2009 April - The Emergent Fool

The Vanguard of Science: Bonnie Bassler...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Cooperation, Emergence, Interconnectedness, Invisible Etiology, Medical Breakthroughs, Networks, Science, Science 2.0, TED on 04 8th, 2009 | View Comments

The import of this talk goes way beyond the specific and stunning work that Bassler and her team have done on quorum sensing. In my mind, this is the prototype for good biological...

Posted by kevindick in Genetics, Medical Breakthroughs, Science, Singularity on 04 6th, 2009 | View Comments

I happened to come across two interesting posts with Singularity implications that I thought you might be interested in. First, the Singularity Hub reports that Osiris has a promising phase II trial underway for a treatment that uses foreign stem cells to repair the muscle damage from heart attacks. If...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Economics, Interconnectedness, Society, Stability on 04 6th, 2009 | View Comments

Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith have published a really nice article that starts out with bubbles in general and goes on to explain why the bursting of this particular bubble hurt the economy so much. It echoes a lot of themes that I’ve covered before, but is obviously much more soundly though...

Too Big to Fail = Too Big to Exist?...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Economics, Government, Interconnectedness, Interventions, Markets, Networks on 04 6th, 2009 | View Comments

I asked this question on twitter/facebook and got a lot of variants of “I agree” and only one person who stated disagreement (but provided inadequate reason, IMO). Jay Greenspan put it this way: Interesting question this morning, and something I’ve been wondering about. I’ve yet to...

Executive Compensation...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Economics, Incentives, Interventions, Management on 04 4th, 2009 | View Comments

The main problem with executive pay is not that they are compensated too highly, but that there’s not enough pain for them personally when they do a bad job. I propose that the top three executives in all public companies be required to invest 100% of their salary in their own stock each year, with a...

Military-Industrial Complex Redux...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Agency, Socio-technical systems, TED, Technology on 04 3rd, 2009 | View Comments

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Posted by Rafe Furst in Cognition, Economics, Government, Interventions, Markets on 04 2nd, 2009 | View Comments

1) The Quiet Coup The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes...

25 Random Things (Kevin Edition)...

Posted by kevindick in Memes, Social Networks on 04 1st, 2009 | View Comments

Rafe, you are not the last person on Facebook to do 25 Random Things. After your post, Jane browbeat me into finally putting my list together. 1) I can force my eyes into a disconjugate gaze–looking in slightly different directions. 2) My wife can also force her eyes into a disconjugate gaze. This...

25 Random Things...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Memes, Social Networks on 04 1st, 2009 | View Comments

1) I might be the last person on Facebook to do 25 Random Things, but I promised some people I would, and I take my promises seriously. 2) The more I learn, the less I feel that I know. But I am okay with that. Still it’s unsettling because I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning. 3) I care...