conceptual framework

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pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

The examples shown in Figures 1–4 are just a tiny sampling of an enormous number of such scaling relationships that quantitatively describe how almost any measurable characteristic of animals, plants, ecosystems, cities, and companies scales with size. You will be seeing many more of them throughout this book. The existence of these remarkable regularities strongly suggests that there is a common conceptual framework underlying all of these very different highly complex phenomena and that the dynamics, growth, and organization of animals, plants, human social behavior, cities, and companies are, in fact, subject to similar generic “laws.” This is the main focus of this book. I will explain the nature and origin of these systematic scaling laws, how they are all interrelated, and how they lead to a deep and broad understanding of many aspects of life and ultimately to the challenge of global sustainability.

This book is about a way of thinking, about asking big questions, and about suggesting big answers to some of those big questions. It’s a book about how some of the major challenges and issues we are grappling with today, ranging from rapid urbanization, growth, and global sustainability to understanding cancer, metabolism, and the origins of aging and death, can be addressed in an integrated unifying conceptual framework. It is a book about the remarkably similar ways in which cities, companies, tumors, and our bodies work, and how each of them represents a variation on a general theme manifesting surprisingly systematic regularities and similarities in their organization, structure, and dynamics. A common property shared by all of them is that they are highly complex and composed of enormous numbers of individual constituents, whether molecules, cells, or people, connected, interacting, and evolving via networked structures over multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Why do almost all companies live for only a relatively few years whereas cities keep growing and manage to circumvent the apparently inevitable fate that befalls even the most powerful and seemingly invulnerable companies? Can we imagine being able to predict the approximate life spans of companies? Can we develop a science of cities and companies, meaning a conceptual framework for understanding their dynamics, growth, and evolution in a quantitatively predictable framework? Is there a maximum size of cities? Or an optimum size? Is there a maximum size to animals and plants? Could there be giant insects and giant megacities? Why does the pace of life continually increase and why does the rate of innovation have to continue to accelerate in order to sustain socioeconomic life?


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 235–44. London: Academic Press. . 1962b. ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework’. Report to the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Menlo Park, CA, Stanford Research Institute. Online: http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/ engelbart/full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html (accessed April 2013). . 1963. ‘A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect’. In Vistas in Information Handling, Volume 1: The Augmentation of Man’s Intellect By Machine, edited by Paul W.

AUGMENTING THE INTELLECT: NLS 41 In particular, Engelbart feels we need to create tool systems that help us deal with knowledge work in a more effective way. This objective is something he claims he inherited from Bush’s 1945 paper, ‘As We May Think’ (Engelbart 1962), and it formed the basis of the ‘Conceptual Framework for Augmenting Man’s Intellect’ he would later erect to explain and support the development of the oN-Line System (NLS), a prototype hypertext system. As he told me: We need to think about how to boost our collective IQ , and how important it would be to society because all of the technologies are just going to make our world accelerate faster and faster and get more and more complex and we’re not equipped to cope with that complexity.

He wanted to build a laboratory at SRI filled with psychologists and computer scientists to research the new ‘field’ of intellectual augmentation. Initially, though, SRI was skeptical, and Engelbart was put to work in magnetics. If the project was to have the kind of impact on the engineering community he wanted, he needed the support of his peers. Engelbart decided to write a conceptual framework for it, an agenda that the computing (and engineering) community could understand. It was ‘remarkably slow and sweaty work’ (Engelbart 1988, 190), but he wrote the paper in 1962 and published it in 1963. It is interesting to note here that both Engelbart and Ted Nelson found writing difficult; they were far from prolific, and would draft and redraft multiple times.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

At this point, Silverstein and his company executives were managing what is called “the pre-development” process. Within twenty-four hours the Port Authority sent back a revised Conceptual Framework, and in his response letter of April 26, “accepting all of your key terms,” Silverstein wrote, “We understand each other’s positions clearly, including the need for reasonable certainty of completion and financeability.” He wanted to proceed immediately, he said, toward the documentation of the transaction rather than focus any longer on the Conceptual Framework and its seventeen specific elements.42 The Port Authority commissioners were tentatively scheduled to consider approval of the transaction in September, and the amount of work to be done before then was huge.

Silverstein did the right thing by accepting one of these options, which should turn out to be a profitable deal, not only for his own company, but also for the public.” The amount of money the public was committing to make the Conceptual Framework a reasonable thrust at rebuilding—and ultimately would have to pump into Ground Zero—made the Times’ last concluding phrase suspect from a financial perspective. From a political perspective, however, the Daily News editorial said it all: “The terms aren’t pretty. . . . But there’s no choice. You put the money in, or nothing gets built.”47 The interim between the April Conceptual Framework agreement and the September document signing was fraught with tension. PA officials told Silverstein Properties they would not take the deal to their board without schematic designs.

Silverstein Towers NYC EDC, “World Trade Center Site Summary of Financial Analysis,” presented to the New York City Council, March 2006. SPI, Letter to Anthony R. Coscia and Kenneth J. Ringler [PANYNJ], re WTC revised “Conceptual Framework” [“2006 deal”] for the redevelopment of the WTC site, April 26, 2006. PANYNJ, Minutes of the Board of Commissioners meeting authorizing the “Conceptual Framework” agreement [“2006 deal”], September 21, 2006. PANYNJ and SPI, “Master Development Agreement for Towers 2/3/4 of the World Trade Center,” November 16, 2006. PANYNJ, Minutes of the Board of Commissioners special meeting authorizing the WTC East Side Development Plan [“2010 deal”], August 26, 2010; update, November 18, 2010; Tower 4 Liberty Bonds Update, October 20, 2011; Tower 3 update, June 25, 2014; December 10, 2015.


Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 334 Deshmukh A Conceptual Framework for Online Internal Controls 1 Internal controls, no matter the exotic terminology, have standard objectives. The objectives of online controls can be classified as validity of transactions, mutual authentication of identity, authorization, end-to-end data integrity and confidentiality, non-repudiation and auditability of transactions. These areas are not mutually exclusive, but provide a way to conceptually organize and discuss internal controls in the online world. Let us take a detailed look at elements of the conceptual framework. Some of the controls mentioned below are covered in detail in a later section. • Validity of transactions: The primary question in online transactions is its legal status.

Controls, Security, and Audit in Online Digital Accounting ................................... 318 Internal Controls: What and Why? ................................................................. 318 Security Issues in the Online World ................................................................ 322 A Conceptual Framework for Online Internal Controls ................................ 334 Standard Online Internal Control Techniques ............................................... 336 Security Policy ...................................................................................... 338 Passwords, Security Tokens and Biometics ......................................... 342 Access Control List (ACL) .................................................................... 343 Anti-Virus Software .............................................................................. 344 Defense Against Social Engineering .................................................... 344 Cryptology ............................................................................................ 345 Digital Watermarks .............................................................................. 349 Firewalls ............................................................................................... 350 Web Content Filtering .......................................................................... 352 Virtual Private Network (VPN) ........................................................... 353 Message Security Protocols ................................................................. 355 A Taxonomy of Network Anti-Intrusion Techniques ....................................... 357 Preventive Techniques .......................................................................... 358 viii Preemptive Techniques ......................................................................... 359 Deterrent Techniques ........................................................................... 359 Deflection Techniques .......................................................................... 359 Detection Techniques ........................................................................... 360 System Integrity Techniques ................................................................. 362 Intrusion Countermeasures (ICE) Techniques .................................... 362 A Word on Wireless Networks .............................................................. 362 Anti-Intrusion Products ........................................................................ 364 Automated Control and Compliance Tools .................................................... 364 Searchspace .......................................................................................... 364 TransactionVision ................................................................................ 367 Privacy and Assurance Issues in the Online World ........................................ 369 Trust Services ........................................................................................ 372 Privacy Audits ...................................................................................... 376 Summary .......................................................................................................... 378 References ........................................................................................................ 379 Endnote ........................................................................................................... 383 About the Author ....................................................................................................... 384 Index .......................................................................................................................... 385 ix Preface Accounting and information technology have been constant companions since the days of tabulating machines.

Chapter IX deals with the role of digital accounting in financial and strategic management. Developments such as financial supply chain and corporate performance management that integrate e-developments in comprehensive managerial philosophies are covered. Finally, Chapter X discusses controls, security, and audit in the online-networked world. This chapter first presents a conceptual framework for internal controls in the online world. Then, various standard control techniques are discussed. The new Web-based anti-fraud and anti-money laundering software is also covered. The discussion of privacy and assurance issues concludes the chapter and rounds off the book. To Whom is This Book Addressed?


pages: 153 words: 27,424

REST API Design Rulebook by Mark Masse

anti-pattern, business logic, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, data acquisition, database schema, hypertext link, information retrieval, off-the-grid, web application

In contrast, most of the rules presented in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 (particularly those that deal with media types and representational forms) are my solutions in the absence of consensus. Note When used in the context of rules, the key words: “must,” “must not,” “required,” “shall,” “shall not,” “should,” “should not,” “recommended,” “may,” and “optional” are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.[16] WRML I’ve invented a conceptual framework called the Web Resource Modeling Language (WRML) to assist with the design and implementation of REST APIs. WRML, pronounced like “wormle,” originated as a resource model diagramming technique that uses a set of basic shapes to represent each of the resource archetypes discussed in Resource Archetypes.

[17] The application/wrml media type’s IANA registration is pending—see http://www.wrml.org for the most up-to-date information. [18] http://www.json.org Recap This chapter presented a synopsis of the Web’s invention and stabilization. It motivated the book’s rule-oriented presentation and introduced WRML, a conceptual framework whose ideas promote a uniform REST API design methodology. Subsequent chapters will build on this foundation to help us leverage REST in API designs. Table 1-1 summarizes the vocabulary terms that were introduced in this chapter. Table 1-1. Vocabulary review TermDescription Application Programming Interface (API) Exposes a set of data and functions to facilitate interactions between computer programs.

Web client (client) A computer program that follows REST’s uniform interface in order to accept and transfer resource state representations to servers. Web component (component) A client, network-based intermediary, or server that complies with REST’s uniform interface. Web Resource Modeling Language (WRML) A conceptual framework whose ideas can be leveraged to design and implement uniform REST APIs. Web server (server) A computer program that follows REST’s uniform interface constraints in order to accept and transfer resource state representations to clients. Web service A web server programmed with specific, often reusable, logic.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Bibliographic Essay Part I: General Sources and Background In Part I of this essay, we explain how our approach relates to past work and theories. Detailed sources for data, facts, quotations, and other material are provided in Part II. Throughout Part II we also highlight work that has particularly inspired our approach to specific topics. Our conceptual framework differs from conventional wisdom in economics and much of social sciences in four critical ways: first, how productivity increases affect wages and thus the validity of the productivity bandwagon; second, the malleability of technology and importance of choice over the direction of innovation; third, the role of bargaining and other noncompetitive factors in wage setting and how these affect the way in which productivity gains are or are not shared with workers; and fourth, the role of noneconomic factors—in particular, social and political power, ideas and vision—in technology choices.

Here, we provide some additional background on these notions, emphasizing how they build on and differ from existing contributions. We also highlight how, based on these ideas, our interpretation of the major technological transitions in history differs from past work. Finally, we relate our approach to a few recent books on technology and inequality. We start with the four building blocks that distinguish our conceptual framework from past approaches. First, with competitive labor markets, wages are determined by the marginal productivity of labor, as we discuss in Chapter 1. Most common approaches in economics relate this marginal productivity to average productivity (output or value added per worker) and hence generate the prediction that the average wage varies with average productivity (or, simply, productivity).

This type of high-productivity automation also increases the demand for the products of other sectors, either through the demand for inputs from the firms installing automation technology or because the real incomes of consumers increase owing to the cheaper products of these firms. Critically, however, these benefits will not occur when automation is “so-so,” meaning that it increases productivity only by a little (see our discussion below and in the context of Chapter 9). Another key part of our conceptual framework, the role of new tasks in generating opportunities for workers and counterbalancing automation, is also distinct from most approaches in economics. Our overall approach builds on a number of prior contributions in the economics literature. Atkinson and Stiglitz (1969) proposed a model of technological change that differed from the conventional wisdom in allowing for innovations to affect productivity “locally”—meaning only at the prevailing capital-labor ratio.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Doug finally got what he wanted -- the freedom to explore a field in which he still had no colleagues. "It was lonely work, not having anybody to bounce the ideas off, but I finally got it written down in a paper I finished in 1962 and published in 1963." Total silence from the community greeted the announcement of the conceptual framework Engelbart had thought about and worked to articulate for over a decade. But the few people who happened to be listening happened to be the right people. Bob Taylor, a young fellow at NASA who was one of the bright technological vanguard of the post-Sputnik era, one of the new breed of research funders who didn't fear innovation as a matter of reflex, pushed some of the earliest funding of Doug's project.

Licklider and Taylor thought Engelbart was just the kind of forward-thing researcher they wanted to recruit for the task of finding new and powerful uses for the computational tools their research teams were creating. They were particularly interested in the same paper of Doug's that the mainstream of computer science had chosen to ignore. The paper that attracted the attention of ARPA and met such a thundering silence from the wider community of computer theorists in 1963 was entitled "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect." In its introduction, Engelbart presented the manifesto by which he meant to launch an entire new field of human knowledge: By "augmenting man's intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.

The system we wish to improve can thus be visualized as comprising a trained human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology. The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts computers and computer-controlled information-storage, information-handling, and information-display devices. The aspects of the conceptual framework that are discussed here are primarily those relating to those relating to the individual's ability to make significant use of such equipment in an integrated system. The biggest difference between the citizen of preliterate culture and the industrial-world dweller who can perform long division or dial a telephone is not in the brain's "hardware" -- the nervous system of the highlander or the urbanite -- but in the thinking tools given by the culture.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

But once the will to power pierced through these norms, not much of them was left to act as an effective counterweight to the power of the newly emerging state. State builders were also quick to reconfigure norms for their own agenda, as we have seen. Going back to Figure 1 in Chapter 2, summarizing our conceptual framework, we can see this situation as corresponding to the bottom left where both state and society are weak to start with. Without the norms and institutions of society capable of restraining the process of state building once it’s in motion, there is no corridor. Hence, in the face of the will to power, there is nowhere else for society to go but toward the Despotic Leviathan.

This is what the Italian communes achieved, thanks to their ability to found a Shackled Leviathan, and this is what the Allegory of Good Government so brilliantly explains. * * * — The reader who is familiar with our earlier book Why Nations Fail will see strong parallels between what we have just described and the conceptual framework developed in that book. (At least we are not entirely inconsistent with our earlier thinking.) There we referred to institutions that provide broad-based opportunities and incentives for people to invest, innovate, and engage in productivity-enhancing activities as “inclusive economic institutions.”

