R.I.P. Jay W Forrester ~ Sociodynamics Pioneer...

Alas, RIP, Jay W Forrester. Through his panache, presence, and personal feedback (to me!) and through his inventing core memory & CNC machines, the Whirlwind real-time digital computer, Sage air defense network, Lincoln Labs, building up the MIT Sloan School, teaching Professors Ed Roberts, John Sterman, Donella Meadows, Jurgen Randers, etc, et al, founding the System Dynamics discipline, and providing essential inspiration to dozens of MIT alumcos -- i.e. his students were founders of Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), MITRE, 3Com, Pugh-Roberts, Patni Computer Systems (birth of Indian offshoring), Ventana, and many, many more -- plus inspirational role in creating SimCity, pioneering management flight simulators, e.g. creating the Beer Game, writing Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, World Dynamics and provoking LImits to Growth, C-ROADS simulators, etc, etc, Jay Forrester remains an awesome and iconoclastic inventor, a personal inspiration to me and thousands more, and one of MIT's most epic and innovative heroes. I'm so sad at losing him but so happy to have had him too...

Revolutionary Ventures ~ Bold Transformations!

My MIT Media Lab colleagues Ed Boyden, Joe Jacobson, Adam Marblestone, Desiree Dudley and I are co-hosting an upgraded and basically new incarnation of our Neurotech Ventures class -- now called Revolutionary Ventures -- this Fall 2015 at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon September 10th from 2-4pm.

While we emphasize a variety of emerging technology domains including neurotechnology, imaging, cryotechnology, gerontechnology, and bio-and-nano fabrication, this course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- anything ranging from entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units to new research centers or universities, even the creation of new disciplines and entire industries!

Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Minds, Money, MIT

My MIT Media Lab colleague Ed Boyden and I are again co-hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall 2014 at the Media Lab starting this Thursday afternoon September 4th from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- both entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units -- to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world. Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

Curating Innovation ~ Bonsen on Social Physics...

Yours truly pontificating about Curating Innovation...

MIT Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Money+Minds!

My MIT Media Lab colleague Ed Boyden and I are again co-hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon 5 September 2013 from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- both entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units -- to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world.

Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

MemTable ~ Seth Hunter's Group Thinkertool...

Check out Seth Hunter's still-impressive Media Lab Master's thesis from 2009, the MemTable...

"...an interactive touch table that supports co-located group meetings by capturing both digital and physical interactions in its memory. Everyone can be a scribe at the MemTable. The goal of the project is to demonstrate hardware and software design principles that integrate recording, recalling, and reflection during the life cycle of a project in one tabletop system. [...] MemTable poses an important question to HCI designers:  How can the multi-person interactions we design be integrated with our workpractices into systems which have history and memory? What is the social computing space of the future?"

Strip-Search Society ~ 24x7 Surveillance Age...

National, State, Local and Private Security "concerns" are being used to rationalize creating the virtual-equivalent of a strip-search society where individuals are under constant biometric, infometric, and sociometric surveillance, our hard-won Constitutional rights to protection from arbitrary invasion, search, and seizure are forfeit, and we have no privacy and thus no real liberty. This is Orwellian Big Brother bullshit and is despicable. Who will lead the resistance?

MIT Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Minds+Money

My MIT colleague Ed Boyden and I (with Rutledge Ellis-Behnke in Germany) are again hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon 6 September 2012 from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- both entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units -- to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world.

Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

America Revealed ~ Hidden Patterns & Rhythms

Thanks to the DailyMail for spotting America Revealed, the new PBS TV show on the hidden patterns and rhythms which make US work!

"Based upon the BBC’s award-winning Britain From Above. America Revealed is a unique look at what makes America tick, what it takes to keeps the biggest food machine in the world going, the delicate balance that keeps our supermarkets stocked with groceries and fast food restaurants supplied with fries. How we keep America moving with its vast and complex transport systems. How we propel ourselves through energy, what maintains the constant supply of fuel and electricity to our homes and businesses and finally how we keep up with the ever changing world, the import and export infrastructure that shapes our manufacturing industry [...] America Revealed uses beautiful and breath-taking aerial photography to provide an otherwise unseen view of America and use original data visualizations to demonstrate how our systems work."

Waves of Innovation ~ Blank on Social Media...

In his latest piece on Why Facebook is Killing Silicon Valley, Steve Blank shows this simplified infographic on Waves of Innovation (which is drawn from his great must-see Secret History talk!-)

Netherlands from Above ~ Godviews of Us++

Thanks to Greetings From Holland for spotting the Nederland van Boven godviews! This Netherlands from Above show visualizes patterns of us from abstract heights through the magic of timelapse, sensors, tracking, and other sociotechnological tricks! Lovely views!

Twitter Diffusion ~ Accelerating US Adoption...

US Twitter Adoption map over time...

"From late March 2006 through the early August 2009, nearly 3.5 million people signed up for twitter. 2.3 million of those users signed up in the 408 cities displayed here. As users sign up, the blue circles grow and size and turn read then that city reaches a critical mass of users. We defined critical mass as achieving 13.5% of the total number of users that city will gain over the three years. The graph represents the number of new users signing up each week."

Definitely read Traditional social networks fueled Twitter’s spread...

