Sursum

New currency, The Ven, built from basket of world currencies and carbon futures

An interesting way to "price in" environmental externalities.  Full description and story is here http://bit.ly/kZeg0U

Hat tip to @umairh.

Smarthistory.org and the textbook industry

I studied Art History in high school, using Gardners "Art Through the Ages," an iconic Art History survey book.  20+ years ago it cost ~$80, and weighed a ton.  

Much of the same content is now available for free at Smarthistory, a non-profit.  Amazingly well-done, I quickly got sucked in.

This is not good news for the textbook market.  Smarthistory shows that non-profit / open source entrants can start to collapse the existing "value chain."  Its going to be an interesting next decade in the textbook market. 

Below is Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (MOMA, 1942).  Smarthistory has some great background / historical context on the painting.  Clearly a man very much in love with his adopted home, NYC.  I love the elemental (yet sophisticated) vitality.

 

Google and Twitter partner to thwart Internet shut-down in Egypt

One of the coolest things that came across my desk today was an emerging partnership between Google and Twitter.  

Egypt has apparently shut down their Internet to prevent reformers from sharing information with each other and also with the outside world.

The Google / Twitter partnership allows reformers to call an international number and "record" a tweet that goes out with a #Egypt hashtag.  Awesome. 

Viva la Revolucion!  

Where Good Ideas come From by Steven Johnson

 

Reasons for optimism - world health and prosperity trends

Sometimes its important to take a step back and see what the data tell us.  Hans Rosling helps us do just that in the video below.

 

Innovative financing options for artists are exploding

The centuries-old patronage model for the arts is experiencing incredible disruption- and is being democratized in the process.  The spectrum runs from Kickstarter (amazing) to sites that help musicians sell shares in their profits to early fans (video below).  Love it.   

 

Let a thousand leaks bloom

The recent Wikileaks diplomatic disclosure is like getting a shot at the doctor's office: the needle hurts going in, and there are a few days of arm pain, but its better for you (and everyone else) in the long term.

Against its will, the US government just went through a baptism of radical transparency.  Were there revelations of skulduggery?  Not quite: the cables instead have revealed broad, earnest, and frank diplomacy -- the kind we should want.

As Timothy Ash recently wrote in the Guardian: "A diplomat's nightmare is a historian's dream."  And yes, the disclosures were somewhat embarrassing, and there is some broken glass to pick up. But as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday, diplomacy is all about real politik anyway, a few awkward moments be damned.

So why so newsworthy?  Because for the average person Wikileaks lifts the veil -- we don't get to read what Robert Gates does.  I can put it no better than Will Wilkinson recently wrote in The Economist (via the NYT):

"To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.

… If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy.

Some have said that "sunlight is the best disinfectant."  But sometimes sunlight also reveals frank and affirming truths that actually build trust.  For many across the globe, the disclosures may have the unintended and positive consequence of representing the best evidence that the US is not run by a cabal of out-of-touch plutocrats. 

We should all want a government, should its innermost workings be exposed to sunlight, to stand up under close scrutiny.  And that is largely what we've got.  If not for Wikileaks, where would this sunlight come from? 

Why Google Wins

There are tensions in every B:B:C business - figuring out what's best for the business customer is often at odds with what's best for the consumer.  No company understands how to ease this tension better than Google.

Its a relatively simple question: what can a company do to make me feel OK about being marketed to?

1. Give me free stuff
2. Give me a good ROI for putting my data in your products
3. Hire people who are my friends and who I respect
4. Prove you are spending some of your profits on things that improve the world
5. Surprise me in a good way
6. Have backbone when it counts (China, etc.)

I would argue that Google and Twitter demonstrate that they value each of these categories.  Facebook values the first 3, but falls behind on the last three.

 

Makani - providing kite power over our oceans

Makani recently won a $3m grant from the DoE to automate and digitize the launching and landing of their power-producing kites.  Google.org had previously chipped in $15M.

These kites are 2x as productive as wind turbines, and a lot better to look at.  I love innovation like this.

 

Need an awesome fake leg? There's a printer for that.

This video from the New York Times does a nice job of introducing the concept and possibilities of 3D printing.  I especially loved the explanation of how you can print an object with moving parts.