We emphasized that new innovations, technologies, and organizations, though indispensable for sustained economic growth, will often be resisted because they may destabilize an existing order (what we called “political creative destruction”). The best guarantee that we have to prevent some powerful actors blocking new technologies, and in the process stamping out economic development, is to make sure that nobody, and nothing, is powerful enough to be able to do so. Looked at from this perspective, our conceptual framework here expands on Why Nations Fail. The Shackled Leviathan is not just the culmination of the inclusive political institutions necessary for inclusive economic institutions. It also critically depends on the Red Queen effect—the ability of society to contend with, constrain, and check the state and the political elites.


pages: 357 words: 98,854

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

Mendel knew nothing about DNA when, in an Austrian monastery garden, he developed his idea of inherited factors that are transmitted ‘true’ from generation to generation of peas. It doesn’t matter. They saw what nobody else had seen and suddenly we all had a new way of viewing the world. The epigenetic landscape Oddly enough, there was a conceptual framework that was in existence when John Gurdon performed his work. Go to any conference with the word ‘epigenetics’ in the title and at some point one of the speakers will refer to something called ‘Waddington’s epigenetic landscape’. They will show the grainy image seen in Figure 1.1. Conrad Waddington was a hugely influential British polymath.

We no longer accept most of his ideas scientifically, but we should acknowledge that he was making a genuine attempt to address important questions. Inevitably, and quite rightly, Lamarck has been overshadowed by Charles Darwin, the true colossus of 19th century biology – actually, probably the colossus of biology generally. Darwin’s model of the evolution of species via natural selection has been the single most powerful conceptual framework in biological sciences. Its power became even greater once married to Mendel’s work on inheritance and our molecular understanding of DNA as the raw material of inheritance. If we wanted to summarise a century and a half of evolutionary theory in one paragraph we might say: Random variation in genes creates phenotypic variation in individuals.

Consequently, at a very fundamental level, all cells in a female body can be split into two camps depending on which X chromosome they inactivated. The expression for this is that females are epigenetic mosaics. This sophisticated epigenetic control in females is a complicated and highly regulated process, and that’s where Mary Lyon’s predictions have provided such a useful conceptual framework. They can be paraphrased as the following four steps: Counting: cells from the normal female would contain only one active X chromosome; Choice: X inactivation would occur early in development; Initiation: the inactive X could be either maternally or paternally derived, and the inactivation would be random in any one cell; Maintenance: X inactivation would be irreversible in a somatic cell and all its descendants.


pages: 178 words: 47,457

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne

conceptual framework, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, gentrification, impulse control, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, post scarcity, War on Poverty, working poor

The procedural self-talk can be written down and eventually will become part of the internal self-talk. Goal-setting addresses several cognitive issues. 4. Teaching conceptual frameworks as part of the content (Marzano and Arredondo, 1986). There are many ways to do this. One is by using graphic organizers. Another is to teach content in an associative way (i.e., teaching it in relationship to what students personally have experienced, rather than in a linear or hierarchical way). Another way to build conceptual frameworks is to take what they know and translate it into the new form. For example, have them write in casual register and then translate into formal register.

If the student is processing from an auditory position, the teacher can ask, "What do you remember hearing?" And so on for the other positions. Eye movements can help the teacher identify how a student tends to store and retrieve information. ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONAL INTERVENTIONS THAT BUILD CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS AND COGNITIVE STRATEGIES 1. Using graphic organizers (Idol and Jones, i99i, Chapter 3). Graphic organizers give students the ability to identify main concepts, assign specific labels to concepts, and sort relevant and non-relevant cues (see example below). Example: Example: (For a comprehensive, research-based overview, see Idol and Jones, 1991.) 2.


pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

Charity and welfare programs are well-intended efforts to lessen the damage done by the capitalist system. But a real solution requires a change in the system itself. CAPITALIST MAN VERSUS REAL MAN THE SYSTEMIC PROBLEM STARTS WITH the assumptions we make about human nature. Indifference to other human beings is deeply embedded in the current conceptual framework of economics. The neoclassical theory of economics is based on the belief that a human being is basically a personal-gain-seeking being. It assumes that maximizing personal profit is the core of economic rationality. This assumption encourages a form of behavior toward other human beings that deserves to be described by far harsher words than mere “indifference”—words like greed, exploitation, and selfishness.

THE PROBLEM OF UNEMPLOYMENT—WRONG DIAGNOSIS, WRONG CURE OF COURSE, TODAY’S YOUNG PEOPLE who are struggling to find decent jobs have done nothing wrong—just as the poor women around the world who are trapped in poverty have done nothing wrong. In both cases, the economic system that we designed and have been following with total trust is to blame—and that needs to change. This problem of unemployment is not created by the unemployed people themselves. It is created by our grossly flawed conceptual framework, which has drilled into our heads that people are born to work for a few fortunate capitalists. Since these few job creators are the drivers of the economy, according to the present theory, all policies and institutions are built for them. If they don’t hire you, you are finished. What a misreading of human destiny!

In the years to come, as the successes of social businesses continue to multiply and expand, more and more people and organizations will join the cause. Eventually, we’ll wonder why it took so long for the world to recognize the obvious demand for an economic system that is truly dedicated to meeting human needs. 11 REDESIGNING THE WORLD OF TOMORROW THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF CAPITALISM was originally laid out by the great Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, primarily in his 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This framework has been improved and elaborated throughout its long history, but the basic tenets have remained unchanged.


No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans by Michael S. Barr

active measures, asset allocation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, information asymmetry, it's over 9,000, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market friction, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, p-value, payday loans, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, search costs, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked

In this sense, improving financial institutions can have a disproportionate impact on the lives of the poor. Moving from a payday lender and a check casher to a bank with direct deposit and payroll deduction can have benefits in improved planning, saving, and other outcomes far more important than the transaction cost saved. Behavior, Markets, and Policy: A Conceptual Framework A behavioral perspective allows one to account better for how individuals make decisions and is thus a useful corrective to the rational-agent model. Yet a model focused on individuals is, on its own, incomplete as a basis for policy. The perspective outlined above needs to be embedded in the logic of markets.

Pension regulation that penalizes firms whose high-income employees are overrepresented in plan enrollments is an example of how scoring gives firms incentives to enroll low-income individuals without setting particular rules on how this is done. Changing rules and changing scoring often accompany each other, but they are conceptually distinct. Table 11-3 weaves these approaches together, illustrating our conceptual framework for behaviorally informed regulation. The table shows how regulatory choice may be analyzed according to the market’s stance toward human fallibility. On the left side of the table, market incentives align reasonably well with the goal of overcoming consumer fallibility, and society’s goal is to overcome that bias as well.

These losses would need to be weighed against the losses from the current system, as well as against losses from alternative approaches, such as disclosure or product regulation. Nonetheless, given the considerations noted above, it seems worth exploring whether such sticky defaults can help to transform consumer financial markets. Sticky defaults are just one of a set of examples we discuss as potential regulatory interventions based on the proposed conceptual framework. As noted above, given market responses to relevant psychological factors in different contexts, regulation may need to take a variety of forms, including some that, while perhaps informed by psychology, are designed not to effect behavioral change but rather to alter the market structure in which relevant choices are made.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Proponents and opponents both err in failing to recognize that both positions may be at once valid yet incommensurable. Any technology of more than trivial import exhibits behaviors at Levels I and II (and beyond, as we will discuss next), and these behaviors are unavoidable and symbiotic. But more profoundly, by relying on simplistic, anachronistic, and contradictory conceptual frameworks, both sides reinforce concepts and frameworks-Enlightenment certainties-that are not capable of engaging the radical technological transitions that we humans are continually creating. It is to these transitions that we now turn. 4 Level III Technology: Radical Contingency in Earth Systems We have explored two levels of technology.

Similarly, the Counter Rocket Artillery Mortar (CRAM) system is a computerized machine-gun system currently deployed to defend against rockets and missiles to which humans could not react in time. 9 Does the word "robot" signify a type of artifact, a type of capability, or a certain level of computational competence? Or does this discussion make the point that emerging technologies render dangerously contingent even words and concepts that we think we understand, Killer Apps 151 and thus leave us open to the risk of relying on implicit assumptions, discussions, and conceptual frameworks that are already obsolete? Lethal autonomous robots (LARs) are controversial at every level, but discussion to date is often characterized by category confusion. To begin with, why should such a technology, in any form, be deployed? The immediate response is Level I: "to save soldiers' lives."

It is, however, illegal to sell or trade in "off-label" drugs that have not been specifically prescribed for the individual. 3. This language was on the original website of the World Transhumanist Association, www.transhumanism.org.In 2008, that site was replaced by www.humanityplus.org. 4. The Great Chain of Being is a conceptual framework of the Universe perfected in the Christian medieval period in Europe. It envisions a structured hierarchy, with pure spirit and perfection (God)at the top, and pure matter and imperfection (rocks and other materials) at the bottom. In between, in order, come all things; angels are next to God, while plants are above matter, and beasts above plants.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Nature abounds with intelligence in many forms, from humble bacterial to complex human intelligence, each adapted to its niche in nature. Artificial intelligence will also come in many forms that will take their particular places on this spectrum. As machine intelligence based on deep neural networks matures, it could provide a new conceptual framework for biological intelligence. The Deep Learning Revolution is a guide to the past, present, and future of deep learning. Not meant to be a comprehensive history of the field, it is rather a personal view of key conceptual advances and the community of researchers who made them. Human memory is fallible and shifts with every retelling of a story, a process called “reconsolidation.”

Motivated by the remarkable similarity in the patterns of activity among the hidden units of a trained multilayer Convolutional Learning 133 neural network and those recorded from populations of biological neurons recorded one at a time, Patricia and I wrote The Computational Brain in 1992 to develop a conceptual framework for neuroscience based on large populations of neurons.14 (Now in its second edition, our book is a good primer if you want to learn more about brain-style computing.) James DiCarlo at MIT recently compared the responses of neurons at different levels of the visual cortex hierarchy of monkeys trained to recognize images of objects with the responses of units in a deep learning neural network that could recognize the same images (figure 9.2).15 He concluded that the statistical properties of the neurons in each layer of the deep learning network matched quite closely those of neurons in the cortical hierarchy.

Skinnerians, at this point in the discussion, appeal to “similarity” or “generalization,” but always without characterizing precisely the ways in which a new sentence is “similar” to familiar examples or “generalized” from them. The reason for this failure is simple. So far Figure 17.2 Noam Chomsky in 1977, after he wrote “The Case against B. F. Skinner” for the New York Review of Books. Chomsky’s essay had a profound impact on a generation of cognitive psychologists, who would embrace symbol processing as a conceptual framework for cognition and discount the essential role of brain development and learning in cognition and intelligence. Hans Peters/Anefoto. Nature Is Cleverer Than We Are 249 Figure 17.3 Cover headline for Noam Chomsky’s 1971 takedown of B. F. Skinner in the New York Review of Books. Chomsky’s essay would influence a generation of scientists to abandon behavioral learning and take up symbol processing as a way to explain cognition.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Nurses become arguably less, not more, productive in a meaningful sense if they treat more patients but the statistics work the opposite way. In the online economy, digital products can show infinite productivity—they can be duplicated essentially for free—but if they’re priced for free, they will perhaps not be produced in the desirable quantities. In these varied examples, the conceptual framework of measurement isn’t up to assessing the things we value (in a noneconomic sense), which in turn actually makes it hard to value them in the monetary sense. This leads directly to a second requirement, which is clarity about the values and aims of economic policy and political choices. There is a fundamental set of trade-offs—a “trilemma,” or three-way dilemma—in the management of the economy—using resources as efficiently as possible, sharing them fairly between people, and allowing people as much freedom and self-determination as possible—and it is only possible to hit two of these three aims at any one time.

These increasing returns activities are growing in their extent, as seen in the growth of goods and research-intensive goods as a share of the leading economies’ annual output. The more you think about the measurement problems, the more it becomes clear that the difficulty in measuring is a result not just of failing to collect the right statistics but is actually due to the way we think about such activities. The conceptual framework that lies behind existing economic statistics is a bad fit for an economy that is no longer mass-producing standardized manufactured goods. The structure of the economy is changing, and so is what people value. This is true both in the sense of what they’ll spend their money on in the weightless economy and in the sense of a growing appreciation of the legacy of today’s economy for tomorrow’s society.

The zero marginal cost of conveying the song or movie to another user makes it harder to charge anything, but that in turn is undermining the provision of the service. Many businesses are scrabbling to find what it is they can charge for in order to cover their costs and sustain profit margins. This all points toward the conclusion that our conceptual framework for understanding economic value hasn’t kept up with the way the economy has changed. INNOVATION IN STATISTICS Economists and statisticians certainly understand the problem. Questions of measurement have not only reached the public policy debate, they have been explored extensively within the profession.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

We argue that this combination poses the most serious risks for liberal democracy by corroding trust in the established mechanisms safeguarding democratic checks and balances, including the protection of minority rights, the role of the free press, judicial independence, and plural debate in civil society, allowing strongman leaders claiming to speak for the people to step into the vacuum, while simultaneously endorsing social intolerance toward out-­groups. Part IV discusses how this conceptual framework help us understand the appeals of diverse populist social movements, parties, and leaders. 65 66 Varieties of Populism I The concept of populism We define populism minimally as a rhetorical style of communications claiming that (i) the only legitimate democratic authority flows directly from the people, and (ii) established power-­holders are deeply corrupt, and self-­interested, betraying public trust.

Researchers also use a bewildering plethora of labels to classify party families such as ‘radical right,’ ‘far-­right,’ ‘right-­wing populism,’ ‘alt-­right,’ ‘extreme right’ and ‘populist right,’ and so on. The lack of consistency raises red flags. Accordingly, to clear the decks, this chapter clarifies the underlying con­ cepts and presents the party typology used in this book. Part I of this chapter summarizes the conceptual framework and the meaning of both populism and authoritarianism, ideas discussed earlier in Chapter 3. Building on this, Part II discusses the pros and cons of alternative methods for gathering evidence useful to categorize party families. Part III describes how party positions are measured in this study and mapped on a multidimensional issue space.

Part IV maps European political parties on these scales – including Authoritarian-­Populist parties – across a wide range of European countries. We also discuss how best to classify presidential leaders. This enables us, in the next chapter, to identify the key determinants of how values translate into voting support for political parties located across the authoritarian and populism indices. I The conceptual framework The meaning of populism continues to be debated but in recent years a broad consensus has emerged among many scholars. Chapter 3 used a minimalist definition of populism as a form of discourse making two core claims, namely that: (i) the only legitimate democratic authority flows directly from the people, and (ii) establishment elites are corrupt, out of touch, and self-­serving, betraying the public trust and thwarting the popular will.


pages: 653 words: 218,559

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975 by Hannah Arendt

American ideology, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, dark matter, desegregation, means of production, military-industrial complex, post-truth, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Rosa Parks, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Thus when universal equality appeared as an unavoidable demand for justice for everyone, for a social and political body in which all were free and no one was ruled, it had all the earmarks of a contradiction in terms: within the tradition of political thought the concept of universal equality could only mean that nobody could be free. With the anticipated disappearance of rule and domination in Marx’s stateless society, freedom indeed becomes a meaningless word unless it is conceived in an altogether different sense. Since Marx here as elsewhere did not bother to redefine his terms but remained in the conceptual framework of the tradition, Lenin was not so wrong when he concluded that if nobody can be free who rules over others, then freedom is only a prejudice or an ideology—although he thereby robbed Marx’s work of one of its most important impulses. Marx’s adherence to tradition is also the reason for his as well as Lenin’s even more fateful error that mere administration, in contrast to government, is the adequate form of men living together under the condition of radical and universal equality.

