Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest

"It is now up to all of us to figure out how to build a sustainable civilization within the new information rainforest - which provides sustenance and shelter, as well as poisonous plants and deadly predators. Success is by no means inevitable. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that make it in people's interest to behave constructively, and which create strong disincentives for destructive behavior in this new environment. We need to help everybody understand how to participate constructively and responsibly in this new space, and protect the rights of minorities and dissenters. We are in uncharted territory, but we have to start somewhere. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive "internet users" - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our information society."

in reference to:

"Global Voices 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile brought together people from 60 different countries"
- RConversation: Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest (view on Google Sidewiki)

Customer-Centric Capitalism

"What is the primary responsibility of a business? Renowned management professor and writer Peter Drucker gave a succinct answer to this question in his 1954 book The Practice of Management: “A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers . . . Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence.”

For the last thirty years, maximizing shareholder value has replaced customer value as the key objective of many companies. But, a number of experts are now raising questions about this widespread business practice and the extreme preoccupation with short term profits that inevitably results from putting shareholders over customers.

A 2006 study co-sponsored by the Business Roundtable and the CFA Institute concluded that: “the obsession with short-term results by investors, asset management firms, and corporate managers collectively leads to the unintended consequences of destroying long-term value, which decreases market efficiency, reduces investment returns, and impedes efforts to strengthen corporate governance.”

in reference to:

"“For three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority.  But evidence suggests that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first.”"
- Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Customer-Centric Capitalism (view on Google Sidewiki)

Gaming and families

"BECTA have just released a new report on the use of gaming in families. It’s a really interesting document – supported by an extensive literature review and a record of the parents’ and children’s views on and experiences of gaming from the survey analysis."

Nice.

in reference to:

"parents and young people reported the following benefits from playing video games together"
- Derek's Blog » Gaming and families (view on Google Sidewiki)

They Are Watching You. And They Are Judging You.

"A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. … Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be."

in reference to:

"Smart Babies"
- http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/they-are-watching-you-and-they-are-judging-you/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Is Free Turning into Just Another Old Telco ?

"Once more, his diatribe takes the North American players as targets: « you cannot give ever growing capacity to American providers (and the largest all are, Youtube, Amazon...) without them contributing anything whatsoever », he stated during the [ARCEP] conference, stating also that he thought regrettable that the public authorities had already abandoned « the idea of taxing Google.»."

in reference to:

"There are many reasons why this is disturbing to me: First of all, it's a patent lie."
- Fiberevolution: Is Free Turning into Just Another Old Telco ? (view on Google Sidewiki)

Evidence based smear campaigns

"All the studies found exactly the same thing: if the original dodgy fact fits with your prejudices, a correction only reinforces these even more. If your goal is to move opinion, then this depressing finding suggests that smears work, and what’s more, corrections don’t challenge them much: because for people who already agree with you, it only make them agree even more."

in reference to:

"A new experiment published this month in the journal “Political Behaviour”"
- http://www.badscience.net/2010/05/evidence-based-smear-campaigns/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

On pasta and music and copyright

"Basically, you can do what you like with pasta, starting with the wheat and water and ending with the cooked meal. At each stage, you have the choice of whether you want to pay someone else to do something or not. Someone else can make the pasta for you. Sell you a machine to make pasta. Write a book and tell you how to make the pasta. Or the meal itself. Someone else can cook it for you, amateur or professional. There are a million ways people can participate in the design, making, cooking and eating of pasta, a million ways people can make money with pasta.

Wonderful, isn’t it? The freedom and creativity that has given us over 1300 types of pasta over centuries, shared and enjoyed by billions.

But you know something? It would take very little to screw all this up, to make a complete codswallop out of pasta. Imagine this scenario:"

Too horrible to continue. Go read.

in reference to:

"Step 7: And so the pasta “bandit” is born. And over time, five thousand years of eating pasta comes to a halt."
- On pasta and music and copyright – confused of calcutta (view on Google Sidewiki)