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POPSWay-new collaboration Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.
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POPSQuestioning Consciousness What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why. 1. What exactly is the real-world brain activity that we are engaging with when we say a sensation is like something? 2. Why does this activity have the (tricky) properties it has, such that our experience of it is seemingly something so strangely private, not of this world, and indescribable in common terms? 3. What makes this trick work? How is it done? 4. What is the point? Why was it designed like this? What might have been the evolutionary advantage of our having these marvelous experiences? I believe we can already propose plausible answers to each of these questions—although they are all quite radical. Here they are.
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POPSThe Big Picture Ubiquitous Transparency, New Models of Development, The Rise of the Post-Hegemonic World
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POPSThe Paradox of Political Animals “The paradox of a highly social species like rhesus monkeys and humans is that our complex sociality is the reason for our success, but it’s also the source of our greatest troubles,” he said. “Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people, and it’s the same for the monkeys. You can put them anywhere, but their main problem is always going to be other rhesus monkeys.” aka 'le condition social'?
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POPSBill Gates wants Creative Capitalism See here for the webcast called "A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century". There's a whole bunch of the Davos 2008 (World Economic Forum) webcasts available here
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POPSNoble or savage? We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet.
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POPSThe Physical World as a Virtual Reality (by Brian Whitworth) The abstract continues: ... It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.
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POPS2008: Time to Change Your Mind Wonderful. Just think: you too could be a different person at the end of this sentence than you were at the beginning! May all our life sentences be write.
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POPSThinking the way animals do
Temple Grandin Ph.D. is an assistant professor of animal behaviour at Colorado State Uni. She suffers from a form of autism, and describes the way she thinks as thinking in pictures. This has helped her understand the way Animals think, with direct association, rather than a logical process. A significant statement which can apply to most people, is the fact that originally as far as she was aware everybody thought the same way. Until she asked people and found this was not the case. She describes a radio station person who said she had no pictures, in her mind, but thought in terms of emotions or words. I'm sure I can understand my dogs. They seem to think in a manner that is simple, and straightforward, it can just be a matter of associating cues with behavior, and remembering Pavlov. I think in Pictures and sounds. There is music I can 'hear' in my mind that not only has the same 'quality' as the original, but there is a remarkable capacity to edit. Perhaps something like Auti
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POPSYou Make Your Own Luck This comes from one of my clips that got privatized due to the retro-active implementation of pop-limits. I just had to reclip this one. Everybody should read the article or at least those 4 guidelines. And I repeat: 1: Maximise Chance Opportunities 2: Listening to Lucky Hunches 3: Expect Good Fortune 4: Turn Bad Luck to Good