My new favorite worldchanger is the Spirit of Innovation Awards.  In short, high school students from around the country solve real-world problems and compete for awards and opportunities (like access to venture capital and mentorship).  Here’s an example: I am working with founder Nancy Conrad...

Inspired by the X Prize, Y Combinator’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” and Kickstarter, I am offering a $100K prize in three parts: $10K for Crowdsourced X Prizes Platform Allows anyone to offer a cash prize for achieving a goal they want achieved Allows anyone to pledge...

This was one of my favorites of the...

Rick Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design” and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC has hit the nail on the head as far as the bank reform goes – Breaking the Banks (via Infectious Greed): “It is not the case that the largest banks are the same as other banks, just bigger“ “The largest...

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually...

The New York Times Year in Review section always has some good ones. Some highlights for me from this year: Does feeling like a fraud make you act like one? Researchers gave experiment subjects designer-style sunglasses from boxes marked “authentic” or “counterfeit”. They then put...

I’ll call Rafe’s Daniel Nocera Nobel prize in <10 years and offer up that Artifical Collective Intelligence technology developed at MIT CCI will bring such breakthroughs that Daniel Nocera will be one of the last few INDIVIDUAL contributors to our inventive/discovery process.  Yes, they are...

PROBLEMS Our economic system hasn’t been self correcting through arbitrage, because markets have stayed irrational longer than one could stay solvent.  Our legal system has not been just because precedents have been bluffed into existence using legal costs instead of legal arguments.  Our...

-”Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)  I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec), but Tyler Cowen’s post on Range...

(Back from Alex’s European adventures) Michael Martin of Broken Symmetry with two incredibly insightful posts on Soros’ theory of reflexivity, distinction between social and physical sciences, and the ability of markets to regulate us as well as themselves. 1. “Are markets flawed? Or is it...

Imagine you are in your early twenties, out of college several years and your best friend, who recently came into an inheritance of $300K cash told you they could think of no better way to invest the money than to invest it in you.  Not the company you started, not as a loan, but invest it in YOU, as if you...

http://www.vimeo.com/8194089 I just saw the most important talk I have seen in 300+ TED, Pop!Tech, etc talks that I’ve watched.  And at the risk of hyperbole, I will say that the worst case scenario is that Daniel Nocera simply wins a Nobel Prize (and yes, I’m willing to bet at even odds that it...

Ever wish you could reinvent the entire systems of government you live under without starting a costly war, revolution or having to win an election?  No?  Well, Patri Friedman has (wondered, that is).  And so has a growing number of seasteaders, ordinary folks (and the occasional PayPal billionaire).  Or...

One of the hidden themes of The Feast this past week has been how to scale successful social ventures.  This has been on my mind a lot recently as I have been working informally with both Self Enhancement, Inc. (SEI) and Decision Education Foundation (DEF) on this puzzle.  SEI is extremely successful...

Mendeley.com is doubling every 10 weeks and is on track to surpass the biggest academic databases in the world next year.  What I find fascinating is that it is based on the Last.fm music algorithm/idea, which is now crossing disciplines into science of all things:  “How does it work? At the basic...

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward” – Thomas Edison “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”.  But what if we teach a man to learn? Was Thomas Edison a genius or “merely” a hard...

This may be the most positive thing I’ve heard in a long time.  The whole article is worth reading.  Here’s a teaser: “…If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president...

The old philosophical theory says that reason is conscious, can fit the world directly, is universal (we all think the same way), is dispassionate (emotions get in the way of reason), is literal (no metaphor or framing in reason), works by logic, is abstract (not physical) and functions to serve our...

Derek Abbott says Australia alone could solve the world’s current and future energy needs using solar thermal and liquid hydrogen.  Saul Griffith says, practically speaking this is not feasible and we need to use all available clean energy technology and reduce and conserve substantially or we are...

I’ve been having a serious discussion with two colleagues of mine about closing the gap that exists between two groups: People of my generation (40 and older) who have capital they want to invest in innovation but only know the VC for-profit-only value model and don’t have any true view into or...

This was one of the most important and encouraging talks of this year’s TED...

Everyone has heard about the Large Hadron Collider, arguably the most ambitious and complex engineering project ever undertaken, anywhere.  The purpose, no less ambitious, is to answer all sorts of burning questions about the nature of the universe, including whether the Standard Model of particle physics...

Has anyone played Foldit, the protein-folding game that is designed to advance the science?  This Wired article makes it sound like Ender’s Game meets biochemistry!  Sounds like the Poehlman kid is the protein-folding equivalent of Stephen Wiltshire.  I love the crowdsourcing, the...

I have been having a 140 character discussion with Ciarán Brewster (@macbruski) via twitter.  And while it’s kind of interesting to force complex subject matter into very few characters, it is limiting the discussion, so I will summarize it so far here and hopefully others can weigh in too. ...

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated for cancer research, as well as the efforts of thousands of the world’s best minds, progress in preventing or curing cancer has been almost non-existent. I find this unacceptable. We should be doing better. We need to be doing better. So what’s...