I run a blog about public policy. I wrote a preliminary a****sment of the EVOKE experience - interesting and in my opinion generally positive, despite the dissatisfaction of some high profile agents over what they perceive as censorship. Anyone interested:
http://bit.ly/aI29Ck
Added by Alberto Cottica on April 20, 2010 at 5:57pm —
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April 2020. In a move that credibly signals a will to push for reform, the European Central Bank starts to reinvent itself. Two brilliant, unorthodox scientists are charged with leading it through the reform process: epistemologist/statistician
Nassim Taleb (nicknamed The Black Swan, after his best seller book) and economist…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on April 4, 2010 at 5:58pm —
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I decided to join the
EVOKE team (15 members, me included, as of today) on the microlending site
Kiva. After some search on the website I allocated a microloan of $50 to Ms. Mame Diarra Samb from Diamaguène Thies, Senegal. She sells works of art at the local market, and will use her loan to purchase more works so she can bolster sales. …
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Added by Alberto Cottica on April 4, 2010 at 2:30pm —
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The
Urban Bike Messengers have set up shop in Milano. Significantly, they are headquartered in
Hub Milano, the coworking space dedicated to social innovators.
These guys are getting a lot of attention because they managed to throw together three features of small deliveries:
- they are green. People like to be seen using them rather than, say, UPS.
- they are cool. They have great gear, and…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on April 4, 2010 at 10:04am —
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Nassim Taleb is a quantitative analyst with a long experience in finance. He is the author of a very successful book,
The Black Swan, where he contends that most of the variability in the money world is concentrated in very few, very large events. They can't be predicted, or mitigated.
In 2009 he gave an iconoclastic talk at a World Bank conference on…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on April 3, 2010 at 9:00pm —
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Money is a promise to pay. If no one can be trusted to honor their obligation, the wh*** money concept collapses.
Futurist Bruce Sterling has come up with the concept of
reputation servers. The principle is that the net stores your obligation-honoring track record, makes it available to people who are considering being in business with you. People with a solid reputation have an easier time accessing credit. Insolvency rates go way down.…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on April 3, 2010 at 8:48pm —
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Here's my favourite water visionaries this week: the fine folks at Bricolab, who have launched the
Open Source Washing Machine Project. Here's the rationale in their own words:
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 26, 2010 at 6:17pm —
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April 8th 2020: celebrating ten years of a happy marriage between me and my wife. I am Italian, she is Swedish-Ethiopian-Sudanese, we live in Costa Rica, part of my family is in Austria, so loved ones are all over the place.
We throw a party, and people convene. But we appreciate that traveling is tiresome and energy-hungry, so we want to give people ways to participate while not making the planet's energy bill any worse. We've thought up of two schemes.
One is an energy…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 26, 2010 at 2:07pm —
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So I did my homework and blogged. So why does my IMAGINE4 not show up in the evidence panel? Why does the mission not log as complete? Do I have to complete LEARN4 and ACT4 before? This did not seem to be the case when I accepted the objective. Can anybody help me? Alchemy?
Added by Alberto Cottica on March 26, 2010 at 12:25am —
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2020. People all around the planet have joined forces two years ago, starting to weave a network of citizens, schools, universities, NGOs, local public administrations. The goal is to check all freshwater bodies on the planet for main pollutants, feed the data to a server and make them available for reuse and remix.
- Volunteers have been trained in basic chemical and biological analysis; a network of teachers and scientists worldwide, led by MIT, has developed a low-cost, low-tech,…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 25, 2010 at 10:33pm —
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My device for saving energy is the
Kublai presentation kit.
I am the director of project named
Kublai. It is a community of creatives targeted especially at the lagging areas of Italy, where social trust is way down. My job entails travelling a lot to creative events and meetups to pitch Kublai to participants: every person and every shared idea counts. Last year I spent more than 120 days on the…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 24, 2010 at 9:34pm —
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When you get on a train or on a motorway, chances are most vehicles you'll see are transporting
information, not things. Commuting to the office? Going to a conference, or to school? Information. You are going there to talk and listen. That's information exchanges. And, in this day and age, information comes in bits
So, look: I don't think that the alternative to the car is the electric car. That's just shifting the problem. The alternative to…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 24, 2010 at 8:00pm —
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My hero is Augusto Pirovano, CEO of
CriticalCity. At 27 (he is now 30) he began to wonder what would happen if we could a play so big that it could encompass our wh*** lives. He lives in Milano, Italy, a business capital plagued by pollution, social tensions, and more than its fair share of corruption. He thought that, if people could perceive their cities as playgrounds, they might live out their cities in a more lighthearted way, and think of things…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 24, 2010 at 5:54pm —
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I want to do something along the lines of
Providing skills, not just finished technologies.I live in a developed country, Italy, with a vast lagging area called Mezzogiorno. While by no means destitute (about 50 billion euro are funneled yearly towards it from the more developed northern Italy to) Mezzogiorno has an autonomy problem. Maintaining private expenditure levels in the area depends on transfers coming from outside, steered by public decision…
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Added by Alberto Cottica on March 24, 2010 at 9:30am —
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