2008 October - The Emergent Fool

Posted by Rafe Furst in Point of Order on 10 31st, 2008 | View Comments

I’d like to find a domain name for this blog so that it’s not “rafefurst.wordpress.com” but rather is more inclusive of Kevin’s posting as well as potential future additional authors. I’ve tried procuring the obvious things like complexsystems.com, but the owners want...

Crowdsourcing Truthiness...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Crowdsourcing, Markets on 10 31st, 2008 | View Comments

Google Labs has a new service called “In Quotes” which might be tweakable to do a truth market of sorts. Here’s the suggestion I just emailed them on this topic: I would love to use Google “In Quotes” to crowdsource measures of truth. For instance, I just saw this: “In a...

Favorite Pop!Tech Talks, part 1...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech on 10 30th, 2008 | View Comments

One of the best speakers of Pop!Tech this year was also one of the best of TED. But if you’ve seen Ben Zander‘s TED talk, you still need to see this one, it’s not the same! Benjamin Zander at Pop!Tech 2008: How Fascinating! – Watch more Videos at Vodpod. Here are a few more...

Out of Poverty...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Markets, Pop!Tech, Poverty, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 29th, 2008 | View Comments

One of the more inspiring talks at Pop!Tech this year was Paul Polak’s talk about serving the “other 90%” with life-saving and transformative products using a for-profit micro-franchise model that scales. Paul’s vision and track-record speaks for itself, check it...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Government, Interventions, Markets, Pop!Tech on 10 29th, 2008 | View Comments

One of the talks at Pop!Tech this year sparked intense emotions regardless of whether people agreed with the premise or not: Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo. To address these intense feelings and the demand for public discussion, a wiki was created, in which you are invited to...

Pop!Tech Notes, part 3...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 25th, 2008 | View Comments

Sustainable ecocities (Dickson Despommier) One shed of hydroponic barley = 200 acres of land No new tech required VerticalFarm.com ...

Pop!Tech Notes, part 2...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 24th, 2008 | View Comments

This session of 3 speakers has been the best so far. All three were great speakers and must-watches on poptech.org. Chris Anderson – attention and reputation are also economic markets; google is world’s largest reputation market (via pagerank); larry page and will wright are central bankers,...

Pop!Tech Notes, part 1...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Pop!Tech, Scarcity / Abundance on 10 23rd, 2008 | View Comments

The conference is being streamed live via video on live.poptech.org Theme of the conference is Scarcity and Abundance. BarefootCollege.org (Bunker Roy) training poor, illiterate rural, older women from around the world to engineers, take knowledge back to their village and transform it decentralizing and...

Two Paths to Empathy...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Psychology, Society on 10 21st, 2008 | View Comments

By all accounts, the ability to empathize with others is the hallmark of social behavior. Indeed, when we come across those rare individuals whom we view as anti-social, or those even more rare individuals that we label as sociopaths, the diminished or missing feature of their personality is empathy. There...

Go Forth and Reify, part II...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Emergence, Epistemology on 10 17th, 2008 | View Comments

In this video talk by Richard Darkins he gives some good food for thought on reification when he talks about Steve Grand’s views on things like whirlpools, electromagnetic fluctuations and walking sand dunes. The most powerful example is this one (quoting Grand): Think of an experience from your...

Encoding Life's Complexity...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Causality, Computation, Games, Genetics, Levels on 10 15th, 2008 | View Comments

Will Wright’s demo of Spore illustrates some key concepts of complex systems, including the notion of simple rules generating complex behaviors, and also the power of recursively applied (i.e. fractal) computation at different levels. Living systems leverage these same principles. ...