Displeased with the existing state or condition inclines to sow in seeds of creation. Bigger forward motions in communicating, betterments in technology as well as expanded respect as well as command for social netw orking sites users have all of the time made-up the way for social movements to boom. When individualized competence as well as well-being is particularly menaced, a roll down of the fresh and new thoughts can swallow up even the greatest ideological leadership.

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Diaspora

Back in 1995, I asked people at a party to provide their predictions for the next 30 years. My co-founder at an Internet service provider and a visionary thinker himself contributed one I never forgot: “…in 30 years, the age of self-replicating machines will be upon us and Capitalism will no longer serve as a model for wealth creation.”

Last week I stumbled upon a set of links that made me revisit my colleague’s prediction. Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at University of Bath, U.K. has been developing a prototype model of what may be called a “3D printer.” The machine can download a design from the Internet and through extrusion technology create three dimensional plastic parts and electronic circuitry that may find their way into hundreds of uses.

What is more interesting is the machine can make parts that make other machines just like it. Right now, only 60% of the parts can be made by its “parent” machine, but give it time.
Imagine: when time-saving machines are sophisticated enough to replicate themselves, then our economic system of scarcity and growth, is due for a major upgrade if not a complete transformation. The global consequences of this have profound potential.

Check out the video on the site here:
More info on Reprap here
and an article about it here:

No, really. Stop reading this blog post and go check this out. It will blow your mind.
Think about where personal computers were 20 years ago and where we are today. This technology will eventually get to the point where 100% of the parts of a machine can be printed and most of the things we imagine need to be produced in factories can be done right at home in a safe and environmentally friendly manner.

Imagine one day being able to download and “print in 3D” a cell phone – the circuitry, the case, etc. – and then recycle or compost the parts of it when you are tired of it and want to print a new one. Your friend wants one? Let her print a machine herself so she can print phones for all her friends.

Some of us remember a time when we used to order CDs online or buy vinyl records at a store. Then came along the ability to download and play music on demand – anytime, anywhere. These were disruptive technologies in action- retail bricks and mortar locations went out of business because it was no longer necessary to move and store all that physical matter to get the desired effect. Now imagine that you can make not only copies of your music- but copies of your MP3 player…

Considering the accelerating pace of technological innovation, we may not be more than two generations away from such a day. And fundamental assumptions that underpin capitalism – scarcity and endless growth -are vulnerable to such technology, because it distributes the production so broadly, leveling the playing field for all to participate.

On the day a machine which utilizes renewable, recyclable or reclaimed materials to make high quality products may be replicated with open source designs that are constantly improved upon by a global community, it will be very difficult for capital-intensive producers to claim exclusive domain over the means of production. This in turn will make it very challenging to justify and reinforce the assumption of scarcity of goods -or producers for that matter.

Further, such an era of distributed mass production turns the “endless growth” mandate on its head. Endless growth is a function primarily of our debt-based capital system- for one, more production means more investment, which means more interest and principal to pay off, thus the mandate for more growth. Also, due to efficiency gains, producers in the U.S. for example produce more than the country can consume and that drives the mandate to encourage “growth” through needless consumption (which results in all sorts of social, technological and environmental pathologies). Both the capital expenditure and consumption dynamics are lessened considerably when people hold the means of production in their hands.

These are very powerful disruptive forces in our global economy. But it goes deeper than that. Central bank issued, interest-bearing debt creates all our national currency. That currency’s value itself is based upon its scarcity and its ability to grow, that is to say, collect interest. Therefore, such debt is the primary driver to the twin problems that ravage the globe; scarcity of primary needs for the many and endless growth and needless consumption by the few. When machines can self-replicate and distribute the benefits of production, not only is scarcity and growth called into question, but also debt itself, along with the form of money that it generates.

Simply put, when our own machines are doing all the work, and making all the stuff we need, why would we have to borrow – or work for that matter- in order to get money to buy the stuff we need?

Our hands and minds would be freer to pursue our own personal artistic and scientific passions.

Considering the pace of technological innovation versus the smokescreen that passes for financial reform in Washington, I’m betting on the machines to redefine the economic structure and not the economic structure to co-opt the potential of the machines (like it has with the Internet).

Imagine if one day our economy was based upon the value stream of one of these machines as it self-replicates on a path to serving so many human needs. It would be wise to begin adjusting to that coming world now, while self-replication and 3D printing is still in its infancy. It would be profound if we created a world that tied the value of the natural earth and everything that implies to a new global economic order.

