Brain Fart Of The Day: DropBox Based Wiki.

Protests have been held in Turkey since 28 May 2013, dubbed the Turkish Spring (cf Arab Spring) by some Western media.[32][33] The initial Istanbul protests were led by about 50 environmentalists[34] against replacing Taksim Gezi Park with a reconstruction of the historic Taksim Military Barracks (demolished in 1940), with the possibility of housing a shopping mall.[35][36] The protests developed into riots when a group occupying the park was attacked, with tear gas and water cannons, by police. The subjects of the protests have since broadened beyond the development of Taksim Gezi Park, developing into wider anti-government demonstrations.[37] The protests have also spread to other cities in Turkey, and protests have been seen in other countries with significant Turkish communities.[38] Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a number of speeches widely seen as inflammatory and dismissive of the protesters, and on 3 June left the country on a planned 3-day diplomatic tour of North African countries, a move that has been criticized as irresponsible by opposing political leaders. On 3 June unions announced strikes for 4 and 5 June. (more)

How To Choose An Ethical Career (With Help From Oxford Philosophers) (more)

SciFi sub-genre (more)

Craig Mod wonders what the "Subcompact" (Worse Is Better) Disruptive Innovation to Magazine Publishing will be. Apple's NewsStand is RSS you can charge for. He thinks Marco Arment's "The Magazine" hits a pretty sweet spot. I think the concept of "issues" is pretty weird, you could just have a single per-title app that sucks down new individual articles as they are posted (plus you could separately send email notification.) (more)

a TelCo (more)

Kevin Kelly pitches an idea of paying someone to read an EBook they bought (they E Reader app could track their usage). If a reader is given credit for reading the book, then he/she would earn more than they paid for the book. For example, if they paid $5 for the ebook, they would get back $6, thus earning $1 for reading the book. Not only did the book not cost them anything, but they made money reading the book. If they read it. cf Gym Membership model. Less Than Free? (more)

Fred Wilson on getting real Business Model value from your API (more)

Revisiting 2011-08-02-FamilyPhoneUpgradeTime because: (more)

Where your business is a way to Make Money for your customers. (more)

Alexis Massie describes her new After Dinner for Writers experiment for Stating The Obvious. But "afterDinner for Writers" is something else altogether, something Massie has described as her "ultimate experiment," an online Writing Workshop "designed to bridge the gap between authors and readers by allowing for immediate exchange of FeedBack and critique."

Louis Menand reviews Mark Mc Gurl's Program Era book about whether Creative Writing can be taught. Mc Gurl's book is not a history of creative-writing programs. It's a history of twentieth-century fiction, in which the work of American writers from Thomas Wolfe to Bharati Mukherjee is read as reflections of, and reflections on, the educational system through which so many writers now pass.... Mc Gurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. He thinks that we're all highly self-conscious ants, because that's what it means to be a Modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program. (Mc Gurl uses the term "reflexive modernity." There is a lot of critical techno-speak in "The Program Era," it's true. There are also flow charts and the like, diagrams suited to systems analysis. If you don't enjoy this sort of thing, you will not get very far into the book. It's worth learning to enjoy, though.)... Changes in creative-writing programs are influenced by changes in two related bodies of thought, both of which try to answer the question "How can we make people more productive and more creative?" These are the philosophy of education and management theory... And this helps Mc Gurl to make a larger point, which is that university creative-writing programs don't isolate writers from the world. On the contrary, university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit--the world of mass higher education and the White Collar workplace. Sticking writers in a garret would isolate them. Putting them in the ivory tower puts them in touch with Real Life. (Note this is writing for the existing reading-class.) (more)

Non-TenUre-Track Professors make an average of $2k/course/semester. Where does all that College Tuition go? (more)

Chad Harbach on the tensions between the MFA/university and Book Publishing worlds. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market. (more)

Nathan Lewis considers the desirability of Economic Growth. I often use the term "economic health" instead of "growth," as it gets closer to what I mean. For probably the last hundred years, there have been criticisms that "growth" has not really led to any apparent improvement in livelihood... By "economic health" I mean largely that people enjoy prosperity and abundance... When economists talk about "growth" they are often talking about avoiding UnEmployment. Historically, when there isn't "growth" then there's unemployment, and most everyone would choose "growth" right? I defined economics previously as the study of how people make a living (Making A Living), which gives us a wider scope of inquiry than nattering on about GDP or interest rates... I would say that, for the most part, it appears that the simple lifestyles of the Native Americans provided prosperity and abundance, on their terms. They enjoyed "economic health," in a format without apparent growth. At least they didn't need Prozac to get through the day. They didn't pay taxes or work 9-to-5 either. And they were never unemployed... One of the reasons why we perceive the Native Americans as having enjoyed prosperity and abundance is that, despite their rather low capability of creating stuff (productivity), they were able to satisfy their basic requirements of living with almost no effort. If they wanted a house, they would simply make one out of naturally available materials. This might take about a week of labor, less with help. No mortgage, no taxes. When they wanted to go somewhere, they walked. When they were hungry, they produced food in some manner, and they didn't have to go to a job interview for the right to do so... The example of the Native Americans produced quite an impression on the incoming Europeans, who had lived for centuries under one tyranny or another. The American project as conceived by the Founding Fathers, with its Constitution, no taxes, no standing army and so forth, was heavily influenced by the Native American example. (more)

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. Perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to keep the scheme going. (more)

Reed College, InstituteForNoeticSciences, WELL, Xerox PARC, Tools For Thought, Virtual Reality, Virtual Community, Electric Minds. (more)

Resource Oriented Client Architecture (more)

The belief that a statement can be defined as "really true". Implies an Objective Reality and lots more. Is that the Nature Of Truth?

Google Plus Group Messaging app. (more)