newspeak

Pigs Fly As Open Science Comes To Big Pharma – Forbes.

This is important. I can’t help but think this is a significant step that can lead not only to better therapies but to a more socially engaged conception of information, what it means, to whom, and what can be done with it.

Why The Fades and Doctor Who Confidential were cancelled | Den of Geek.

Shucks. The Fades was a brilliant series in premise, acting, directing. So few so successfully occupy the hazy area of the uncanny as well as The Fades did. 

File Sharing: Is It Wrong? | Media Piracy | The American Assembly.

Let’s start with the easy question: what’s IP piracy? Easy question, much less easy answer. And what is the relation of piracy to privacy? To community? to the pragmatics of any kind of property relation in a commons-based community?

The Truth About Bain: Inside The House That Mitt Built – Forbes.

It probably goes without saying that Forbes is hardly on the left. But independent of that, the journalism as such, as far as I can tell, is quite good and solid, and does give some more insight into the private equity world.

Denver Presidential Debate Live Blog – Live Coverage – Election 2012 – NYTimes.com.

I think the fun will start when we start learning of all the things Romney’s campaign will walk back, starting with the “I love regulations” bit–bitter bait for conservatives coming from the mouth of their elected.

NewsDaily: Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires: study.

It’s not that pesticides are bad for you, though they surely are, especially for those most vulnerable and those applying them or living downwind and down-stream from their immediate application. What really bothers me is the sheer lack of foresight evidenced by those who could regulate these practices. 

It’s a governmental duty: to step out of the market’s immediacy and to look to what is desirable for the populace not just this or next quarter or year but actually decades in the future. Sadly, nearly all governmental models extant are not predicated on such foresight’s desirability or even possibility. Arguably, China’s is more forward looking but as a short look at the Three Gorges Dam project suggests, that look deprecates the consequences of environmental effects and works.

DARPA launches first phase of “open source” vehicle design challenge | Ars Technica.

I’m probably not alone in thinking, Why just the military? Why not other fields? Why not, say, transportation, medicine, what have you?

Probably the answer: In America (the US), government market intervention is generally seen as scary–except for military intervention, that is, defence spending. Then it’s just seen as inefficient, but for all that, more desirable to perpetuate than to stop.

(It also has, for all its hideous focus and monstrous inefficiencies, brought some meaningful improvements, such as richly funded research universities which, however indirectly, created a unique university culture; and though this could have and ought to have been done more directly, more efficiently, the beauty of defence spending was that it was pretty much untouchable and not directly reducible to the mega-corporations that very interestedly strive to shape contemporary US higher education.)

So this move by DARPA is interesting, and promising. DARPA, btw, in case anyone has forgotten, was instrumental in establishing the model and actuality of the Internet, among many other things we almost take for granted. 

More Russians are online today than Germans, making Russia the largest Internet market in Europe. Russians also, strangely, have spent more freely relative to their income than Americans on virtual products, like special powers for online games, making their country a useful market for testing revenue streams other than advertising.

via Zuckerberg Visits Russia and Meets With Medvedev – NYTimes.com.

Perhaps not so odd. In fact, upon reading it, I’m not at all surprised, but then, the history of cultural works in Russia leans heavily toward the oblique allegory, the fantasy masquerading the real. (Karl Rove, eat your heart out.) Even recent science fiction follows this grand narrative, again no surprise.

Islands of Resilience.

More on this later–but I want to balance on the fulcrum of community the fuzzy identities of intellectual property, green energy, and the possibly new term, “green manufactury.”

The point, which deviates from left/progressive accounts and also from right-wing accounts, is that “community” must be empowered to identify, address, manage the challenges it faces. But it cannot do this alone. Nor can communication be in some way resembling that of the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Modern communication–modern notions of “social” or “presence” even “identity”–need to be invoked. And we need, as well, to use the lessons (I, at least) learned form the cooperatives of the 1970s. 

(Confession. I live in Yorkville, Toronto, where the greatest of the student cooperatives existed in the ’70s and lived my first two years of college at UC Berkeley at Barrington Hall, where I was the Workshift Manager and also on the Board of Directors, all well before my 19th birthday. I was also deeply influenced by BF Skinner’s reappraisals and by, at least at the time, negatively, Toffler. And also, more positively, by Doris Lessing’s really underappreciated Briefing for a Descent Into Hell.)

Further point: As I write this, the Maker Faire is taking place. It’s about promoting participatory culture. But, especially in the US, it’s hardly novel. The entire country’s spirit is premised on it, on the idea of DIY.

The difference lies in what you can do now: far far more than ever before. But it’s not about being independent. It–my notion, especially–is about recognizing what can be done….

And in undoing the mistake of the 20th century, to bind all under the sun to constrictions of property.