randform

As some randform readers may have noticed the randform blog webpage, as well as Tims lateron.de were put offline yesterday Jan. 18 on the occasion of the protests against SOPA and PIPA and ACTA.

“verticalized overhead power line with book lover using excessive light”, fotography of the Sony Center court yard on Potsdamer Platz by Loretta (see also the randform post chains)

I was recently looking a bit into the issue of smart grids and ran over an interesting european strategy analysis.

In 2005 the european smartgrid platform www.smartgrids.eu was set up. On their document page the currently newest document linked to is from 2010, it is a Strategic Deployment Document for Europe’s electricity networks of the future (2010) on page 53 one finds:

Engineering in the energy sector, electricity grids in particular, is seen by many as old- fashioned and “difficult” as it requires a high level of competence in mathematics, physics and other sciences. This discourages the potential new students from studying and pursuing a career in power engineering.

… and

All stakeholders in the electricity sector have a responsibility to improve the image of the sector, e.g. by engaging with educational institutions and explaining in an understandable way the real benefits of being involved with and able to deliver solutions to the energy, climate and environmental challenges of today.

This sounds very much as if the major problem of getting new working force for the electricity high-tech sector is mainly a question of hipness. In part it may be true that science and math is regarded as highly “unhip” in certain circles (and the reasons for this are manifold), however the comment in the document seems to miss somewhat a crucial point. Or maybe lets say it sounds a bit strange in the view that even fields medallists in e.g. Great Britain or France try to politely point out that there is structurally something at odds with the whole european science and math research and education.

Happy holidays to all randform readers!

supplement 1.1.2012: a happy new year to all randform readers!

I decided to translate the part in the last randform comment, which deals with democracy and social media, because it is of a more general nature.

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I had posted a question to the thinkspace at openeconomics.net, which is an initiative of the open knowledge foundation. The site had been managed amongst others by Guo Xu who is the coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. The question hasn’t been moderated yet, but regardless of that I thought I may post the question also here.
The question I ask is which other forms of money flow regulation -aside from national currencies- are seriously discussed among economists. In particular this concerns the question on how to tackle the Euro problem.

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bye, bye THISYouKNOWmustNOTbemaned***

Unfortunately on Oct. 1st some countries signed the socalled Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The European Union may eventually join in. The agreement is rather problematic.

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Hiroshima nowadays

For commemorating the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki two links to recent comments, which I left on the blog Azimuth. One link is to a comment to the new scientist article article “The carbon cost of Germany’s nuclear ‘Nein danke!’ ” where I try to explain why the authors arguments that Germany’s renunciation of commercial nuclear power generation leads to more carbon output are flawed.

A second comment is related to the Manhattan project itself but also to the dangers of biotechnology.

The Theseus program is a german research project (sofar funded for five years). It is kind of a bit on the side of the already mentioned Quaero project. Theseus is amongst others concerned with the development of aspects of the semantic web. Moreover it is especially concerned with technology in connection to business applications and services. So for example companies like antibodies-online may look out for unified descriptions of their products* etc. The Theseus project hosts the socalled TEXO lab, which offers now a prize for an app written in USDL (which seems to be some variant of WSDL, i.e. a metalanguage, which describes entities of web services). The website of the prize is in german, but thanks to google-translate (which still works for this site) one can get an easy translate of the site. This may enhance the global competition for a posh enterprise app.

*as a side remark: eventually this could also be useful for flutracking

My talk at the open knowledge confence was well perceived, however on the other hand there were not so many participants listening to my talk. In general it seemed to me that games were not (yet) in the focus of the open knowledge community. That is tere were not so many talks involving games at the conference. Nevertheless there were enough issues of importance and the conference was fun.

The slides of my talk are currently too big for upload, so I only uploaded a newer version of the article.

update (130711): The slides are available now at slideshare.net:

Talk: “Testing new toy economies/political structures in MMOGs” at slideshare.net

Short notice: I am giving a talk on contents of the game scheme article and the scientific platform article on July 1st at the open knoledge conference in Berlin.

Photography: Pal Lindlund

This post is like the previous post a comment to the discussion about human-machine hybrids in the recently uploaded game-scheme article.
In a passage from human to a human-machine hybrid the tolerance towards body modifications plays an important role.
There was recently an interesting interview in the english newspaper “The Guardian” wether cosmetic surgery does help or damage people.
The interview however didn’t really touch the issue of how strongly plastic surgery (and other body modifications) is influenced by cultural predispositions (which are of course often influenced by economic considerations, but not only by these). In particular it also didn’t touch upon the question in how far the design of the human outer appearance via cosmetic surgery (especially its current boom) etc. might be seen as a step in a human-machine-hybrid transition.