This changed with the advent of the French Revolution because it seemed as though here, for the first time, ideas were making history. The most obvious conclusion from the course of the French Revolution seemed to be that the same rules, which determine the change and development of ideas within the conceptual framework of the mind, determine also the historical and political development in the realm of worldly reality. The trouble with this conclusion is that all ideas, by virtue of being ideas and nothing else, have an extraordinary affinity to each other which is most pronounced where we deal with opposites—such as good and evil or moralism and immoralism.

The trouble is that, contrary to what Jefferson himself believed, the “common sense of a matter” is by no means always identical with the commonly held beliefs about it. To put this another way, though Jefferson could write as indignantly as he pleased about “the nonsense of Plato,” the truth is that Plato’s “foggy mind” has predetermined the categories of political thought to such an extent and has erected a conceptual framework of such stability that Jefferson himself was no more, and perhaps even less, capable of escaping hidden Platonic notions in his political thinking than any avowed admirer of the Republic. These notions—to put them as crudely as possible but hardly more crudely than Platonic ideas had become at the end of the eighteenth century—can be enumerated as follows: The ultimate end of politics in general and action in particular is beyond and above the political realm.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Friedman writes that “Extremists have always been much better at exploiting the media.” He is quite right; Israel and the U.S. have shown unparalleled mastery of this art, as his own articles and news reports indicate.9 His convenient version of history and the conceptual framework of his reporting, as just illustrated, provide a few of the many examples of the success of extremists in “exploiting the media”—now using the term in its literal sense. In adopting a conceptual framework designed to exclude comprehension of the facts and issues, the Times follows the practice of Israeli models such as Rabin, who achieve the status of “moderates” by virtue of their general conformity to U.S. government demands.

One stable feature is the Churchillian doctrine: the rich and powerful have every right to demand that they be left in peace to enjoy what they have gained, often by violence and terror; the rest can be ignored as long as they suffer in silence, but if they interfere with the lives of those who rule the world by right, the “terrors of the earth” will be visited upon them with righteous wrath, unless power is constrained from within. The first five chapters below are concerned with the first phase of the “war on terror,” during the Reagan–Bush (No. 1) Administrations. The preface and the first three chapters constitute the original publication: Pirates and Emperors (Claremont, 1986). Chapter 1 is devoted to the conceptual framework in which these and related issues are presented within the reigning doctrinal system. Chapter 2 provides a sample—only a sample—of Middle East terrorism in the real world, along with some discussion of the style of apologetics employed to ensure that it proceeds unhampered. Chapter 3 turns to the role played by Libya in the doctrinal system during those years.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

In part 1 of this book we’ll use these concrete examples to distill a set of principles that explain how online tools can amplify collective intelligence. I have deliberately focused the discussion in part 1 on a relatively small number of examples, with the idea being that as we develop a conceptual framework for understanding collective intelligence, we’ll revisit each of these examples several times, and come to understand them more deeply. Furthermore, the examples come not just from science, but also from areas such as chess and computer programming. The reason is that some of the most striking examples of amplifying collective intelligence—examples such as Kasparov versus the World—come from outside science, and we can learn a great deal by studying them.

In this chapter we’ll see that it’s this ability to restructure expert attention that is at the heart of how online tools amplify collective intelligence. What examples such as InnoCentive, the Polymath Project, and Kasparov versus the World share is the ability to bring the attention of the right expert to the right problem at the right time. In the first half of the chapter we’ll look in more detail at these examples, and develop a broad conceptual framework that explains how they restructure expert attention. In the second half of the chapter we’ll apply that framework to understand how online collaborations can work together in ways that are essentially different from offline collaborations. Harnessing Latent Microexpertise While the ASSET-InnoCentive story is striking, Kasparov versus the World is an even more impressive example of collective intelligence.

Nature, 440:255–256, March 16, 2006. [61] Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [62] T. S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methune, 1920. [63] Douglas C. Engelbart. Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework. Stanford Research Institute Report, October 1962. [64] Jon Fortt. Top 5 moments from Eric Schmidt’s talk in Abu Dhabi. Fortune Tech (blog), March 11, 2010. http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/11/top-five-moments-from-eric-schmidt%27s-talk-in-abu-dhabi/. [65] Full cast and crew for Avatar.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Induction requires abduction as a first step, ­because we need to bring into observation some framework for making sense of what phi­ los­o­phers call sense-­datum—­raw experience, uninterpreted. Even in ­simple induction, where we induce a general statement that All swans are white from observations of swans, a minimal conceptual framework or theory guides the acquisition of knowledge. We could induce that all swans have beaks by the same inductive strategy, but the induction would be less power­ful, ­because all birds have beaks, and swans are a small subset of birds. Prior knowledge is used to form hypotheses. Intuition provides mathematicians with in­ter­est­ing prob­lems.

The truth is that the ­whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at e­ very step.”11 The origin of intelligence, then, is conjectural or abductive, and of paramount importance is having a power­ful conceptual framework within which to view facts or data. Once an intelligent agent (person or machine) generates a conjecture, Peirce explains, downstream inference like deduction and induction make clear the implications of the conjecture (deduction) and provide a means of testing it against experience (induction).

Abduction gets harder and harder. It soon departs from all known conceptions of automatic inference or computations. Take scientific discovery, or innovation. ­Human beings invent languages, concepts, and laws to explain the world. This is creative abduction. Creative abductions “leap” to novel conceptual frameworks themselves. Sir Isaac Newton comes to mind. Not only did he extend mathe­matics to describe instantaneous rates of change on curves (or acceleration), he gave words in En­g lish new meanings, to explain physics. Gravity used to mean depth and seriousness—as in gravitas—­a nd the force of attraction we now call gravity was understood as tendency or purpose.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

The printing press and increasingly reliable postal services combined to create an extraordinary network, small by modern standards, but more powerful than anything previously achieved by a community of scholars. There was of course a great deal of intellectual resistance, as is always the case when the paradigm – the conceptual framework itself – shifts.28 Indeed, some of this resistance came from within. Newton himself dabbled in alchemy. Hooke all but killed himself with quack remedies for indigestion. It was by no means easy for such men to reconcile the new science with Christian doctrine, which few were ready to renounce.29 But it remains undeniable that this was an intellectual revolution even more transformative than the religious revolution that preceded and unintentionally begat it.

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 made clear, rhetorical pleas to ‘save the planet’ for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now. We love our grandchildren. But our great-great-grandchildren are harder to relate to. Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole’s artistic representation of a civilizational supercycle of birth, growth and eventual death is a misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic – sometimes almost stationary, but also capable of violent acceleration?

., The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago, 1982) ———, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1991 [1963]) Maddison, Angus, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris, 2001) Melko, Matthew, The Nature of Civilizations (Boston, 1969) Matthews, Derek, ‘The Strange Death of History Teaching (Fully Explained in Seven Easy-to-Follow Lessons’, unpublished pamphlet (January 2009) Morris, Ian,Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York, 2010) Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (New York, 1961) Murray, Charles A., Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York, 2003) North, Douglass C., Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, 2005) ———, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast,Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, 2009) Osborne, Roger, Civilization: A New History of the Western World (New York, 2008) Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000) Putterman, L. and David N.


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Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Thus, an understanding of these fundamental concepts is important not only for data scientists themselves, but for anyone working with data scientists, employing data scientists, investing in data-heavy ventures, or directing the application of analytics in an organization. Thinking data-analytically is aided by conceptual frameworks discussed throughout the book. For example, the automated extraction of patterns from data is a process with well-defined stages, which are the subject of the next chapter. Understanding the process and the stages helps to structure our data-analytic thinking, and to make it more systematic and therefore less prone to errors and omissions.

The business problem itself provides the goal as well as constraints on its solution. The data and domain knowledge provide raw materials. And data science provides frameworks for decomposing the problem into subproblems, as well as tools and techniques for solving them. We have discussed some of the most valuable conceptual frameworks and some of the most common building blocks for solutions. However, data science is a vast field, with entire degree programs devoted to it, so we cannot hope to be exhaustive in a book like this. Fortunately, the fundamental principles we have discussed undergird most of data science. As with other engineering problems, it is often more efficient to cast a new problem into a set of problems for which we already have good tools, rather than trying to build a custom solution completely from scratch.

Since we want to predict the existence (or strength) of a link, we might well decide to cast the task as a predictive modeling problem. So we can apply our framework for thinking about predictive modeling problems. As always, we start with business and data understanding. What would we consider to be an instance? At first, we might think: wait a minute—here we are looking at the relationship between two instances. Our conceptual framework comes in very handy: let’s stick to our guns, and define an instance for prediction. What exactly is it that we want to predict? We want to predict the existence of a relationship (or its strength, but let’s just consider the existence here) between two people. So, an instance should be a pair of people!


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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Nevertheless, as soon as the war ended, they became the basis for a series of massive military research projects, including the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the SAGE air defense system, and the Polaris Intermediate Range Missile. All of these projects depended heavily on computers, on interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaborations, and on a systems approach to engineering.44 Over the next twenty years, cybernetics and systems theory more generally provided a rhetoric and a conceptual framework with which to link the activities of each of these actors to the others and to coordinate their work as a whole. The power of cybernetics and systems theory to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration emerged in large part thanks to the entrepreneurship of Norbert Wiener and the research climate of World War II.

[Computer] intelligence should be directed toward instructing [the user], demystifying and exposing its own nature, and ultimately giving him active control.”25 The concept of building a peer-to-peer information system and the idea that individuals needed to gain control over information and information systems had been features of both the New Communalist movement and the New Left for some time. Yet, the notion of doing these things with computers was relatively new, at least outside the walls of SRI and Xerox PARC. For those who hoped to turn computing machines toward populist ends, the religion of technology espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog offered an important conceptual framework and source of legitimation. In the early 1970s, for example, Lee Felsenstein began to design the Tom Swift Terminal—a freestanding, easy-to-use terminal that would be as easy to repair as a radio. Although it was never built precisely to Felsenstein’s first specifications, the Tom Swift Terminal design ultimately drove the creation of an early personal computer known as the Sol.

He explained in the first issue that the magazine took its name from the biological theory of “coevolution,” in which two species evolved symbiotically. Brand traced the origin of this idea to a 1965 study of the relationship between certain predatory caterpillars and the plants they ate, conducted by his old teacher Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven.38 The first issue of CQ prominently featured an article by Ehrlich outlining his conceptual framework, entitled “Coevolution and the Biology of Communities.” Yet, Brand considered coevolution to be more than a biological theory. It was a metaphor— derived from and carrying the legitimacy of science—for a new way of life. That metaphor depended not so much on Brand’s reading of contemporary biology as it did on his reading of the mystical cybernetics of a former anthropologist, psychiatrist, and biological researcher, Gregory Bateson.


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What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

But otherwise, you sound just like all the other charlatans.” He had difficulties getting his ideas across to people throughout his career, but Engelbart persisted. By October 1962, he had sketched out his vision in a summary report for the air force entitled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” and the following year he condensed his ideas into a chapter in a collection titled Vistas in Information Handling. His “framework” was both a technological and organizational prescription for creating computer-equipped teams of people who could more efficiently work on a broad range of human problems.

Engelbart Collection, Stanford Special Library, Stanford University. 4.Doug Engelbart, “The Augmented Knowledge Workshop,” in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations, ed. Adele Goldberg (New York: ACM, 1988), p. 190. 5.D. C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” prepared for Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, October 1962, p. 5. 6.Ibid., p. 6. 7.Douglas Engelbart, oral history, interview by John Eklund, Division of Computers, Information, and Society, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute, May 4, 1994. http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/englebar.htm. 8.Oral history, interview by Lowood and Adams. 9.M.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Coyote, Peter. Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Engelbart, Douglas C. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1962. Evans, Christopher Riche. The Micro Millennium. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Farber, David R. The Sixties: From Memory to History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. ———. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s.


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Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

You might not want to try, because to have good odds of seeing a reaction occur, you’d have to watch for about a billion minutes, which is to say, about two thousand years. Thus, the scaled view that gives such powerful insights into the behavior of rigid nanomachines is essentially useless for understanding solution-phase chemistry. Chemists must work in a different conceptual framework, one seldom concerned with mechanical speed, force, or position.* Thermal energy also dominates motions in biomolecular nanomachines, devices which straddle the gap between the chaos of solution-phase chemistry and the orderly motion of gears, bearings, shafts, and the rest. Many biomolecular components are made of protein, which makes proteins worth a closer look.

We need to start at the bottom, exploring the performance of extraordinary materials in extraordinary forms, then move up to higher levels: components, products, applications, and costs (in the broadest, yet physical sense of the word). The results of this exploration will offer a concrete view of the potential products of radical abundance, providing a conceptual framework for considering its implications. The resulting picture combines radically low-cost production—in terms of labor, capital, materials, energy, and environmental impact—with products that themselves can be radically better in performance, efficiency, and cost of use. ASKING THREE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS “What can be made?”

We’ve seen the emergence of a gift economy in digital products such as software, text, images, and video; the natural course of events would see this pattern extend to APM product-design files, leading (aside from the cost of input materials) to a gift economy in physical objects (but within what mandated constraints?). Considering both similarities and contrasts between the two revolutions can help to build a more robust conceptual framework. Regarding specific problems (a plunge in demand for steel, for example), it’s natural to worry that they might be neglected, simply out of distraction and inertia. In a world in which coherent scenarios have traction, however, specific problems will often be framed as instances of a broader, generic, high-profile problem—steel, after all, won’t be a special case of falling demand.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

From the beginning, he saw a combination of languages, methodologies, and machines supporting new ways to think, communicate, collaborate, and learn. Much of the apparatus was social, and therefore nonmechanical. After failing to recruit support from computer science or computer manufacturers, Engelbart wrote his seminal paper, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of a Man’s Intellect,” in order to explain what he was talking about.83 Engelbart came to the attention of Licklider. ARPA sponsored a laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the “Augmentation Research Center,” where Engelbart and a group of hardware engineers, programmers, and psychologists who shared Engelbart’s dream started building the computer as we know it today.

Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE1, March 1960, 4. Reprinted in In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider, 19151990 (Palo Alto: Digital Systems Research Center, 1990), 1. 82. M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001). 83. D. C. Engelbart, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,” in Vistas in Information Handling, vol. 1, ed. D. W. Howerton and D. C. Weeks (Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books, 1963), 129. 84. Wright, Nonzero. 85. Ibid., 16. 86. Ibid., 22. 87. Ibid., 2223, 24. 88. Ibid., 152. 89. Ibid., 154. Index Aaltonen, Aleksi Abrahamsson, Joel Abuzz Web site Active tags Adar, Eytan Ad-hocracies Adorno, Thomas Afghanistan African grasslands Agriculture Ahtisaari, Marko AI (artificial intelligence) AIDS AirSnort Alexa Internet Algorithms Allen, Myles R.

