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...

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...

As readers of my blog posts know, I talk a lot about evolutionary systems, the formal structure of cooperation, the role of both in emergence of new levels of complexity, and I sometimes use cellular automata to make points about all these things and the reification of useful models (here’s a summary...

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...

(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...

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...

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...

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the future prospects of Facebook and Twitter. Some of us even feel strongly enough to want to bet on it. Unfortunately, the companies are privately held, and unavailable to be bet on in the traditional way, via the stock market. It is not just household names like...

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. ...

One problem facing financial institutions is not knowing what the Mortgage Backed Securities they hold are worth. One problem facing homeowners is that the abandoned and unmaintained house beside them is dragging down the value of their property. An anecdotal story from Modesto, Ca has two neighbors getting...

In part 1 I advocated photographing your completed ballot before submitting it and posting your photograph online.  Turns out that if you followed this piece of advice in Missouri, you might be in jail right now.  Oops!  Sorry :-) ...

One of my favorite talks of all time is Ken Robinson’s on how children are born naturally innovative and the process of schooling and growing up in our society beats it out of them by the time they are adults.  More recently, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love fame) opened some eyes with this talk on...

Tribes are hot. Kevin has referred more than once to the famous Dunbar number for limits on optimal human tribe size. One of my favorite books recently is Seth Godin’s book on leadership, called — you guessed it — Tribes. Yesterday I heard a great talk by David Logan, co-author of Tribal...

In a March 2009 Wired article, Daniel Roth calls for radical transparency in financial reporting as the path to recovery and a more secure financial system.  He argues that the reporting requirements today allow companies to obscure what’s going on and that the way to fix things is as follows.  ...

Has anyone read the entire text of the stimulus package? The ambiguity of this question is intentional. ...

Clay Shirky is always a great speaker.  Here’s his Pop!Tech from last year: @ Yahoo!...

Here’s a contest model for spurring innovation that I’d like to explore: 50 participatns ante a pre-determined amount of money Each participant submits original work (of a pre-determined type) Each participant votes for one winner (other than themselves) Winner gets the money ...

The Obama Transition team wants your input on how to fix the country: No, seriously.  Check out the various meetings they have upcoming and the comments sections that go with each.  Some topics like Health Care have lots of comments.  Others like the Humanitarian, Refugee, and Asylum Policy meeting...

Okay, Kev, here’s your chance on affecting climate policy, go...

[ I'm asking for your help in answering this question, read past the fold to see how ] In my post on invisible etiology, I challenged us all to be as open-minded as possible when dealing with our most complex problems, for this is the only way to make the invisible become visible.  Here’s where I...

Back in June, I suggested that public voting records would be healthy for our democracy if the populace were comfortable revealing their voting records.  There is now a movement* and new web site for this called Who Voted? though they are not going as far as I am in advocating for revealing your actual...

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...

I am a fan of prediction markets.   They have typically done much better than polls at predicting the outcome of elections.  Why?  Here’s a thought experiment.  Consider who you think is going to win the election (not who you want to win).  Now consider that I was going to bet you $10,000 of your...