Novel by Rob Brezsny. Full-text available free online. http://www.freewillastrology.com/pages/oracle.shtml I'm betting there are at least a half a million readers out there who are receptive to contracting the metavirus I call pronoia, which is the exact opposite of paranoia: a sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower us with blessings.

Charlie Stross thinks that what appears to be widespread ignorance/insanity is really Future Shock. It's about forty years since "Future Shock" was published, and it seems to have withstood the test of time. More to the point, the Tofflers' predictions for how the symptoms would be manifest appear to be roughly on target. They predicted a growth of cults and religious fundamentalism; rejection of modernism: irrational authoritarianism: and widespread Insecurity. They didn't nail the other great source of insecurity today, the hollowing-out of state infrastructure and externally imposed asset-stripping in the name of economic orthodoxy that Naomi Klein highlighted in The Shock Doctrine, but to the extent that Friedmanite Disaster Capitalism can be seen as a predatory corporate response to massive political and economic change, I'm inclined to put disaster capitalism down as being another facet of the same problem. (more)

Michael Shellenberger: Why I Believe Climate Change Is Not the End of the World. In early 2020, scientists challenged the notion that rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean were making coral reef fish species oblivious to predators. The seven scientists who published their study in the journal Nature had, three years earlier, raised questions about the marine biologist who had made such claims in the journal Science in 2016. After an investigation, James Cook University in Australia concluded that the biologist had fabricated her data. (more)

aka improvisation (more)

Imprinting is the term used in Psychology and Ethology to describe any kind of phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage) that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior. It was first used to describe situations in which an animal or person learns the characteristics of some stimulus, which is therefore said to be "imprinted" onto the subject. Imprinting is hypothesized to have a critical period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology) (more)

Book Publishing brand; See also Imprinting (ethology) (more)

The DAO (stylized Đ) was a digital decentralized autonomous organization (DAO),[5] and a form of investor-directed venture capital fund.[6] It launched in April 2016 after a crowdfunding campaign. By September 2016, it was delisted and had, in effect, become defunct. The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing both commercial and non-profit enterprises.[7][8] It was instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain, and had no conventional management structure or board of directors.[7] The code of the DAO is open-source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. Smart contracts were first proposed by Nick Szabo in 1996.[1] (more)

Event that would completely destroy a species (or a "way of life" if one's a drama-queen) (more)

a risk/potential of Existential Threat

Law professor; author, Wealth Of Networks (avail as EBook and in print) and paper "Coase's Penguin" (Ronald Coase) (more)

economist, known for his Theory Of The Firm and other things (more)

aka Idea Futures

The basic idea is that you can have many active programs distributed over physically dispersed machines, unaware of each other's existence, and yet still able to communicate. They communicate to each other by releasing data (a tuple) into tuple space. Programs read, write, and take tuples (entries) from tuple space that are of interest to them. A tuple-space is a public repository or buffer that can contain tuples. (more)

Mike Caulfield has been doing some work with Federated Wiki. Apr'2014: his gloss on the general idea... I'm not talking here about Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki, which was largely the inspiration for this, but about our local attempts to make DokuWiki work in a way that approximates federation. But I think the use cases apply to Ward's work as well. Note this piece isn't about EduTech, but rather producing support documentation for your faculty, though he extends the details into teaching-process thoughts... On a wiki every page has an edit button; on a federated wiki, every page has a fork button. He also notes the UI issue: But that step of deciding what comes onto your wiki from the federation — what does that look like? It could get really noisy. It could get very difficult to know which updates of a dozen you want. It could be so time consuming to scan the updates and understand what they are that it’s easier to roll your own. Alternatively, the process could be so silent that everything flows into your drafts folder but never gets used. Things like attributing cleanly without gunking up the articles with too many lines of credits are also issues. Tracking what you have approved and not approved may get confusing as well (Did I review this already?) unless the system handles it elegantly. (more)

Interactive Narrative that uses the Real World as a Platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_Game (more)

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you. (more)

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment 2019: AOC Edition. From my perspective, the true center of this war is between different forms of collective intelligence. The 2016 election served as a notable inflection point in the conflict and, therefore, one might take the Trump Administration as the source and driver of the decentralized collective intelligence that John Robb called “the Trump Insurgency”. (more)

see huge invention, innovation, progress, R and D

Brian Merchant interviews Alan Kay: The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed. What’s interesting is the next thing to look at: What are the non-universals that are particularly interesting and powerful? They were things like agriculture, reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science (math and science), equal rights. These inventions are almost always harder to learn, because we’re less genetically predisposed. (more)