See also p2p (peer-to-peer) computing Competition Computer(s): Altair computer laptop mainframe operating systems for super- tablets See also PCs (personal computer) "Computer for the 21st Century, The" (Weiser) Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum) Computer Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament "Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of a Man's Intellect, A" (Engelbart) Congress Conn, Grad Constitution (United States) Consume the Net Contextual Computing Group Contracts CoolTown Cooperation theory: and the alchemy of cooperation and cooperation amplification and cooperation catalysts and CPR research and the end-to-end principle and the Internet as an innovation commons and mutual aid and Shelling points and social networks, as driving forces Copyleft license "Cornucopia of the Commons, The" (Bricklin) Counter-power CPUs (central processing units) and ad-hocracies clustering cycles and grid computing Intel, advent of and Moore's Law and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Crandall, Richard Credit: cards verification services Critical Mass Crown Prince of Tonga Cryptography Cyberman (documentary) Cybernetics See also Cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) Cyberspace Cybiko Cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) Cyborgspace DAN (Direct Action Network) Dance, of bits and atoms See also Bits and atoms DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Darwin, Charles "Dataveillance," Dawkins, Richard Dayton, Sky Deadlock game Defense Department Delarocas, Chrysanthos Democracy in Mongolia and non-zero-sum games and reputation systems and wireless networks Dense-packet radio networks Dery, Mark Digia Digital: cities passport technology Disciplinary methods See also Punishment Disk space: and ad-hocracies sharing Disney (company) Disney, Walt Distributed processing.


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Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

., height, skin color, etc.) resulting from these genes. Darwinism and Mendelism were finally recognized as being complementary, not opposed. One reason the early Darwinists and Mendelians disagreed so strongly is that, although both sides had experimental evidence supporting their position, neither side had the appropriate conceptual framework (i.e., multiple genes controlling traits) or mathematics to understand how their respective theories fit together. A whole new set of mathematical tools had to be developed to analyze the results of Mendelian inheritance with many interacting genes operating under natural selection in a mating population.

His work was so good that just five years later he was given the best academic job in the world—a professorship (with Einstein and Gödel) at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. The institute didn’t go wrong in their bet on von Neumann. During the next ten years, von Neumann went on to invent the field of game theory (producing what has been called “the greatest paper on mathematical economics ever written”), design the conceptual framework of one of the first programmable computers (the EDVAC, for which he wrote what has been called “the most important document ever written about computing and computers”), and make central contributions to the development of the first atomic and hydrogen bombs. This was all before his work on self-reproducing automata and his exploration of the relationships between the logic of computers and the workings of the brain.

Chaos has shown us that intrinsic randomness is not necessary for a system’s behavior to look random; new discoveries in genetics have challenged the role of gene change in evolution; increasing appreciation of the role of chance and self-organization has challenged the centrality of natural selection as an evolutionary force. The importance of thinking in terms of nonlinearity, decentralized control, networks, hierarchies, distributed feedback, statistical representations of information, and essential randomness is gradually being realized in both the scientific community and the general population. New conceptual frameworks often require the broadening of existing concepts. Throughout this book we have seen how the concepts of information and computation are being extended to encompass living systems and even complex social systems; how the notions of adaptation and evolution have been extended beyond the biological realm; and how the notions of life and intelligence are being expanded, perhaps even to include self-replicating machines and analogy-making computer programs.


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Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Bronner and Shulman, “’A Cloud Turned Goose’: Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium,” 28–29. 3. Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit,” 394. 4. Dalmia, “Sanskrit Scholars and Pandits of the Old School,” 334. 5. See Srinivas, “Amarabhāratī: Sanskrit and the Resurgence of Indian Civilization,” 41–42. 6. Kapoor and Ratnam, Literary Theory: Indian Conceptual Framework, 1. 7. Ramaswamy, “Sanskrit for the Nation,” 334–35. 8. Ibid., 373. 9. Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” 29. 10. Merwin, East Window: The Asian Translations, 36. 11. Eliot, The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays, 58. 12. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 43–44. 13. Sanderson, “Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” 675. 14.

Springer, 2009. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-93885-9_1. Kapoor, Kapil. Dimensions of Pāṇini Grammar: The Indian Grammatical System. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2005. ______. Text and Interpretation: The Indian Tradition. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2005. Kapoor, Kapil and Nalini M. Ratnam. Literary Theory: Indian Conceptual Framework. New Delhi: Affiliated East-West Press, 1998. Kelly, John D. “What Was Sanskrit For? Metadiscursive Strategies in Ancient India.” In Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, edited by Jan E. M. Houben, 87–107. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Khan, Taslima. “40% of Startups in Silicon Valley Are Headed by India-Based Entrepreneurs.”


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A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

This crisis of connectedness has been described in a variety of ways. A number of analysts across the political spectrum have argued that it must be ultimately philosophical or metaphysical—essentially that contemporary liberalism is so committed to the ideal of individual liberation that it lacks the conceptual framework to articulate ideals of solidarity or even of community. We depend on these deeper social foundations and yet we lack the tools to maintain or reconstruct them, and we have lost the words with which to speak about what we owe each other.7 Some, mostly on the Right, have suggested that at the core of the crisis is a collapse of family and religion—and that without these preconditions for individual flourishing we are uprooted and adrift.

It accords with the individualism of our time even when it argues for community, and it feeds the sense that what we lack are connections and relationships. Thus we talk about breaking down walls or building bridges or casting a unifying vision to strengthen our society. We hope that social media might bind us together this way, or that the ideals of our politics will give us the conceptual framework for cohesion, or that our moral and religious traditions will reinvigorate our sense of solidarity, or that by narrowing the differences between rich and poor we will make our society more whole. There is great appeal in this idea and in these different calls for solidarity. But something crucial is still lacking in this vision of connectedness.


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Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

When I got to the gallery, Simon Denny, whom Anthony had described to me as “kind of a genius” and “the poster-boy for post-Internet art,” was making some last-minute preparations for the show’s opening. He was a neat and droll man in his mid-thirties, a native of Auckland who had lived for many years in Berlin, where he was a significant figure in the international art scene. He talked me through the conceptual framework for the show. It was structured around games—in theory playable, but in practice encountered as sculptures—representing two different kinds of political vision for New Zealand’s future. The bright and airy ground floor space was filled with tactile, bodily game-sculptures, riffs on Jenga and Operation and Twister.

Harris asked the man what he thought of the exhibition, and the man paused a long time before saying that it was “actually a work of phenomenal detail.” He asked Harris if he knew the artist, and Harris said that he did, that he himself was in fact a writer whose work had formed part of the conceptual framework for the show. Of the sheer improbability of these two men—one for whom New Zealand was a means of shoring up his wealth and power in a coming civilizational collapse, one for whom it was home, a source of hope for a more equal and democratic society—just happening to cross paths at an art exhibition loosely structured around the binary opposition of their political views no mention was made, and they went their separate ways.


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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The rise of the alpha geeks means the 1 percent is more fiercely educated and the returns on elite education are higher than ever before. One way to understand why we are living in a golden age of the nerds is with a metaphor invented by Jan Tinbergen, joint winner of the first Nobel Prize in economics: the race between education and technology. That idea is the title of and conceptual framework for a recent book by Larry Katz and Claudia Goldin, the Harvard pair who study how the interplay between new technologies and education shapes income distribution. In the nineteenth century, as the first gilded age was reaching its peak, technology raced ahead of education. As a result, if you were what counted as highly educated in that age—which was finishing high school (remember, bestselling author Henry George left school at fourteen)—you could command a premium compared to unskilled workers.

Chanos, who leased office space from Soros’s Quantum Fund in midtown New York between 1988 and 1991, agrees. “One thing that I’ve both wrestled with and admired that Soros conquered many years ago is the ability to go from long to short, the ability to turn on a dime when confronted with the evidence. Emotionally that is really hard.” “My conceptual framework, which basically emphasizes the importance of misconceptions, makes me extremely critical of my own decisions,” Soros told me. “I reexamine them all the time and recognize when I am on the wrong track. . . . I know that I’m bound to be wrong and therefore am more likely to correct my mistakes.”

the ability to “pivot” Caroline O’Connor and Perry Klebahn, “The Strategic Pivot: Rules for Entrepreneurs and Other Innovators,” Harvard Business Review blog network, February 28, 2011. Flickr’s genesis was in 2002 See Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Apress, 2007), pp. 257–264. “One thing that I’ve both wrestled with” Chrystia Freeland, “The Credit Crunch According to Soros,” Financial Times, January 30, 2009. “My conceptual framework, which basically emphasizes” CF interview with George Soros, December 16, 2008. “It’s an almost aggressive pessimism about his own ideas” CF interview with Jonathan Soros, July 14, 2009. “The businesses and institutions underpinning” Jennings, “Opportunities of a Lifetime.” “The group of winners is churning at an increasing and rapid rate” “Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change: The 2009 shift index”, Deloitte Center for the Edge, December 2009, p. 115.


The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

Alfred Russel Wallace, behavioural economics, centre right, conceptual framework, intentional community, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Menlo Park, out of africa, Plato's cave, social intelligence, theory of mind

Not everyone, even at that time, may have accepted the happy fortuity of creation coinciding so neatly with the beginning of the Cambridge University academic year, but virtually everyone believed that human history started miraculously at a moment that was not so very long ago. De la Vialle had no conceptual framework into which to fit the significance of what he was seeing, so, in effect, he did not ‘see’ it at all. What happened during the years between Time-Byte II and Time-Byte III? Why did Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends see what de la Vialle missed? The answer is both simple and momentous. The Western world had learned that it had a deep past, its concept of humanity had undergone profound changes, and its yearning to know the truth about its origins had risen to a level of unprecedented intensity: finding evidence for ‘Human Origins’, be it stone artefacts, fossils or genes, had become an absorbing passion.

Darwin himself neatly summed up his central idea thus: ‘…the theory of descent with modification through natural selection’.7 The first printing of 1,250 copies of On the Origin of Species was sold out on the first day, an achievement that few, if any, subsequent scientific writers have been able to equal. By 1872, six editions and 24,000 copies had been published; by 1876, the book had been translated into every European language. Here was the conceptual framework that de la Vialle lacked, a framework that opened up an entirely new perspective on humanity. Suddenly, Westerners who had access to Darwin’s ideas could ‘see’ things that they had never noticed before. The most famous public clash came in 1860 at an Oxford meeting of the British Association.

When we notice, perhaps even stumble upon, observations that do not accord with received theory, and then make the leap to a new hypothesis, we are fortunate indeed. We may even be on the threshold of a ‘revolution’. With these important ideas about discovery, theory and evidence in mind we can move on from the antiquity and evolution of humankind to another discovery that many found hard to swallow, even though they had a conceptual framework into which they should have been able to fit it. Acceptance of Stone Age art, even in the adventurous intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century, was another matter altogether. The very idea of Palaeolithic art was deeply disturbing.Was not art one of the great achievements of high civilizations?


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

“Major shifts in technology for which the first mover is ill-prepared because of its investment in old technology may favor the fast follower that is not burdened with such investments,” write Roger A. Kerin, P. Rajan Varadarajan, and Robert A. Peterson, “First-Mover Advantage: A Synthesis, Conceptual Framework, and Research Propositions,” Journal of Marketing 56, no. 4 (1992): 33–52. “Later entrants’ access to relatively newer cost-efficient technologies enables them to offset or neutralize the first mover’s experience-based cost advantages.” 116 Many of the biggest corporate successes: Steve Blank, writing in Business Insider, makes one of the best-formed arguments on second-wave advantage out there: “You’re Better Off Being a Fast Follower than an Originator,” Business Insider, October 5, 2010, http://www.businessinsider.com/youre-better-off-being-a-fast-follower-than-an-originator-2010-10 (accessed February 16, 2014). 117 The way to predict the best waves: Fernando F.

Simon and Schuster, 2011. Jay-Z. Decoded. Spiegel and Grau, 2010. Kahneman, Daniel, and Gary Klein. “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise.” American Psychologist 64, no. 6 (September 2009): 515–26. Kerin, Roger A., P. Rajan Varadarajan, and Robert A. Peterson. “First-Mover Advantage: A Synthesis, Conceptual Framework, and Research Propositions.” Journal of Marketing 56, no. 4 (1992): 33–52. Kluger, Avraham N., and Angelo DeNisi. “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory.” Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 254–84.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

In their view they are applicable to all sciences, but economics has benefited especially from these defensive strategies because of its claim to be like a natural science. Persistence is partly inevitable in all sciences, as practitioners must be ‘indoctrinated’ before being allowed to practise, but it also provides a stable conceptual framework that can be scientifically useful and, perhaps most significantly, protects the positions of the established practitioners. The upshot is that once a ‘normal’ way of doing ‘science’ has been established, it develops strong staying power, however much its scientific claims are questioned. How much more is this likely to be the case in economics, when refutation is almost impossible and vested interests are rampant.

Yet all his case studies are couched in the language of classical microeconomic theory and a postwar competitive business and management theory that he spells out in great detail and with faith in its revealed truths . . . Acton presents his task reasonably, challenging readers to use classical microeconomics to ask whether Athenians ‘might still have operated in practice according to the same set of fundamental economic principles that we are familiar with today’, even though they lacked the language or conceptual framework within which we articulate those principles. For Acton, there’s never any question that ‘the same economic laws prevailed despite the different context’ because the microeconomic ‘framework is timeless’ and because ‘irrespective of conscious motivation by ancient agents, elementary economic principles are heuristically effective and a source of important historical insight.’6 Fine studies of ancient economies, like those of Moses Finlay, show how remote all this is from good history.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

However, this means that the whole process of disintermediation over the last twenty years at least, which is continuing apace with cloud computing and the splitting of supply chains into increasingly specialist activities, is invisible in the GDP statistics. We are netting out all the intermediate stages and somehow the benefits are not appearing in final output. This is a reformulation of the productivity puzzle, and in my view its resolution is likely to involve a rethink of the conceptual framework for thinking about growth. There is much else that existing economic statistics do not capture. What data flows where and what is it worth? To what extent are companies adopting cloud computing and what are they doing with it? How many are adopting AI? If a manufacturer in the UK emails a blueprint to a contract manufacturer in Malaysia, based on designs by a studio in Berlin, with the IP registered in Dublin, what should be counted and to which country’s GDP should it be allocated?