About us: URSULAproject, is a 501(c)3 organization.

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Erik Rothenberg: Capitalism and The Age of Machines, 3.0

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Erik Rothenberg: Capitalism and The Age of Machines, 3.0

The new Ubuntu operating system by Linux is supposed to have a better user interface. The operating system by Linux is a free open source operating system and is very easy to used and install as well.

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Ubuntu 10.04 Release Date

Asustek announced the tablet PC at the end of March. The Eee Pad will be based on Google’s open source Android OS and will employ the services of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform. Asus will present the Eee Pad during this year’s Computex trade show, which will find place in Taiwan during the first [...]

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Asus sets date for Eee Pad – Tablet PC

Asustek announced the tablet PC at the end of March. The Eee Pad will be based on Google’s open source Android OS and will employ the services of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform. Asus will present the Eee Pad during this year’s Computex trade show, which will find place in Taiwan during the first [...]

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Asus sets date for Eee Pad – Tablet PC

Here we go open source fans, the first debut of MeeGo 1.0 running on Intel silicon — an Acer Aspire One netbook (the 532h, from the looks of it) with a Pinetrail processor to be precise — sporting a simplified UI that looks to have inherited far more Moblin DNA than Maemo. You’ve got tasks, appointments, most-used apps, and a quick-launch bar all up front. We’re also seeing 3D gaming support; Zones, Applications, People, Internet, Media and Settings tabs; and real-time social networking integration for Twitter, Facebook, and instant messaging with task bar alerts. Can’t wait to see how the MeeGo user experience translates to a smaller, say, 4.8-inch Moorestown device or the TI OMAP-based followup to the Nokia N900 later this year. Until then, check the video after the break.

Update: Second video added showing MeeGo running on a TV, an unidentified AAVA Moorestown-based smartphone (see after the break), and digital coupon machine. It’s worth mentioning that this is Intel’s take on the MeeGo UI and Nokia’s will likely look much different. [Thanks, Atlantian, pdexter]

Continue reading Intel gives MeeGo 1.0 its first public performance (video)

Intel gives MeeGo 1.0 its first public performance (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel gives MeeGo 1.0 its first public performance (video)

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Intel gives MeeGo 1.0 its first public performance (video)

A few months ago, GE Healthcare rolled out a portable electrocardiogram machine, trumpeting the new product’s ability to help patients wherever they might need it.

But the most interesting thing about the MAC 800 is not where it can go, but where it came from: China.

Chinese engineers funded by GE Healthcare helped develop the machine for sale in China. Although initially tailored to local needs, the MAC 800 has found a new market – the United States, where hospitals with community programs can easily take it on the road to treat patients.

The company is betting that other products originally created for the developing world ultimately also can be useful here. GE is tapping into the increasingly popular idea that medical innovation should be a global two-way street in which the West benefits from the resourcefulness and frugality poorer nations apply to health problems. The idea isn’t new, but it’s gaining traction, beyond the creation of products and technology, as public health experts rethink ways to prevent disease and deliver care.

Health care in the developing world holds several “general lessons for richer countries,” Nigel Crisp, a former permanent secretary of Britain’s Department of Health, observed in a recent Times of London op-ed. “Unconstrained by our history, [developing countries] train people differently, create new sorts of organisations, involve families and communities and concentrate more on promoting health rather than on just tackling disease.”

With interest in international health expanding, this type of thinking is likely to become more common. A 2009 survey by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health found that enrollment in global health courses had doubled since 2006. This rapid growth is changing the way people think about health care abroad, says Dr. Michael Merson, director of the Duke Global Health Institute. “I think the old days of development … where the rich helped the poor, for the most part have passed,” he says. “I think we go into this with a true sense of shared partnership.”

The Roots Of ‘Kangaroo Care’

While some experts doubt the U.S. is really ready to embrace lessons from abroad, there is a growing number of examples. They run the gamut from basic to high-tech – including an electronic medical records program in use in more than 20 countries.

The Boston-based Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment project, which serves HIV/AIDS patients, is modeled on a community health worker program pioneered in Haiti. Since the late 1990s, the project has sought out the most difficult-to-treat HIV patients: those who fail in conventional programs because of factors such as mental illness and poverty. The program reports good results and has been sharing its methods with the New York City health department and hospitals with similar programs.