"...the site’s growth in the United States actually relied primarily on media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity"

Supernetworked Firms ~ Global Corp Control...

New Scientist trumpets Revealed -- the capitalist network that runs the world, spotlighting The network of global corporate control by Vitali, Glattfelder, and Battiston...

"An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable. [...] When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions."

Which, to the extent they manage mutual funds and the money of masses, is obvious. But nevertheless interesting!

MIT Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Minds+Money

My MIT colleague Ed Boyden and I (with Rutledge Ellis-Behnke in Germany) are again hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon 8 September 2011 from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building startups (both entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial) to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world. Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

TweetQuake ~ Twitter Outraced VA Quake Vibes!

Twitter outpaced geological vibrations during recent VA 'quake!

"Inspired by XKCD, [here's a] heat map of the frequency of tweets mentioning the word "earthquake" in the 5 minutes after the Virginia earthquake on 08/23/2011. The locations are self-reported by Twitter users and may be erroneous. The spread of the earthquake is approximated to be 4000 m/s."

And see here actual seismometrics across the US...

Real Life Social Network ~ Understanding Circles

Check out this Presentation That Inspired Google+

Place Pulse ~ Crowdsourced Urban Evaluations

Check out Place Pulse, a new project by Media Lab colleagues Phil Salesses, Anthony DeVincenzi, and César Hidalgo to...

"...generate evaluative maps of cities from crowdsourced questions. Use it to identify preferences within a population or to find similar areas between two cities. [...] Place Pulse allows the creation of comparative studies in which both cities and its neighborhoods can be contrasted and compared. Place Pulse is a tool that helps improve our society’s ability to measure our urban environments, and can provide valuable feedback for the design and evolution of current and future cities."

Collaborative Consumption ~ Share & Swap...

The Guardian's Leo Hickman spotlights collaborative consumption, the core notion of Rachel Botsman's book, What's Mine Is Yours...

"...a cry for us to consume "smarter" by moving away from the outdated concept of outright ownership -- and the lust to own -- towards one where we share, barter, rent and swap assets that include not just consumables, but also our "time and space". The notion of "collaborative consumption" is not, she notes, new -- it has been around for centuries. But the arrival of internet-enabled social networking, coupled with "geo-located" smart phones, has super-charged a concept that was already rapidly gaining primacy owing to the twin pressures of our environmental and economic crises. Echoing the Japanese concept of muda -- the relentless hunt for, and eradication of, inefficiencies in any system -- collaborative consumption aims to exploit previously ignored or unnoticed value in all our assets by both eliminating waste and generating demand for goods and services that are otherwise "idling."

Hickman is a bit skeptical, but spotlights a number of example new ventures helping urban dwellers live asset-light lifestyles. In any case, hear it from Botsman herself at TEDxSydney...

100 Million People ~ Hoffman on Having Impact

LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman speaks now at the Media Lab on How to Benefit 100 Million People: Designing and Building Human Ecosystems for Networks and Marketplaces. Key themes...

• Public Intellectual Society -- How improve ourselves and society by designing, building, and improving human ecosystems;
• Impact at Scale -- How change world, elevate game for us all, meaning hundreds of millions of people;
• Media Enables -- Designing and building tools for linking humanity. Software and networks are incredibly powerful;
• Commerce is Good -- Economic engine drives growth and endures;
• Learning from Ventures -- First company begat better followers;
• Platforms, Networks, Marketplaces -- What to invest in and build;
• LinkedIn as Live-Case Study -- Most well-known exemplar of themes;
• as Platform: LinkedIn Skills -- App that's usefully enabled mashup;
• as Network: LinkedIn Today -- People w/ ID, connected, ultra-custom of professional relevance;
• as Marketplace -- Talent liquidity via transparency and reputation leads to tremendous productivity boost for society;
• Self Regulation Layers -- Explicit and implicit reputation, permission, empowerment;
• Career Ladder is Broken -- Old world metaphor, change too fast and different. Must be more adaptable. Everyone an entrepreneur!
• Startup of You -- Reid's new book, you need to operate as business of yourself!

Also interesting Q&A discussion with Media Lab Director Joi Ito plus audience, including connecting with polar-opposite Peter Thiel, that it's generally not a good idea to dropout of college, pros and cons of business-mindset and their monopolistic temptations, LinkedIn has has best-interest of professional customer centrally in mind, crafting a culture of collaboration, architecting for innovation, teaching "how to" collaborate in order to get high-performance, Google buying breakfast thus synchronizing group circadian rhythm, dealing with IPO and being public, Chomsky's Responsibilities of Intellectual, always speaking truth but not all truths, helping SME businesses better connect and find each other, timescales of change in IP patents vs IP internet, explaining away MBA and background in management consulting (ouch;-), data as Web 3.0, data-ownership, overhauling the global patent system, role of open vs closed systems, etc.

ReConstitution 2008 ~ Sosolimited's Prez D-b8s

The MIT alums at Sosolimited rock-morphed the polisphere!

"ReConstitution was a live remix of the 2008 US Presidential debates performed by Sosolimited in Boston, New York, and Washington DC. This movie shows highlights from the performances and gives an overview of selected transformations."

ReConstitution 2008 Reel from Sosolimited on Vimeo.