If an existing pharmaceutical product is applied to a new use (such as oral rehydration therapy, mini-aspirin to avert cardio-vascular problems, or Lucentis instead of Avastin for wet age-related macular degeneration), and nothing changes about costs or production techniques, but health outcomes improve at a lower systemic cost—how should that be accounted for in economic statistics? These are ideas about using existing products in a different way. What is productivity when there are no material products? These are not simple questions when the conceptual framework for the economy assumes: a) Price times quantity equals revenue, ‘quantity’ is defined, and ‘quality’ changes little; b) People have stable preferences for different goods and services, and there are no new products (or at least preferences are defined over all future possible products); c) Trade involves tangible or at least trackable products for final consumption.


pages: 303 words: 67,891

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

Furthermore, precise probabilistic inference would be implemented as a special collection of rules running on top of the underlying NARS inference engine in roughly the same manner that programs may run on top of an operating system. Following up on the uncertain-logic theme, the next chapter by Stephan Vladimir Bugaj and Ben Goertzel moves this theme into the domain of developmental psychology. Piaget’s ideas have been questioned by modern experimental developmental psychology, yet remain the most coherent existing conceptual framework for studying human cognitive development. It turns out to be possible to create a Piaget-like theory of stages of cognitive development that is specifically appropriate to uncertain reasoning systems like PLN, in which successive stages involve progressively sophisticated inference control: simple heuristic control (the infantile stage); inductive, history-based control (the concrete operational stage); inference-based inference control (the formal stage); and inference-based modification P.

All rights reserved. 25 Four Contemporary AGI Designs: a Comparative Treatment September 26, 2006 Stan FRANKLIN, Ben GOERTZEL, Alexei SAMSONOVICH, Pei WANG Introduction (by Ben Goertzel) During his talk at the AGI Workshop, Stan Franklin suggested that his LIDA architecture might fruitfully be considered not only as a specific AGI design, but also as a general framework within which to discuss and compare various AGI designs and approaches. With this in mind, following the workshop itself, I (Goertzel) formulated a list of simple questions intended to be pertinent to any AGI software design, mostly based on the conceptual framework presented in Stan Franklin’s workshop presentation (and represented in this volume by his article “A Foundational Architecture for Artificial General Intelligence”) with a couple additions and variations. All individuals who presented talks on AGI architectures at the workshop were invited to respond to the questionnaire, giving answers appropriate to their own AGI design.

And although we do have some external access to the functioning of the brain, through brain mapping techniques, signal interventions and post-mortem examination, our ability to get fine detail, and to link that detail to the cognitive level, is a subject of fierce debate within the cognitive science community [12]; [13]. 4.4. Frameworks and Quasi-Complete Systems What does it mean to engage in a program of “systematic exploration” of the space of cognitive systems? To be systematic, such a program needs to be unified by a common conceptual framework that is explicit enough that it allows the relationships between systems to be clearly seen. The idea of a “framework” is that it defines a set of choices for the broad architectural features of the class of cognitive systems that it expresses. For every one of the various mechanisms that we might anticipate being involved in a complete cognitive system, the framework should have something to say about how that mechanism is instantiated, and how it relates to the rest of the system.


pages: 501 words: 134,867

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

In this, it helps to focus our attention on: the dizzying rates of capitalist growth made possible by oil; the ensuing political transformations that reinforce the oil-dependent economy and block transitions to a safer and fairer way of organizing economic life; and the perpetual state of crisis that is induced by the imperative of expansion, one that simultaneously undermines the supply of non-renewable fuel and—more importantly—the earth’s lifesupport systems. Ultimately, this conceptual framework helps us understand not only how Alberta is intimately connected to global oil crises, and the United States energy market in particular, but also how Canada and especially Alberta are riven with political, economic, and environmental problems in attempts to expand tar sands extraction. Petro-Capitalism At the centre of the analysis of capitalism’s relation to nature is its inherent and unavoidable dependence on fossil fuels, and particularly on oil.

Since capitalism needs infinite economic growth and ever-expanding consumption, its logic essentially compels increasing CO2 emissions that threaten the global ecological system—and indeed life itself.8 The growth imperative drives the continual global search for new (though ultimately finite) oil supplies in ways that often have high energy and resource demands (as in the tar sands, and in hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and gas) and carry a large ecological burden. In sum, the conceptual framework of petro-capitalism centres oil as the lifeblood of global capitalism, with the power to fundamentally reshape political institutions from global to national to provincial levels. Yet it is also a system in permanent crisis due to its intractable role in climate change and environmental degradation, alongside inevitable challenges to oil supplies.

James, when Jim Munroe was presenting on the traditional system of keyoh (territory or trapline) holdings, a series of Dakelh terms were rendered illegible in the published transcript: “There are laws around that. There’s terms in our language it’s called (native word) and (native word) and it means they did—people disappear if they don’t respect the land and they don’t ask.”21 This silencing of Indigenous terms from the official record reflects an underlying disregard for Indigenous conceptual frameworks, despite the putative inclusions of Aboriginal traditional knowledge in the hearings. These exclusions are rationalized on the basis that the hearings process is recorded in “either of the official languages [French and English], depending on the languages spoken by the participant at the public hearing.”22 The fact that Indigenous languages are unrecognized as “official” languages underlines how, despite the ostensible inclusion of Indigeneity, the underlying framework of regulation remains an imposed and colonial one.


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Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

Markets taught people about such things as the limitations of the capacity for reason and the dangers of miscalculation. These complex conceptual frameworks augmented and stimulated the development of problem solving, but they also set up a conflict between traditional and quantitative modes of thought. This conflict is heightened during periods of financial innovation and financial disaster. Not only did financial architecture challenge traditional institutions, it also challenged traditional conceptual frameworks for dealing with the unknown. Cultural notions of chance and fortune are embedded in a rich set of symbols, myths, and moral valences.

Borrowing, lending, and financial planning shaped a particular conceptualization of time, quantifying it in new ways and simplifying it for purposes of calculation. This way of thinking and specialized knowledge, in turn, affected and extended the capabilities of government and enterprise. This conceptual framework is what I refer to as the software of finance in the Introduction. Finance relies on the ability to quantify and calculate and reason mathematically. Thus, much of this chapter focuses on the development of mathematical tools in ancient times. Another basic ingredient of finance is the dimension of time.

Writing and numbers brought clarity and precision to the economic arrangements demanded by the Near Eastern economic system. There is also evidence that financial contracting developed alongside and stimulated conceptual development. Increasing urban density in an economy managed by a common authority required a record system—and a conceptual framework—capable of expressing big numbers. Evidence from early cuneiform appears to document this leap in written expression and perhaps an accompanying shift in arithmetic thought. Likewise, scholars have documented an administrative quantification of time that abstracted from natural, astronomical time.


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Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Several times, I was taken aback when his comments made tentative concessions to the opposition’s argument. He even endorsed, though only in broad principle, some objectives for reforming global trade that his critics have long advocated. I suggest that reformers test his sincerity. In the same spirit, they might try to initiate a conversation about what Rubin calls the “conceptual framework” for reform. He says he would welcome the discussion. The Hamilton Project’s early policy output, I concede, doesn’t encourage a belief that reasoned dialogue with dis-senters is what Rubin has in mind. Advisory board members see themselves as progressive-minded, but they do not stray from the mainstream’s conventional wisdom—lots of Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley, no one from the ranks of “free trade” skeptics.

This is a startling statement: The man from Citigroup has articulated the essential reasoning that makes the case for including labor rights in the global trading system. That conversation has convinced me that outgunned reformers ought to make use of Rubin’s musings. Knock on his door and try to initiate a dialogue. If the critics come forward and offer their ideas on a “conceptual framework” for reform, I ask, would the Hamilton Project be willing to discuss them? Rubin reiterates his doubts and reservations. “But the answer is yes,” he says. “The answer is absolutely yes.” Skeptical friends and kindred spirits will probably say to me, You have been conned. I would say back to them, What have you got to lose by talking to the man?


pages: 255 words: 76,495

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

Without online social networks, these otherwise-interested parties might never hear about the opportunity either because they are not closely connected enough to be part of the e-mail distribution or the individual does not notify them out of social protocol and not wanting to bombard their network with mass messages. Social capital is the currency of business interactions and relationships. This chapter provides an important conceptual framework around social capital that will be repeatedly referenced in subsequent chapters on social sales, marketing, product innovation, and recruiting. In particular, there are four important implications for business: First, social networks establish a new kind of relationship that is more casual than what was previously acceptable.

The Future of Social Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .203 A. Snapshot of Top Social Networking Sites, March 2009 . . . . . . . . . .213 From the Library of Kerri Ross This page intentionally left blank From the Library of Kerri Ross 8 Engage Your Customers ith the conceptual frameworks from Part I,“A Brief History of Social Media,” and the functional overviews of social networking in Part II, “Transforming the Way We Do Business,” behind us, the remaining chapters are meant to be an action-oriented guide on how to get started. Before doing anything else, you first need to come up with a strategy for your company’s social network presence.


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

Back in the day when Michael Untergugenberger was elected mayor of Wörgl, in 1931, some 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed, leaving 200 families absolutely penniless. The mayor-with-the-longname, as the renowned U.S. economist Irving Fisher from Yale would call him, was familiar with Silvio Gesell’s work. A German economist and merchant, Gesell’s conceptual framework for demurrage and for other theories made him, some argue, the grandfather of modern-day cooperative currencies. His monetary designs are often referred to as freigelt, or “free money” in English. The mayor decided to put Gesell’s ideas to the test, as there was much to be done around the town and many willing and able-bodied folks looking for work.

See also Bankruptcy Defection, 196–197 Deflation, 167, 235n12 Democracy: in Bali, 187–188, 190–191; civic and, 147–148; concentration of wealth and, 21–22, 52– 53; in principled society, 193–194; regio and, 191; social capital and, 46 Demurrage: BONUS and, 171; on Chiemgauer, 88; concentration of wealth and, 67– 68; conceptual framework for, 176; saber and, 155; sustainability and, 67, 206; on Terra, 136, 138–139, 206; velocity and, 64, 68– 69; on wära, 179; on Wörgl, 176–177 Denver, 11–12 Development, 33 Disaster relief, 167, 169, 169–172 Discounted cash flow (DCF), 45– 46 Distance tax, 89 Diversity, 32– 33, 62– 63, 70 Divine right of kings, 24 Dixie Dollar, 113 Doctors without Borders, 17–18 Domestic care, 34 Drill and kill, 156, 220–221 Dual currency system, 65– 66, 99–102, 103–107, 162 Earthquake, 167, 169 Earthship model, 165 Ecological disaster, 34, 188 Eco-money, 235n12 Economic Literacy Program, 184 Economics, school of, 28, 35 Economic treadmill, 43, 52 Ecosystem, 32– 33 Ecosystem, monetary, 59– 60, 145, 199–202, 220 Education, 14, 16; for computers, 83; Creative Currencies Project and, 153–155; knowledge exchange network, 184; learning currency, 153–155, 201; in Mae Hong Son, 205; mentoring, 254 INDEX Education (continued) 153–154, 171–172; paradigms in, 220–221; in Paraná, 143–144; Patch Adams Free Clinic and, 165; in principled society, 193; Prussian model of, 216; standards, 43; Time dollars and, 82– 83; university, 153–154, 193, 226–227n13; wispos and, 156–157.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Indeed, when the Industrial Revolution first transpired, since technological change was incremental, populations spiked but average incomes increased only very modestly, just as would be predicted by the Malthusian theory. Yet, at a certain point, nearly a century later, the Malthusian equilibrium quite mysteriously vanished and tremendous growth ensued. The conceptual framework I devised in the past few decades to address this conundrum was inspired by insights from the mathematical field of bifurcation theory, which demonstrate how, beyond a certain threshold, minor alterations in a single factor may generate a sudden and dramatic transformation in the behaviour of complex dynamical systems (as is the case when heat crosses a threshold and transforms water from liquid to gas).[3] In particular, this research has focused on identifying the cogs that were whirring invisibly beneath the surface, wheels of change that were turning relentlessly throughout the epoch of the Malthusian equilibrium but which ultimately broke its hold and led to the emergence of modern growth – much like the rising temperatures in the kettle.

It is virtually impossible to understand the history of humankind without grasping the contributions of these forces to the progression of the human species – the evolution of the human brain, the two monumental revolutions (the Neolithic and the Industrial), the growth of human capital investment and the Demographic Transition, the major trends that made us the dominant species on Planet Earth. These undercurrents provide a unifying conceptual framework, a clear axis from which to understand this journey. In their absence, the history of human development would be merely a chronological list of facts – an incomprehensible wilderness of rising and falling civilisations. And yet the pace of progress in living standards has been neither universal nor inevitable.


The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare

autism spectrum disorder, classic study, cognitive load, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, Helicobacter pylori, impulse control, intermodal, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, p-value, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, yellow journalism

Pynoos and colleagues have developed an elaborate model for childhood traumas that takes into account developmental age, spatial proximity, familial structure and subsequent aggravating or alleviating events. While this model goes beyond childhood abuse by a parent, it is helpful to set this within a conceptual framework. One of the debates that Brymer et€al. [43] engage is that between Anna Freud’s observation that a child’s reaction to trauma is determined by his mother’s reactions [6] and Terr’s observation [7] that certain events€– such as the Chowchilla kidnapping and burial alive of a school bus of children€– are sufficiently powerful that they are traumatic in and of themselves.

The authors of Ch. 5 review a range of studies that provide evidence for the long-term impact of early 88 experience on later functioning, including the differential predictive power of maternal depression at different ages in the child’s life on the child’s depressive symptoms at each of those ages. The inclusion of maternal depression and maternal unresponsiveness in the authors’ conceptual framework of “hidden trauma” raises the question of when, in the continuum from stress to trauma, emotionally costly experiences become traumatic experiences, when trauma is framed in the context of classic definitions that involve unpredictability, horror and helplessness [6,7]. In light of these three markers of trauma, can maternal unresponsiveness in the face of ordinary stress be considered traumatic if it becomes the norm rather than the exception in the infant’s emotional life?

This chapter begins by explicating the concept of mentalizing€– in brief, attending to mental states in self and others – before moving on to discuss the intergenerational transmission of mentalizing impairments in the context of attachment disturbance, illustrating how this developmental psychopathology is exemplified in borderline personality disorder (BPD). Finally, mentalizing-focused interventions for BPD and trauma-related symptoms are examined. This chapter aims to present succinctly a coherent conceptual framework for treating attachment trauma and thus entice readers to consult additional literature for more detail [2–7]. Mentalizing Mentalizing has a foreign ring to many ears, and the word does not appear in many dictionaries. Yet its first reÂ�corded use goes back two centuries, and mentalizing first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary a century ago [3].


pages: 95 words: 24,843

From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework

FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY A Conceptual Framework for Liberation GENE SHARP © 2002, 2003, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 by Gene Sharp All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013. From Dictatorship to Democracy was originally published in Bangkok in 1993 by the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Burma, in association with Khit Pyaing (The New Era Journal) Published in the United Kingdom by Serpent’s Tail, London, 2012 Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012 Distributed by Perseus Distribution ISBN 978-1-59558-857-9 (pbk.)


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

In contrast, the modern machinery of accounting, with its numerous noncash revenues and expenses and the marking of assets and liabilities to market (fair values)—which constitutes most of the extensive, worldwide accounting rules and regulations—was intended to improve upon the 18 AND YOU THOUGHT EARNINGS ARE THE BOTTOM LINE “primitive” concept of cash flows. This was made clear by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the exclusive accounting rule-making body in the United States in its original conceptual framework: Information about enterprise earnings based on accrual [noncash] accounting generally provides a better indication of an enterprise’s present and continuing ability to generate favorable cash flows than information limited to the financial effects of cash receipts and payments.7 Obviously, as our research shows, reported earnings, the end product of accounting measurement and valuation procedures, do not outperform cash flows, at least for their predicted values to generate investment returns.