“Kangaroo care,” an approach developed in Colombia, is another example. With a major shortage of incubators, doctors advised mothers to cradle preterm babies in a sling. They did so well that it changed what had been the conventional approach in the U.S., which encouraged only limited human contact while newborns were in incubators.

Merson participated in what became one of the best known illustrations of a borrowed idea. During the 1970s he was in Bangladesh working with other doctors to treat an outbreak of cholera, an acute infectious disease whose symptoms include severe diarrhea. The team made extensive use of a cheaper, simpler treatment for diarrhea, which can result in life-threatening dehydration, and it is now the recommended standard for care worldwide.

“It took a while for pediatricians to use here,” Merson says, “but now we have products like Pedialyte and other kinds of oral rehydration fluids that are used to treat kids.”

These days, it’s increasingly common to find experts without medical backgrounds collaborating on health-related projects for developing countries. One example is OpenMRS, an open-source electronic medical record system that started in 2004 as a collaboration between the Boston-based nonprofit Partners in Health and the Regenstrief Institute, an informatics and health care research organization in Indianapolis. Both programs use the system to manage projects in the developing world. It’s especially critical for hospitals that track large numbers of HIV-positive patients, says William Tierney, an informatics expert at Regenstrief.

Without electronic information, “How do you know when patients aren’t coming in, so you can go out and chase them down to enhance adherence to the drug?” Tierney asks.

Rwanda, Tanzania and Peru are among the countries where the program has caught on. Since the software platform is open source it can be customized by anyone and tailored to specific programs, which would be more challenging with bigger commercial systems. Now it is being used at Indiana University’s School of Medicine – where Tierney is a professor – as well as at sites in Maryland, Boston and Los Angeles.

‘What Can The U.S. Learn From Ghana?’

Students now in school might lead a new wave of innovation. Anjali Sastry, a global health delivery and system dynamics researcher who lectures at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says her MBA students are increasingly using what they learn to experiment with different models for care delivery. “Ghana tried a national health insurance system, for instance,” she says. “What can the U.S. learn from Ghana?”

Dr. Jaspal Sandhu, a global health designer and researcher with an engineering background, is among those asking such questions. In 2004, Sandhu and two other researchers traveled to Tamil Nadu state in India to closely examine the workings of Aurolad, an affiliate of Aravind Eye Care System, which developed an intraocular lens that significantly reduced the cost of cataract surgery in India. Today, Aurolab exports the lenses to 120 countries, including Canada, Denmark and Israel, though not the U.S.

It’s not just the lenses that interest Sandhu, a consultant who has worked with the World Bank, Microsoft and other clients. It’s the way the Aravind system works. This includes the use of health workers rather than doctors for certain basic procedures–one of a handful of strategies that could promote “lower costs and shorter waiting periods,” he says.

Not every expert is as optimistic. Josh Ruxin, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, says in the U.S., “hyper-technologization of everything” leads to rejection of simple solutions in favor of “the stuff that has some incredibly overly technical basis.”

“I think there are a ton of lessons that can be applied in primary care and at community health centers from countries like Rwanda,” says Ruxin, who runs a health and poverty program in that country. “But I haven’t sensed that the United States is ready for that.”

GE Healthcare, a believer, is investing $3 billion over six years in its “Healthymagination” initiative to create low-cost, high-quality products worldwide. It aims to use “reverse innovation,” the same development process that produced the MAC 800. GE learned a hard lesson prior to the initiative. “Quite frankly, when we develop stuff in the U.S. and try to make it available for lower-cost markets, it just doesn’t work,” says Melanie Varin, GE’s general manager of marketing for diagnostic cardiology. Products created that way tend to be too expensive for those markets and are unable to capture “the mindset of the local user.”

That experience led GE to pursue its current approach, which is outlined in an October 2009 Harvard Business Review article, coauthored by GE’s CEO, Jeffrey R. Immelt. “Once products have proven themselves in emerging markets,” the article says, “they must be taken global.”

Kaiser Health News is a service of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health-care-policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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Developing Nations: Laboratories For Health Care Innovation

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Developing Nations: Laboratories For Health Care Innovation

Searching your desktop for files can be a real pain without the right tools. Every desktop has one (ore more) search tools that can be used to search for that missing file. Linux is not an exception. One of my favorite search tools for the Linux desktop is Beagle. You can read about the basics of Beagle in my article “Enable Beagle searching in GNOME“. Of course Beagle is not just for GNOME. Beagle can be used in just about any Linux desktop.

