the application of the science of complexity to artificial and real life. Melanie Mitchell is well qualified to teach us about this field as she has been connected with Santa Fe Institute since 1989, five years after it was founded. The book is well written, easy to read and follows impeccable logic.
The book begins with a quote from Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, “Reductionism…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 24, 2009 at 12:33pm —
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This book is subtitled “Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple.”
To me the use of the word complexity in the title and most of book is misleading. Most of the time the author is writing about what I would call complicated systems. Complicated systems do not have the distinctive characteristics of complex systems such as emergence or randomness. Furthermore, a complex system cannot be made simple. Humans are quite often fooled by complexity and make assumptio…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 24, 2009 at 11:52am —
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In late May, I attended the conclave of the Fellows of the
IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. In June, I taught a course in Operations Management at Fujen Catholic University in Taipei, Taiwan, and gave lectures at National Chengchi University and National Tsinghua University. I was honored to be invited to return to Tsinghua as a visiting professor, but that will have to wait for a sabbatical year.
The Darwin’s birthday issue of…
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Added by Fred Phillips on September 21, 2009 at 1:00pm —
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http://www.cite-sciences.fr/derosnay/english/articles/Internet%20metacomputer.html
The Internet is self-organizing into a Global Metacomputer
Interview by Yves Sciama
World Knowledge Dialog,. Posted July 13, 2009 on Cellular News
Joël de Rosnay
Special Advisor to the President
Cité des Sciences et de l'Insdustrie – La Villette – Paris – France
If you make use of this article, please quote the original reference
The Internet is Self-organising into a G…
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Added by Wolfgang A. Korzen on September 21, 2009 at 7:51am —
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Atul Gawande, New Yorker
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen calls itself the Square Dance Capital of the World. “Lonesome Dove” was set around here.
McAllen has another…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 10, 2009 at 12:30pm —
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In 1979 I saw a lecture by Phillip Morrison, an MIT professor, on PBS entitled "Termites to Telescopes". The implications of that lecture have haunted me ever since. Morrison described how African termites build very large and complex mounds for their nests.
Communication among termites is not completely understood. Since they live and work in darkness, they are blind, as we know the term. Smell and touch seem to be the preferred form of communication. Termites build nests from a material that…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:30pm —
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What is an Open Space Technology meeting?
Open Space Technology has been defined as:
* a simple, powerful way to catalyze effective working conversations and truly inviting organizations -- to thrive in times of swirling change.
* a methodological tool that enables self-organizing groups of all sizes to deal with hugely complex issues in a very short period of time.
* a powerful group process that supports positive transformation in organizations, increases productivity, inspires creative solu…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:26pm —
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"Effective debate requires a shared set of references and metaphors. The expansion of culture and knowledge depends on linguistic and conceptual shorthand based on shared knowledge and experience. Collaborative, innovative discussion is impossible if every item must be expanded and reduced to so-called first principles. This body of knowledge, experience and ideas has come to be known as a commons.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is th…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:23pm —
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Jeff de Cagna writes in his blog, "Associations today face a potent and relentless adversary: profound change. Yes, it’s true, we’ve always faced change in our organizations, but not like this. The very nature of change itself is changing. Change today is more constant than episodic, more complex than clear, more non-linear than cyclical and it is occurring at a greatly accelerated pace. We find that in this environment many of the tried-and-true heuristics of association management are remarkab…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:21pm —
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A virtuous circle or cycle is a condition in which a favorable circumstance or result gives rise to another that subsequently supports the first.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle) explains "In many parts of economics there is an assumption that a complex system of determinants will tend to lead to a state of equilibrium. When this tendency is absent we use terms like virtuous circle and vicious circle (or virtuous cycle and vicious cycle) to describe these unstable patter…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:20pm —
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Howard Rheingold, in his great book, Smart Mobs, writes about the governance of common pool resources (CPR), "In 1990, sociologist Elinor Ostrom argued that external authorities might not be necessary in governing what she called common pool resources (CPRs)." Ostrom made a series of studies of the ways in which people cooperated in the management of commons throughout the world. "In comparing the communities, Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfu…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:18pm —
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In the emergence of food sharing, "the Inuit knows that the best place for him to store his surplus is in someone else's stomach."
There is a tension between self-interest and collective action. Yet, symbiosis and cooperation have been observed at every level from cell to ecosystem. There are some genetic reasons why this is so. It was that stream of thought that originated my interest in the subject of an innovation commons (Creating an Innovation Commons).
When we get to the level of human i…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:16pm —
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"The Internet is both the result of and the enabling infrastructure for new ways of organizing collective action via communication technology. This new social contract enables the creation and maintenance of public goods, a commons for knowledge resources."
"Before the word "hacker" was misappropriated to describe people who break into computer systems, the term was coined (in the early 1960s) to describe people who create computer systems. The first people to call themselves hackers were loyal…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:15pm —
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Law, Custom, and the Commons
by Randy T. Simmons
Dr. Simmons heads the political science department of Utah State University and is a senior associate of PERC (Political Economy Research Center) in Bozeman, Montana.
"Free and unregulated access to scarce resources has long been recognized as a serious problem. Two thousand years ago Aristotle wrote: What belongs in common to the most people is accorded the least care: they take thought for their own things above all.
More recently, the biolog…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:12pm —
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"When two attorneys enraged millions of Internet users by publishing identical advertisements on six thousand unique network discussions known as "newsgroups," they were attacking a tradition of cooperation. Now the same attorneys are flogging a book and trying to convince readers of op-ed articles that they have been the victims of elitist attacks by Internet intellectuals who oppose honest business on the Net. Citizens on and off the Internet need to understand exactly how these hucksters are…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:10pm —
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by Yochai Benkler
For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public att…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:06pm —
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We are moving to a more responsive, interactive, collaborative world, which is already disrupting conventional business models and releasing energies and new ways of doing things that create new solutions and opportunities. Personal interest, energy, passions, ideas and opinions - and little or no direct personal financial gain - are fuelling everything from Linux software to distributed computing in support of big science projects, to Wikipedia to blogs to indexed photo collections to and scien…
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Added by Paul Schumann on September 9, 2009 at 6:03pm —
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The Wave of the Future: Understanding Marshall McLuhan
Online Medical Records
What I (over)did on my summer vacation
Joël de Rosnay - The Internet is self-organizing into a Global Metacomputer