The yearly adjusted R2 s shown in Figure 3.4 are obtained from the annual regression of sample firms’ market value on their sales, cost of goods sold, selling, The Widening Chasm between Financial Information and Stock Prices 39 general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses, net earnings, total assets, and total liabilities. The samples for all regressions include all US-listed companies with the required data, as retrieved from the intersection of the Compustat and CRSP databases for 1950 to 2013. NOTES 1. FASB, 2010, Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts No. 8, Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting, Chapter 1, Introduction. 2. See Yoree Koh, “Twitter Ad Woes Subside but Growth Stalls,” The Wall Street Journal (July 29, 2015), B1. 3. Some readers, accustomed to the proliferation of surveys and polls in many walks of life, may wonder why we don’t survey investors about the relevance of financial information.


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Another was Trivers’ reciprocal altruism,7 which would work only if a replicator could rely on the returned favour coming back precisely to itself, at least most of the time. The exposition of these and other ideas in The Selfish Gene is not only a tour de force of plain speaking but, by relating them all to the same central argument, itself the best representation of Darwinism available, it established a single conceptual framework within which old and new ideas in adaptationism could be understood. This overarching coherent structure in The Selfish Gene provides the kind of logical foundation and conceptual unity across a broad spectrum of ideas that is usually associated with mathematics. The irony will become clear.

For him sociobiology is in fact ‘the branch of ethology inspired by Bill Hamilton’.27 Accordingly, The Selfish Gene expounds on such things as The Prisoner’s Dilemma as the prototype model for game theoretical reasoning. It teaches the reader to start thinking in terms of strategies, and it provides a common conceptual framework for the core theorists Hamilton, Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Trivers. The book is full of imaginative examples, some of them involving genetic actors as vivid as if they were humans, all in the service of explaining the logic or mechanism of evolution, and all from a gene’s eye perspective.


pages: 398 words: 86,855

Bad Data Handbook by Q. Ethan McCallum

Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Benoit Mandelbrot, business intelligence, cellular automata, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, conceptual framework, data science, database schema, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, Gini coefficient, hype cycle, illegal immigration, iterative process, labor-force participation, loose coupling, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, selection bias, sentiment analysis, SQL injection, statistical model, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, text mining, too big to fail, web application

Operating from a data quality framework allows you to: Quit worrying about what you think you know or don’t know about the data. Step outside conventional wisdom about what you need and don’t need, and establish fresh conceptions about your data and its issues. Develop and re-use tools for data quality management across a wider variety of scenarios and applications. This chapter outlines a conceptual framework and approach for data quality analysis that will hopefully serve as a guide for how you think about your data, given the nature of your objective. The ideas presented here are born from (often painful) experience and are likely not new to anyone who has spent any extended time looking at data; but we hope it will also be useful for those newer to the data analysis space, and anyone who is looking to create or reinforce good data habits.

The ideas presented here are born from (often painful) experience and are likely not new to anyone who has spent any extended time looking at data; but we hope it will also be useful for those newer to the data analysis space, and anyone who is looking to create or reinforce good data habits. Framework Introduction: The Four Cs of Data Quality Analysis Just as there are many angles from which to view your data when searching for an answer, there are many viewing angles for assessing quality. Below we outline a conceptual framework that consists of four facets. We affectionately refer to them as The Four Cs of Data Quality Analysis[77]: Complete: Is everything here that’s supposed to be here? Coherent: Does all of the data “add up?” Correct: Are these, in fact, the right values? aCcountable: Can we trace the data?


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

‘All human beings bend the truth and sometimes lie,’ Pinker points out in Enlightenment Now – it’s one of the good points in his book.46 The poor do engage in strategic ignorance, but the rich do it better, not because of innate superiority, but due to having more political and economic power to structure laws in their favour. The power of the powerful, to put it simply, is contingent on this very tactic: the attempt to dominate systems of law. What this book adds is a new conceptual framework for understanding the role that strategic ignorance plays in age-old processes of political and economic domination through law-making. Through new phrases developed in the book, from ‘useful unknowns’ to ‘oracular power,’ my aim has been to expand the language for understanding the social and political implications of the type of doublespeak that Orwell so evocatively warned about (here’s one that Orwell might appreciate.

‘Women took part in it as well as men,’ he admits, ‘and when at last the time had come to surrender, the women were the last to yield.’15 THE LORDE PRINCIPLE This is a book about strategic ignorance, but also other types of ignorance too, the most pernicious of which isn’t necessarily the deliberate will to ignore, but rather the slow, unwitting hardening of assumptions into false beliefs. I was faced about 15 years ago with what I saw as an impoverished language for describing the unknown and so I developed new terms worthy of a new conceptual framework. The meanings of ‘micro-ignorance,’ ‘macro-ignorance’ and ‘useful unknowns’ might seem obvious when pointed out, but the terms were not coined before this book. I mention this because I’m staking a claim to originality and offering another thinker the last word. My suggestion is that her name should be attached to a truth about rational ignorance that she discovered long before me.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Thus every actor will be able to mobilize consensus more easily in some groups or categories than others.”39 And then there is class consciousness, including class and group identity, as yet another means to absorb the individual into the collective—that is, the mass movement and revolution. Professor Aldon D. Morris of Northwestern University contends: “Empirical studies using diverse methodologies and conceptual frameworks have demonstrated that class consciousness has developed in a variety of societies and historical periods and that it has affected major revolutions and social movements. Indeed, class consciousness has been one of the key determinants of social and historical change.”40 Morris’s observations reflect, in a significant way, the teachings of Marx in that he sees society and culture broken down into classes that are in a constant state of competition and conflict.

For example, another significant and growing movement is the “Latina/o Critical Race Theory” (LatCrit), which, as Lindsay Perez Huber, a “post-doctoral scholar” at UCLA writes, involves “experiences unique to the Latina/o community such as immigration, status, language, ethnicity, and culture. A LatCrit analysis has allowed researchers to develop the conceptual framework of racist nativism, a lens that highlights the intersection of racism and nativism…. The overarching theoretical frameworks… are CRT, and in particular, LatCrit. CRT in educational research unapologetically centers on the ways race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of oppression manifest in the education experiences of People of Color.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Both oppose arrogance: the Principle of Mediocrity opposes the pre-Enlightenment arrogance of believing ourselves significant in the world; the Spaceship Earth metaphor opposes the Enlightenment arrogance of aspiring to control the world. Both have a moral element: we should not consider ourselves significant, they assert; we should not expect the world to submit indefinitely to our depredations. Thus the two ideas generate a rich conceptual framework that can inform an entire world view. Yet, as I shall explain, they are both false, even in the straightforward factual sense. And in the broader sense they are so misleading that, if you were seeking maxims worth being carved in stone and recited each morning before breakfast, you could do a lot worse than to use their negations.

Though the unobserved parts of that wider phenomenon have in no way affected what we, the viewers, observe, they are essential to its explanation. Similarly, common sense and classical physics contain the parochial error that only one history exists. This error, built into our language and conceptual framework, makes it sound odd to say that an event can be in one sense extremely unlikely and in another certain to happen. But there is nothing odd about it in reality. We are now seeing the interior of the spaceship as an overwhelmingly complex jumble of superposed objects. Most locations on board are packed with people, some of them on very unusual errands, and all unable to perceive each other.

Short-lived rapid changes have always happened: famines, plagues and wars have begun and ended; maverick kings have attempted radical change. Occasionally empires were rapidly created or whole civilizations were rapidly destroyed. But, while a society lasted, all important areas of life seemed changeless to the participants: they could expect to die under much the same moral values, personal lifestyles, conceptual framework, technology and pattern of economic production as they were born under. And, of the changes that did occur, few were for the better. I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants. Before we can understand our unusual, dynamic sort of society, we must understand the usual, static sort.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

Depending on the studies consulted, the degree of ethnic heterogeneity or of democratic reform could be aggravating or mitigating factors.27 The early post-1990 scholarship was influenced by the established state-centric approach of international relations, that is instead of looking up from the level of the state to the wider system they looked down to conflict below, and often did so with a similar conceptual framework.28 It took time before serious investigations began on sub-state actors in their own right.29 Over time the best studies were those that kept the statistical work on tap rather than put it on top, combining it with field work and archival research. As a result their conclusions were often less clear-cut, but they were more reliable.

German Atrocities of 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Howard, Michael. Studies in War & Peace. London: Temple Smith, 1970. . War and the Liberal Conscience. London: Temple Smith, 1978. . The Invention of Peace. London: Profile Books, 2000. Huber, Thomas M. ‘Compound Warfare: A Conceptual Framework’. Compound Warfare: That Fatal Knot. Ed. Thomas M. Huber. Fort Leavenworth, MS: US Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2002. Hughes, Llewelyn, and Austin Long. ‘Is There an Oil Weapon? National Security Implications of Changes in the Structure of the International Oil Market’. International Security 39.3 (2014/15).

Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington, VA: The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007). In a similar concept, Thomas Huber identified ‘compound war’ as a developing form of warfare. In 2002, he described it as the ‘systematic, deliberate combining of regular and irregular forces’. Thomas M. Huber, ‘Compound Warfare: A Conceptual Framework’, Compound Warfare: That Fatal Knot, ed. Thomas M. Huber (Fort Leavenworth, MS: US Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2002). 6. Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Hybrid vs. Compound War: The Janus Choice of Modern War: Defining Today’s Multifaceted Conflict’, Armed Forces Journal (2009): 1–2.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

We will elaborate the three primary aspects ofimmaterial labor in the contemporary economy: the communicative labor ofindustrial production that has newly be- come linked in informational networks, the interactive labor of symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labor ofthe produc- tion and manipulation of affects (see Section 3.4). This third aspect, with its focus on the productivity of the corporeal, the somatic, is an extremely important element in the contemporary networks of biopolitical production. The work ofthis school and its analysis ofgeneral intellect, then, certainly marks a step forward, but its conceptual framework remains too pure, almost angelic. In the final analysis, these new conceptions too only scratch the surface of the productive dynamic ofthe new theoretical f ramework ofbio- power.17 Our task, then, is to build on these partially successful attempts to recognize the potential ofbiopolitical production.

In this way intervention is an effective mechanism that through police deployments contributes directly to the construction ofthe moral, normative, and institutional order ofEmpire. Royal Prerogatives What were traditionally called the royal prerogatives ofsovereignty seem in effect to be repeated and even substantially renewed in the construction ofEmpire. Ifwe were to remain within the conceptual framework of classic domestic and international law, we might be B I O P O L I T I C A L P R O D U C T I O N 39 tempted to say that a supranational quasi-state is being formed. That does not seem to us, however, an accurate characterization ofthe situation. When the royal prerogatives ofmodern sovereignty re- appear in Empire, they take on a completely different form.

The institutions that constitute civil society functioned as passageways that channel flows ofsocial and economic forces, raising them up toward a coherent unity and, flowing back, like an irrigation net- work, distribute the command ofthe unity throughout the imma- nent social field. These non-state institutions, in other words, orga- nized capitalist society under the order ofthe state and in turn spread state rule throughout society. In the terms ofour conceptual framework, we might say that civil society was the terrain of the becoming-immanent ofmodern state sovereignty (down to capitalist society) and at the same time inversely the becoming-transcendent ofcapitalist society (up to the state). In our times, however, civil society no longer serves as the adequate point ofmediation between capital and sovereignty.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press 1979), 18. 9. See ibid., 124–26, and H. J. Habakkuk, “English Landownership 1680–1740,” Economic History Review 10, no. 1 (February 1940): 2–17, for comments on the hostility of courts to entails. 10. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 84. 11. Much of this paragraph draws on Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 118, 132. 12. Reed and Bekar, “Religious Prohibitions,” 352. 13.

A substantial fraction of the seized monastery property was indeed let out for long tenures rather than sold. There was little point in taking these away from the current efficient tenants and looking for new ones. 11. See, for example, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12. Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy. 13. See, for instance, Rajan and Zingales, Saving Capitalism, chapter 6, and Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 14.

See, for example, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist papers (1788), available at https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers, especially Federalist 10, “The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” 35. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 36. Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, “Corruption and Reform: An Introduction,” in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s History, ed. Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14. 37.


The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

Chapter 3 analyzes the frontiers of agricultural biotechnology, including genetic editing and genetic modification. It examines the benefits of transgenic crops and the challenges of regulating them. Africa must develop its own regulatory system that can analyze each crop on a case-by-case basis and takes into account local context. Chapter 4 provides a conceptual framework for defining agricultural innovation in a systemic context. The use of emerging technology and indigenous knowledge to promote sustainable agriculture will require adjustments in existing institutions. New approaches will need to be adopted to promote close interactions among government, business, farmers, academia, and civil society.

An innovation state has the added challenge of addressing more complex challenges such as inclusive growth and sustainable development. 9 PLOWING AHEAD A new economic vision for Africa’s agricultural transformation—articulated at the highest level of govern­ ment through Africa’s Regional Economic Communities— should be guided by new conceptual frameworks that define the continent as a learning society. This shift will entail placing policy emphasis on emerging opportunities such as renewing infrastructure, building human capabilities, stimulating agribusiness development, and increasing participation in the global economy. It also requires an appreciation of emerging challenges, such as climate change, and the ways in which these challenges may influence current and future economic strategies.


pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

But when time came for one network to exchange data with, say, the ARPANET, the internetworking protocols would operate. The gateway computers handling the transmission couldn’t care about the local complexity buried inside each network. Their only task would be to get packets through the network to the destination host on the other side, making a so-called end-to-end link. Once the conceptual framework was established, Cerf and Kahn spent the spring and summer of 1973 working out the details. Cerf presented the problem to his Stanford graduate students, and he and Kahn joined them in attacking it. They held a seminar that concentrated on the details of developing the host-to-host protocol into a standard allowing data traffic to flow across networks.

Berkeley UNIX with TCP/IP would be crucial to the growth of the Internet. When Sun included network software as part of every machine it sold and didn’t charge separately for it, networking exploded. It further mushroomed because of Ethernet. While packet radio and SATNET sparked the thinking about a conceptual framework for internetworking, they were largely experimental. Ethernet—the local area network designed by Bob Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC back in 1973—was a practical solution to the problem of how to tie computers together, either on a campus or at a company. Xerox began selling Ethernet as a commercial product in 1980.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Over recent years this relationship has increasingly exhibited what might be described as ‘parasitic’ features, with the private business sector lobbying governments to weaken regulations and cut capital gains taxes, but at the same time reducing its share of investment in basic research and thus relying even more on public spending in this area.21 As we shall show below, future growth will require a very different form of collaboration between public and private sectors, characterised by a healthy symbiosis that is sustainable over the long-term. Orthodox economic theory and the ‘market failure’ approach To meet these challenges and achieve the goal of smart, innovation-led growth, we need to develop a new conceptual framework. For this we need to look beyond the narrow assumptions of mainstream economics, which has paid too little attention to the disequilibrating process of innovation. These models continue to assume that innovation is (a) driven mainly by the individual genius of single entrepreneurs, at best ‘facilitated’ by the public sector; (b) only characterised by predictable risk (which can be precisely quantified ex-ante by means of well-defined probability distributions, as in lotteries) rather than true uncertainty; and (c) has the same probability of occurrence at any moment in time.