But one feature you might not know exists with Beagle is the ability to search across your internal LAN on other Beagle-enabled machines. This makes for an amazingly handy way to search for files across multiple machines without having to run around to every machine on your network. With one of the later releases of Beagle, you can enable remote searches. In this tutorial I will show you how to set this up and how to run a search across your network.

First and foremost, make sure you are running a recent release of Beagle. Do this by open up your package manager and see that Beagle is, in fact, the latest version. If you have any security measures on your network, you will need to open up port 4000 so that the Beagle machines can see one another. Once you have those tasks done you are ready to set up Beagle. I am going to make this simple by only setting up two machines for this feature: Desktop and Laptop. The information you need to know:

LAPTOP

• IP address: 192.168.1.15
• Hostname: jlwallen-laptop

DESKTOP

• IP address: 192.168.1.100
• Hostname: jlwallen-desktop

Let’s set up the desktop first. Follow these steps:

1. Open up Beagle on the desktop machine.
2. Click on Search > Preferences.
3. Click on the Data sources tab.
4. Make sure NetworkServices is checked.
5. Click on the Network options tab.
6. Check “Enable web interface for local search services”.
7. Check “Allow external access to local search services”
8. In the Index Name text area enter “Desktop” (no quotes).
9. Click OK.

You will have to come back to this section in just a moment. But first go over to the laptop and run through the same steps as above, only insert “Laptop” (no quotes) where you see “Desktop”. Once you have that done, come back to the desktop and follow these steps.

Figure 1

1. Open up the Preferences window again.
2. Click on the Network options.
3. Click the Add button in the Networking section.
4. From the list of currently available hosts, double click the host named “Laptop” (see Figure 1).
5. Click OK on the Preferences window.

Now go back to the laptop and run through the same steps (above) to add the Desktop host. Once you have done this close Beagle on both the Desktop and the Laptop and restart both.

When Beagle has restarted you are almost ready to search. But before you do you have to tell Beagle to include the Neighborhood in its search. To do this click Search > Search Domains and check Neighborhood.

Figure 2

Now when you run your search it will include a search on the remote machine. Figure 2 shows a search for the string “beagle” as run on the laptop. For this test I created a file called “beagle_desktop” on the desktop machine and “beagle_laptop” on the laptop machine. Figure 2 shows both files.

Congrats! You now have remote searching set up in Beagle.

Final thoughts

Beagle is one of the more flexible search tools on any desktop. Give remote searching a try and Beagle will probably become your favorite search tool.

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Remote searching with Beagle

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Remote searching with Beagle

Most Windows users think CCleaner if they have to recommend a temporary files cleaner for the Windows operating system. There are on the other hand a few alternatives that are as good as CCleaner. ACleaner resembles CCleaner in many regards starting from the available locations that can be cleaned to the option to add additional locations and the ability to schedule a cleaning of the system in regular intervals.

One difference between ACleaner and CCleaner is that it is slightly more complicated to select the items that should be cleaned. CCleaner displays them in the main interface right away while they have to be selected in the settings in the ACleaner interface.

The items that can be cleaned are divided into categories like Windows, browsers or applications which are divided into further categories like MS Office or system in the Windows category or Internet Explorer, Opera, Google Chrome or Firefox in the browsers category.

Items like cookies, temporary Internet files or recent documents can be selected individually or all at once by right-clicking in the interface of each category.

ACleaner provides additional options to clean Registry settings next to cleaning files in the Windows operating system. This is actually an easier process as it takes one click to scan the Registry for issues and leftovers.

There are options to deselect specific items that are excluded from future scans. Custom items and locations can be added to ACleaner just like they can be added to CCleaner. This is interesting for users who want to clear data that is not included by the default categories like portable software files.

Another interesting option is the ignore list that can be used to protect items so that they are never cleaned during cleanups.

The scheduler can be used to enable automatic cleanups in intervals that range from every 15 minutes to every eight hours.

ACleaner has all the options needed to cleanup the Windows operating system regularly and effectively. The software program can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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Windows Cleaner ACleaner 3.5 Released

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Windows Cleaner ACleaner 3.5 Released

Starting Out with Alice: A Visual Introduction to Programming (Paperback)
By Tony Gaddis

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Starting Out with Alice: A Visual Introduction to Programming (Paperback) newly tagged “kids”

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Starting Out with Alice: A Visual Introduction to Programming (Paperback) newly tagged "kids"