The U.S. Patent and Trademark office issues nearly 160,000 patents a year for everything from nanotechnology to jet-powered surfboards. Yet a mere 1 percent—just 1,600—reach the marketplace, according to the patent office. The dirty little secret about American ingenuity is that we’re terrible at translating original ideas into profit-producing businesses.
Source : Business Week
It’s ironic that this global network reminds us how important non-technological solutions are to good working practice. The web makes it possible for some to do their jobs without being bound to a physical place, but technology isn’t going to replace face-to-face contact. In fact, it makes it more essential. How’s that for a growing pain?
Source : The guardian
“To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determing elements and combining them.”
-Karl Gerstner
1.What Jaron Lanier Thinks of Technology Now
“These arguments have proved popular. The book has received admiring reviews in the Times and (twice) in The New York Review of Books. In the months after “Gadget” was published, Lanier lectured at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, travelled to Seoul to speak at a major conference about innovation, and made Time’s list of the hundred “most influential people in the world.” At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: “If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”
Technology, USA, Culture, Design
Source :The New Yorker
“While they were purchasing a gift for a teammate, they also became more interested in their teammate and were happier to help them further in multiple other ways.”
Business, USA, Culture, collaboration
Source : Dan Ariely
“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers’.”
Culture, Community, London, Public, Memorial
Source :Eye Magazine
“rightfully in my humble opinion, ignore this because the government isn’t doing what the government is best at – absorbing risks. All the government is doing is setting the stage for the individual to confront the entirety of their economic risks by themselves.”
Economics, USA, Culture, Policy
Source : Rortybomb
“they know it—and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.”
Gangs, Culture, Media, USA, politics
Source : The Nation
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
“To curb as if in fetters unbridled hopes and a mind obsessed with the future, and to aim to acquire riches from ourselves rather than from Fortune.” – Seneca
“Australia generates more carbon pollution per head than any other developed country, thanks to its heavy reliance on coal-fired power stations. With a population of 22 million, Australia is responsible for 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, Britain, with nearly three times the population, produces just 1.7%.”
australia, environment, policy, politics
Source :The Guardian
“James Fothergill, the CBI’s head of education and skills, said: “Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff’s skills up to scratch.”
education,policy,technology,uk
Source : BBC
“Increasing numbers of children are dropping dead on the long trek to refugee camps. Those who do get there are more severely malnourished than ever before. And, says the UN, the number of people under threat has now reached 11 million – equivalent to every man, woman and child in Belgium facing starvation. Thus, the chronic food crisis of the Horn of Africa edges with every hungry day towards full-blown famine.”
africa,economics,policy,politics
Source : The independant
“Once deforestation and regrowth are taken into account, however, tropical forests have been essentially carbon neutral.”
environment,global,policy
Source : The independant
“Should this technology take off, the cellphone could become the central repository of not just bank account information but coupons, loyalty points, and membership cards, allowing companies such as Google to route deals to cellphones at just the right time and place.”
Technology, Culture, Economic, Global, Mobile
Source : Business Week
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– Kaushik
“It is the difference between the “organic” solution (solving the problem by returning to the purity of the original non-corrupted system) and the truly radical solution (identifying the problem as the “symptom” of the entire system, the symptom which can only be resolved by abolishing the entire system)”. – Living in the End Times – Slavoj Zizek
“Soda is still the most-consumed beverage in the U.S., with the average consumer chugging nearly 45 gallons of the fizzy stuff last year. So it’s no coincidence that three of the biggest measured-media budgets in the beverage category belong to soda brands.”
Culture, Health, Food
Source :Adage
“Many donors do care about how their money is spent. Brian Walsh, director of global social engagement at Liquidnet for Good, pointed to a recent study that showed 85 percent of donors say they care about performance. Nonetheless, only one third say they conduct research before they make a donation and only 3 percent say they make gifts based on a charity’s performance”
Nonprofit, Grants, Culture
Source : Philanthropy.com
““But maybe it should be. For me, a professional who is pushing every day to make a struggling museum relevant and sustainable, I find incredible joy in these simple visitor comments.”
Place, Culture, Museum
Source : Museumtwo
“Combined with Social Security benefit cuts, the rise of 401(k)s has led to growing retirement insecurity and an increase in the labor force participation of older workers. Still, workers with only 401(k)s are better off than the nearly half of full-time workers with no retirement plan at all.
Economics, Culture, Work
Source : EPI.org
“If we really want people to understand a given probability, then we have to play to the human brain’s strengths, and adjust how we present the information.”
Technology, Humans, Culture
Source : Arstechnica
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– Kaushik
“Solar energy was a rising star in the ’70s — until it was banished by the powers that be. Are we ready for its return.”
Sustainable, Technology,USA
Source : Motherjones
“Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being.”
Economy, Life, USA
Source : Vanity Fair
“People were moved too quickly, without any planning, and without any thought about where they would live, and how it would affect the families or the places,” complains James Rosenbaum, the author of the original Gautreaux study.
Housing, Urban, Race
Source : The Atlantic
I realize that what I thought could work in the digital era doesn’t have the same impact locally as it does globally. People don’t want more messages; they want more interactions.
Teaching, Design, Leadership, Digital
Source : Fast Company Digital
How does urban geography effect the way societies develop? What have streets given to politics?
Urban, Culture, Global
Source : BBC : Thinking Allowed
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
This is the first in a series of collected readings. The best of what I read and see for a given week.
“She asked the crowd what percentage of time the average person uses his car. “Across the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe, it’s 8%,” she said. “Which means that over 90% of the time, this thing that costs us a lot of money is just sitting around.”
Collaboration, Technology, SF
Source : Fastcompany
“The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward”
Technology, Life, London
Source : The Guardian
“To bring together previously separated political matter in the pursuit of the common good.”
Politics, Labour, London
Source : The Guardian
The Mill Co. Project and the collaborative work ethic
Collaboration, Work, London, Interdisciplinary
Source : Eye Magazine Blog
“It was through one Brian Eno that the principles and practices behind minimalism would properly, and most lastingly, permeate the pop mainstream.”
Collaboration, Music, Interdisciplinary, Media
Source : Fact
Hope you like this first collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
Collected Reading 