The modelling community could fruitfully focus attention on the economic processes which generate knowledge and drive innovation and systemic change. This could prove greatly valuable in designing effective policy. Climate change policy A range of policy instruments are required to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Michael Grubb has provided a helpful conceptual framework. He notes how regulatory measures (such as energy efficiency standards) are appropriate where economic activity is characterised by satisficing behaviour; market-based incentives (such as carbon pricing) in the domain of optimising behaviour; and innovation policy (such as deployment subsidies and R&D expenditure) where technological and structural transformation is required.35 Of these, innovation policy is the most complex, and the one where environmental economics has so far had least to say.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Engelbart, the inventor of the point-and-click computer user interface, and the mouse to use with it, was perhaps the first to embrace the term augmentation, which in his view involved getting machines to perform the mechanical aspects of thinking and idea sharing. In 1962 he published a widely circulated paper: “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”4 He even founded an Augmentation Research Center, which in 1969, by the way, constituted one end of the first Internet link ever made. (The University of California, Los Angeles, was the other end.) Jobs borrowed not only Engelbart’s interface ideas, but also his desire to create “wheels for the mind.”

Steve Jobs, in “Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress” (TV movie), directed by Julian Krainin and Michael R. Lawrence, 1990, Accessed on YouTube, October 29, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c. Jobs was referring to the article “Bicycle Technology,” by S. S. Wilson, in Scientific American 228, no. 3 (1973). 4. Douglas C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223, prepared for Director of Information Sciences, Air Force, Office of Scientific Research, Washington 25, DC, Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project No. 3578 (AUGMENT,3906), October 1962, http://insitu.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/FONDIHM/2012/papers/Englebart-Augmenting62.pdf. 5.


pages: 321 words: 97,661

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine by Trisha Greenhalgh

call centre, complexity theory, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, p-value, personalized medicine, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, systematic bias, systems thinking, the scientific method

Implementation Science 2012;7(1):62. 3 Gurses AP, Marsteller JA, Ozok AA, et al. Using an interdisciplinary approach to identify factors that affect clinicians' compliance with evidence-based guidelines. Critical Care Medicine 2010;38:S282–91. 4 Gagliardi AR, Brouwers MC, Palda VA, et al. How can we improve guideline use? A conceptual framework of implementability. Implementation Science 2011;6(1):26. 5 Evans-Lacko S, Jarrett M, McCrone P, et al. Facilitators and barriers to implementing clinical care pathways. BMC Health Services Research 2010;10(1):182. 6 Michie S, Johnston M. Changing clinical behaviour by making guidelines specific.

Much of the literature on organisational change is in the form of practical checklists or the ‘ten tips for success’ type format. Checklists and tips can be enormously useful, but such lists tend to leave me hungry for some coherent conceptual models on which to hang my own real-life experiences. The management literature offers not one but several dozen different conceptual frameworks for looking at change—leaving the non-expert confused about where to start. It was my attempt to make sense of this multiplicity of theories that led me to write a series of six articles published a few years ago in the British Journal of General Practice entitled ‘Theories of change’. In these articles, I explored six different models of professional and organisational change in relation to effective clinical practice [39–44]: 1.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

For example, Dourish and Mazmanian (2011) argue that it is important to push beyond the mere physical fact of data and to encounter them in their use. By focusing on data practices they seek to bring the ‘the historical particularities, cultural specificities, and political consequences’ (Dourish and Mazmanian 2011: 4) of data in the world to the fore. Drawing on the conceptual framework developed by Haraway (1997), Wilson (2011) unpacks the material-semiotics of data and data production. Rather than detail data practices per se, his work interrogates how meaning comes to be associated with specific data within local communities. Somewhat at odds to these approaches however, Bates et al. (2016) push back against the blurring of matter and meaning.

In these instances, subjects do not merely follow but interpret, invent and circumvent ways of acting. These questions are especially critical given the tendency to treat digital data as raw. We now have myriad studies that are challenging this by accounting for the relations between people and technologies that come to make it up. But we also need a conceptual framework to understand how these also involve power relations between and amongst embodied subjects and citizens who act through the internet and in doing so are part of the making of cyberspace and data through which we come to know cities. Acknowledgements The framing that I develop in this chapter assembles a number of arguments and then builds on Isin and Ruppert (2015) Being Digital Citizens.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In an ideological context driven by such liberal nostrums of human improvement, the refugee crisis forces a questioning of everything from top to bottom. What is radical about the migration crisis is not that it asks us to give different answers to those questions pondered in 1989 but that it changes the questions altogether. We are on a substantially changed intellectual footing than a quarter century ago. In Fukuyama’s conceptual framework, the central questions humanity would need to confront were clear-cut: How can the West transform the rest of the world, and how can the rest of the world best imitate the West? What specific institutions and policies need to be transferred and copied? What books should be translated and reprinted?


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Beyond any particular claim or category—beyond any of the specific arguments about the role of the work ethic in sustaining the structures and cultures of work, the legitimacy of basic income, the need for shorter hours, or the utility of utopian thought—the project is meant to raise some basic questions about the organization and meaning of work. The assumptions at the heart of the work ethic, not only about the virtues of hard work and long hours but also about their inevitability, are too rarely examined, let alone contested. What kinds of conceptual frameworks and political discourses might serve to generate new ways of thinking about the nature, value, and meaning of work relative to other practices and in relation to the rest of life? How might we expose the fundamental structures and dominant values of work—including its temporalities, socialities, hierarchies, and subjectivities—as pressing political phenomena?

Moreover, a feminist demand for shorter hours should include a broader accounting of what is recognized as work and feminist analyses of its value. Beyond the assertion of a specific policy proposal, to demand is also, as we have seen, to assert a particular discursive agenda. Considering the demand for shorter hours also in these terms, I want to take into account the ways in which it could provide a vocabulary and conceptual framework for new ways of thinking about the nature, value, and meaning of work relative to other practices. With this in mind, in the pages that follow I will build an argument about what a contemporary feminist movement for shorter hours in the United States could accomplish, and how it might most fruitfully be conceived.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

Of course, collapse in this context doesn’t mean that everybody died, but that their ways of life radically shifted and often much of the population migrated to other regions. In other words, history provides us with no models of sustainable development other than democratic capitalism. Every one of these earlier ultimately unsustainable societies was what economics Nobelist Douglass North and his colleagues call, in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, “natural states.” Natural states are basically organized as hierarchical patron-client networks in which small, militarily potent elites extract resources from a subject population. The basic deal is a Hobbesian contract in which elites promise their subjects an end to the “war of all against all” in exchange for wealth and power.

“Sustainable development”: Gro Harlem Brundtland, Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf. economic growth proceeded: Angus Maddison, The Maddison Project, Original Maddison Home Page, January 2013. www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm. ultimately unsustainable societies: Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. concur with the analysis: Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business, 2012. “Many lines of evidence”: Harvey Weiss and Raymond S.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

Universality is therefore queer-impossible, as this would require a common human nature—a concept that queer Theory utterly rejects. With its focus on deconstructive techniques and its conception of knowledge as a construct of power, queer Theory is, arguably, the purest form of applied postmodernism. It underlies much trans activism and makes an appearance in multiple forms of Social Justice scholarship. The conceptual framework of intersectionality formed part of the foundational texts of queer Theory, and although the name “intersectionality” is more associated with critical race Theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, Butler also spoke of “intersections” with other forms of marginalized identity at the same time as Crenshaw and, seemingly, independently.

This is because of its reliance on the postmodern knowledge principle—social reality and what is accepted as true are constructed by language. Disagreement would allow dominant discourses to be reasserted, voiced, and heard, which Theory sees as not safe. As Applebaum explains, “language constitutes our reality by providing the conceptual framework from which meaning is given.”43 She adds, “Even if one retreats to the position where one only speaks for oneself, one’s speech is still not neutral and still reinforces the continuance of dominant discourses by omission.”44 Given this understanding of the power of language (a postmodern theme) and its impacts on social justice (through the postmodern political principle), it is essential to control what may and may not be said.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Here again, the French experience is quite relevant to today’s world, where many commentators continue to believe, as Leroy-Beaulieu did a little more than a century ago, that ever more fully guaranteed property rights, ever freer markets, and ever “purer and more perfect” competition are enough to ensure a just, prosperous, and harmonious society. Unfortunately, the task is more complex. The Theoretical and Conceptual Framework Before proceeding, it may be useful to say a little more about the theoretical and conceptual framework of this research as well as the intellectual itinerary that led me to write this book. I belong to a generation that turned eighteen in 1989, which was not only the bicentennial of the French Revolution but also the year when the Berlin Wall fell.

Malthus, Young, and the French Revolution Ricardo: The Principle of Scarcity Marx: The Principle of Infinite Accumulation From Marx to Kuznets, or Apocalypse to Fairy Tale The Kuznets Curve: Good News in the Midst of the Cold War Putting the Distributional Question Back at the Heart of Economic Analysis The Sources Used in This Book The Major Results of This Study Forces of Convergence, Forces of Divergence The Fundamental Force for Divergence: r > g The Geographical and Historical Boundaries of This Study The Theoretical and Conceptual Framework Outline of the Book Part One: Income and Capital 1. Income and Output The Capital-Labor Split in the Long Run: Not So Stable The Idea of National Income What Is Capital? Capital and Wealth The Capital/Income Ratio The First Fundamental Law of Capitalism: α = r × β National Accounts: An Evolving Social Construct The Global Distribution of Production From Continental Blocs to Regional Blocs Global Inequality: From 150 Euros per Month to 3,000 Euros per Month The Global Distribution of Income Is More Unequal Than the Distribution of Output What Forces Favor Convergence?

See also Global in­e­qual­ity of wealth; Inheritance, dynamics of Distribution of wealth debate: data and, 2–­3, 11–­13, 16–­19, 27–­30; classical po­liti­cal economy and, 3–­5; scarcity principle and, 5–­7; infinite accumulation principle and, 7–­11; postwar optimism and, 11–­15; in economic analysis, 15–­16; historical sources and, 19–­20; results of current study in, 20–­22; forces of convergence and divergence and, 22–­27; theoretical and conceptual framework and, 30–­33 Distribution tables, 267, 269–­270 Divergence, 22–­27, 424, 571; Eu­rope and North America and, 59–­61; supermanagers and, 333–­335; mechanism of wealth, 350–­353, 431; global, 438–­439, 461–­463; oligarchic, 463–­465, 627n49 Divisia, François, 591n19 Django Unchained (film), 163 Domar, Evsey, 230–­231 Domestic capital, 49; in Britain and France, 117–­119; in Germany, 141, 143; in the United States, 150–­151, 155; in Canada, 157; slavery and, 158–­163, 593n16 Domestic output/production, 44–­45, 598n3 Douglas, Paul, 599n18 Dowries, 392, 418 Duflo, Esther, 634n49 Duncan, G., 632n30 Dunoyer, Charles, 85 Dupin, Jean, 591n19 Durable goods and valuables, 179–­180, 594n13 Durkheim, Emile, 422, 621n55 Duval, Guillaume, 592n6 Earned and unearned income: inheritances and, 377–­379, 390; taxation and, 507–­508 Eastern bloc countries, privatization in, 186–­187 ECB (Eu­ro­pe­an Central Bank), 530, 545, 550–­552, 553, 557–­558, 649n26 “Ecological stimulus,” 568 Economic determinism, 20 Economic flows, 381–­383 Economic growth, 72–­74, 84, 93–­94; stages of, 86–­87; in postwar period, 96; social order and, 96.


pages: 137 words: 36,231

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

Shannon came to regret its widespread popularity, and I shall avoid it in this context. MTC is the theory that lies behind any phenomenon involving data encoding and transmission. As such, it has had a profound impact on the analyses of the various kinds of information, to which it has provided both the technical vocabulary and at least the initial conceptual framework. It would be impossible to understand the nature of information without grasping at least its main gist. This is the task of the present chapter. The mathematical theory of communication MTC treats information as data communication, with the primary aim of devising efficient ways of encoding and transferring data. 7.


pages: 161 words: 39,526

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders by Mariya Yao, Adelyn Zhou, Marlene Jia

Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cognitive load, computer vision, conceptual framework, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, natural language processing, new economy, OpenAI, pattern recognition, performance metric, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, skunkworks, software is eating the world, source of truth, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, subscription business, technological singularity, The future is already here

AI experts and engineers are well-versed in these details, but most executives who lack technical backgrounds tend to clump all AI technologies together and regard it as a silver bullet. If you haven’t read our opening chapters on basic AI terminology and the Machine Intelligence Continuum, you should do so now. Even if you’re familiar with technical concepts, you’ll benefit from the definitions and conceptual framework that we present in those chapters for thinking about machine intelligence. We focus much of our book on machine learning and deep learning techniques since these algorithms are widely used in enterprise solutions. Many other approaches to AI exist and will be covered at our website, appliedaibook.com.


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Particular interest might usefully be paid to the institutional economics of the Historische Schule and to Marx the social theorist, as opposed to the deterministic economist. The lesson to be learned from all of them is that capitalism denotes both an economy and a society, and that studying it requires a conceptual framework that does not separate the one from the other. How to study contemporary capitalism, then? My first answer is: not as an economy but as a society – as a system of social action and a set of social institutions falling in the domain of sociological rather than today’s standard economic theory.3 This is in fact the tradition of political economy in the nineteenth century.

For a time, the dependence of politics and political success under democratic capitalism on uninterrupted capital accumulation – or in the technocratic language of standard economics: on economic growth – led inevitably optimistic politicians to place their hopes on riding the tiger and jump on the historical bandwagon towards liberalization and deregulation until the re-formed capitalist economic regime almost crashed as a result of its unfettered progress. It may seem like hairsplitting if I now ask, in Block’s terms as he reconstructs the Polanyian conceptual framework, whether the current crisis was due to the capitalist ‘economy’ having become misembedded or disembedded. Block declares the latter to be impossible, due to economic action always and inevitably being social action. But while one can fully and indeed emphatically agree with this, as I do,26 there is no logical need to conclude from it that a capitalist political economy is governed by a primacy of politics.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Global Governance and the New Wars. The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books. 93. UNHCR. 2009. 2008 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons. UNHCR: Geneva. 94. Anna Lindley. 2008. “Conflict-Induced Migration and Remittances: Exploring Conceptual Frameworks,” Working Paper Series No. 47, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. 95. Stephen Castles and Sean Loughna. 2003. “Trends in Asylum Migration to Industrialized Countries: 1990–2001,” UNU-WIDER Discussion Paper No. 2003/31, p. 16. 96. Robert E. B. Lucas. 2005. International Migration and Economic Development: Lessons from Low-Income Countries.

“Does Globalization Make the World More Unequal?” in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 227-271. Lindley, Anna. 2008. “Conflict-Induced Migration and Remittances: Exploring Conceptual Frameworks,” Working Paper Series No. 47, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Oxford, UK: Refugee Studies Centre. Lluberas, Rodrigo. 2007. “The Untapped Skilled Labour of Latin America,” Towers Watson Technical Paper. Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1261978.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

Notes 1 Young, S et al (2018) The economic consequences of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in the Scottish prison system, BMC Psychiatry, https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-018-1792-x (archived at https://perma.cc/6KTP-EK3X) 2 Mandell, D S et al (2009) Racial/ethnic disparities in the identification of children with autism spectrum disorders, American Journal of Public Health, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2007.131243 (archived at https://perma.cc/G3LA-QDNN) 3 Rippon, G (2019) Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain, The Bodley Head Ltd, London 4 Young, S et al (2018) The economic consequences of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in the Scottish prison system, BMC Psychiatry, https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-018-1792-x (archived at https://perma.cc/6KTP-EK3X) 5 Fazel, S, Xenitidis, K and Powell, J (2008) The prevalence of intellectual disabilities among 12 000 prisoners – a systematic review, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlp.2008.06.001 (archived at https://perma.cc/5UBH-7QXY) 6 Underwood, L et al (2016) Autism spectrum disorder traits among prisoners, Advances in Autism, https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AIA-11-2015-0023/full/html (archived at https://perma.cc/79LX-YLGM) 7 Doyle, N and McDowall, A (2019) Context matters: A review to formulate a conceptual framework for coaching as a disability accommodation, PLoS ONE, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199408 (archived at https://perma.cc/R4ZU-6XE2) 8 Milton, D (2018) A critique of the use of Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA): on behalf of the Neurodiversity Manifesto Steering Group, Kent Academic Repository, https://kar.kent.ac.uk/69268/1/Applied%20behaviour%20analysis.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/5VYA-ZVKD) 9 Argyris, C (1977) Double loop learning in organizations, Harvard Business Review, hbr.org/1977/09/double-loop-learning-in-organizations (archived at https://perma.cc/SM93-ZE85) 10 Doyle, N (2021) Adapting other internal resources to a neurodiverse workforce.

An ‘empty review’ of research into ‘neurodiversity’ and a road map for developing the inclusion agenda, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 16 Roberson, Q M (2018) Diversity in the workplace: a review, synthesis, and future research agenda, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012218-015243 (archived at https://perma.cc/6UEW-PUQE) 17 Kalargyrou, V, Kalargiros, E and Kutz, D (2018) Social entrepreneurship and disability inclusion in the hospitality industry, International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15256480.2018.1478356 (archived at https://perma.cc/XP7G-23PU) 18 Bassuk, E L et al (2016) Peer-delivered recovery support services for addictions in the United States: A systematic review, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsat.2016.01.003 (archived at https://perma.cc/E4W6-6XUJ) 19 Leamy, M et al (2011) Conceptual framework for personal recovery in mental health: systematic review and narrative synthesis, British Journal of Psychiatry, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.110.083733 (archived at https://perma.cc/VWF7-LR2J) 20 Thamesreach (2010) Homelessness Literacy Report, Turning the Key: Portraits of low literacy amongst people with experience of homelessness, https://thamesreach.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Turning-the-Key-Literacy-Report.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/EVH5-NFZA) 21 Thamesreach (2010) Homelessness Literacy Report, Turning the Key: Portraits of low literacy amongst people with experience of homelessness, https://thamesreach.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Turning-the-Key-Literacy-Report.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/EVH5-NFZA) 22 Office of National Statistics (2019) Exploring the UK’s Digital Divide, 4 March, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/householdcharacteristics/homeinternetandsocialmediausage/articles/exploringtheuksdigitaldivide/2019-03-04#what-are-the-barriers-to-digital-inclusion (archived at https://perma.cc/8WN8-C67W) 23 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (2018) What digital skills do adults need to succeed in the workplace now and in the next 10 years?


pages: 721 words: 197,134

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms by Mehmed Kantardzić

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, backpropagation, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, discrete time, El Camino Real, fault tolerance, finite state, Gini coefficient, information retrieval, Internet Archive, inventory management, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, loose coupling, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, phenotype, random walk, RFID, semantic web, speech recognition, statistical model, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, text mining, traveling salesman, web application

Based on the knowledge of the application domain and the goals of the mining effort, the human analyst may select a subset of the features found in the initial data set. The process of feature selection can be manual or supported by some automated procedures. Roughly speaking, feature-selection methods are applied in one of three conceptual frameworks: the filter model, the wrapper model, and embedded methods. These three basic families differ in how the learning algorithm is incorporated in evaluating and selecting features. In the filter model the selection of features is done as a preprocessing activity, without trying to optimize the performance of any specific data-mining technique directly.

Numerous illustrations and examples enhance the readers’ knowledge about theory and practical evaluations of data-mining techniques. Cherkassky, V., F. Mulier, Learning from Data: Concepts, Theory and Methods, 2nd edition, John Wiley, New York, 2007. The book provides a unified treatment of the principles and methods for learning dependencies from data. It establishes a general conceptual framework in which various learning methods from statistics, machine learning, and other disciplines can be applied—showing that a few fundamental principles underlie most new methods being proposed today. An additional strength of this primarily theoretical book is the large number of case studies and examples that simplify and make understandable concepts in SLT.

The text concludes with a detailed discussion of several important statistical methods such as least-square minimization, ANOVA, regressions, and analysis of time series. Cherkassky, V., F. Mulier, Learning from Data: Concepts, Theory and Methods, John Wiley, New York, 1998. The book provides a unified treatment of the principles and methods for learning dependencies from data. It establishes a general conceptual framework in which various learning methods from statistics, machine learning, and other disciplines can be applied—showing that a few fundamental principles underlie most new methods being proposed today. An additional strength of this primary theoretical book is a large number of case studies and examples that simplify and make understandable statistical learning theory concepts.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

More than ever, it is essential to dissolve these barriers by engaging the power of networks to forge effective partnerships. Companies and organizations that fail to do this and do not walk the talk by building diverse teams will have a difficult time adjusting to the disruptions of the digital age. Leaders must also prove capable of changing their mental and conceptual frameworks and their organising principles. In today’s disruptive, fast-changing world, thinking in silos and having a fixed view of the future is fossilizing, which is why it is better, in the dichotomy presented by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his 1953 essay about writers and thinkers, to be a fox than a hedgehog.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

And if a theory called the holographic principle proves correct, we and our four-dimensional world may be shadows on the boundary of a larger, five-dimensional space-time. In that case, our status in the universe is analogous to that of the goldfish. Strict realists often argue that the proof that scientific theories represent reality lies in their success. But different theories can successfully describe the same phenomenon through disparate conceptual frameworks. In fact, many scientific theories that had proven successful were later replaced by other, equally successful theories based on wholly new concepts of reality. Traditionally those who didn’t accept realism have been called anti-realists. Anti-realists suppose a distinction between empirical knowledge and theoretical knowledge.


Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Meg Patrick

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

Moriarty (2005) considers the implications of the epistemic argument for traditional concepts of desert. My initial crack at thoughts on these topics is Cowen (2006). MacAskill (2014) considers how we ought to maximize across the expected values of possibly conflicting moral theories with possibly conflicting conceptual frameworks. 83 as well. All those lives rested upon your decision. Any moment most of us might be doing something that will lead to truly wonderful results, truly terrible results, or most likely a mix of both at the same time. It seems paralyzing. If you internalized that feeling, all of life would be like walking around on eggshells, except that the eggshells are geopolitical changes, possibly worth millions or even billions of future human lives.


pages: 140 words: 42,194

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

questions in the context of military history. Moriarty (2005) considers the implications of the epistemic argument for concepts of desert. My initial crack at these topics is Cowen (2006). MacAskill (2014) analyzes how we ought to maximize across the expected values of possibly conflicting moral theories with possibly conflicting conceptual frameworks. 2. The economic literature on probability offers a debate about whether we can ever say we have “no idea” about the likelihood of an outcome. Under one view, we can always attach a Bayesian probability, whether explicit or implicit, to various outcomes (Caplan 1999). Even if we are very uncertain, in principle there exist betting odds that we would or would not be willing to take on a given choice.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Following the political scientist Robert Dahl, for example, “procedural minimalists” define a democracy as any system that features: “Free, fair and competitive elections; Full adult suffrage; Broad protection of civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, and association; and The absence of nonelected ‘tutelary’ authorities (e.g. militaries, monarchies, or religious bodies) that limit elected officials’ power to govern.”2 Dahl’s conceptual framework thus bakes the protection of liberal rights into the very definition of democracy. This makes it impossible to ask whether democracy and liberalism might be coming apart. By focusing on a particular set of historically contingent institutions, it also makes it difficult to ask whether these institutions actually allow the people to rule.

When these basic needs are met, they pay increasing attention to more rarefied desires: They seek love and belonging. They aspire to be esteemed. And they search for ways in which they can achieve what Maslow called “self-actualization.”59 Influential social scientists like Ronald Inglehart have derived a very optimistic vision from this basic conceptual framework. Back when most societies suffered from acute scarcity and violent conflict posed a constant threat, Inglehart argued in the 1970s, the main political cleavages were determined by the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy. The need to procure food and shelter meant that politics was largely organized along class lines, with poorer voters likely to support parties that championed the welfare state and called for redistribution, and more affluent voters likely to support parties that sought to protect their wealth.


pages: 627 words: 127,613

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As a former Mayor of West Berlin (1957–66), Brandt felt the pain of division as a gut issue, unlike previous chancellors such as Konrad Adenauer (a Rhinelander) and Ludwig Erhard (from Bavaria). Accepting the fait accompli of two states, Brandt nevertheless wanted to prevent total alienation between the peoples of East and West Germany and to keep open the possibility of eventual reunification. The conceptual framework for this policy had been elaborated by his adviser Egon Bahr during the 1960s, built around the slogan of ‘change through rapprochement’ (Wandel durch Annäherung) and the ‘policy of small steps’ (Politik der kleinen Schritte). The Brandt-Bahr partnership proved essential for Bonn’s détente diplomacy, especially after Brandt had acceded to the chancellorship in October 1969.

Brandt repeatedly insisted that he aimed at ‘reconciliation’ with the East, and thereby specifically included the GDR. While he used the term Aussöhnung for relations with Poland, he sometimes referred to the need for Aussöhnung im Innern (inner reconciliation) with regard to East Germans.10 The peace researcher John Paul Lederach has developed a conceptual framework outlining favourable elements and processes leading to ‘sustainable reconciliation’.11 While Lederach in his examples mostly discusses the period after the Cold War, we argue that some of his broader conclusions also shed useful light on the issues in this chapter. Indeed, to a large extent the general characteristics of the conflicts described by Lederach also apply to the FRG-GDR relationship in 1970: the conflicting groups ‘live as neighbours and yet are locked into long-standing cycles of hostile interaction’; the conflicts are ‘characterized by deep-rooted, intense animosity, fear, and severe stereotyping’; and the conflicting groups ‘have direct experience of violent trauma’.12 Lederach proposes an interesting definition of what actually constitutes reconciliation.


pages: 165 words: 45,129

The Economics of Inequality by Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer

affirmative action, basic income, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, Gini coefficient, income inequality, low skilled workers, means of production, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Simon Kuznets, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, very high income, working-age population

If one could precisely measure the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor and the elasticity of the supply of capital, it would be possible in principle to determine the optimal amount of capital-labor redistribution and the best instruments to achieve it. The intellectual and political conflict over redistribution is about more than just the measurement of elasticities, however. Indeed, this whole conceptual framework implicitly assumes that we accept the rules of the market economy and the allocative role of the price system. This is obvious in the case of the elasticity of capital supply (why should society give in to the threat of capitalist households to save less if they deem the rate of return on capital to be too low?).


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

A third example is estimating the value of income received in the form of deferred stock options, once a small part of total remuneration but now quite significant. The actual number for GDP is therefore the product of a vast patchwork of statistics and a complicated set of processes carried out on the raw data to fit them to the conceptual framework. The “Production Boundary” As if all of this were not enough, there are some important conceptual questions about the GDP definition, some of which will be followed up in later chapters. The definitions have evolved over the years, and there are areas of active debate among national statistics experts.


The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market by Paul de Grauwe, Anna Asbury

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit motive, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, very high income

When I am in that historic city I ride a mountain bike to cope with the deep potholes and bumps disfiguring the streets. In many countries rail infrastructure is ageing, with insufficient investment in replacements, resulting in failures, faults, and delays. In this chapter we have provided a conceptual framework which enables us to understand this better. The expansion of the market system encourages individual rationality in each of us, weakening the drive for cooperation. A sort of repressive effect occurs, as the market regards us as individuals. This prompts each of us to act individually. Cooperative behaviour is not rewarded in the same way, so many of us will suppress this behaviour.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Engelbart, D. C. 196 I. "Special Considerations of the Individual as a User, Genera- tor, and Retriever of Information." AmerIcan Documentation I 2, no. 2: I2I- 2 5. . 1962. "AugmentIng Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework." Report to the Director of Information SCIences, Air Force Office of ScientIfic Re- search. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, October. . I963. "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect." In V,stas in Information Handling, edited by P. W. Howerton and D. C. Weeks, I: 1-29. Washington, D.C.: Spartan. . 1973. "Design Considerations for Knowledge Workshop Terminals."


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Ron Hubbard and Scientology, 158–60 Maxwell Maltz and Psycho-Cybernetics, 162–65 culture (continued) personal computer and, 187–89 pseudoscience, 160–62 self-help books, 162–65 Spacewar video game, 181–84 cyber (term) origin stories, ix–xii as prefix, 304, 350 varieties of meaning, xi “Cyber and Justice Holmes, The” (Riley), 87–88 cybercash, 286; See also digital cash cyberculture, 102–3 cyberdelic, 227 cyberespionage, 316–39 cybernated systems, 101; See also cybernation cybernation, 100–102, 105–7, 110–12 Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (Michael), 100–102 “Cybernation and Culture” (McLuhan), 108 cybernetic anthropomorphous machine (CAM), 129–30, 136–38 cybernetic frontier, 181, 194 cybernetic myths, xiii–xvi anthropomorphizing of machines, 342–44 cultural impact of, 157–58 cyberspace and, 345–47 cyberwar and, 305–6 cyborgs and, 344–45 fall of the machines, 340–52 rise of the machines, 110–11 technology’s outperforming of, 349 three stages of, 342–47 cybernetics Gregory Bateson and, 175–76 coining of term, 3 conceptual framework development, 47–53 contradictions in predictions about, 348–49 and control, 47–48 and counterculture, 165–94 development of discipline, 43–72 early scholars of, 52 as emerging field, 68 and enchantment of the machine, 351 evolution of concept, 62 and feedback, 48–49 L. Ron Hubbard and, 158–60 and human-machine interaction, 49–51 irony as pattern in history of, 350–51 new terms as pattern in history of, 349–50 origins of term, xi–xii patterns in history of, 348–51 popularity in 1970s, 157 religious implications of, 90–92 spiritual pattens in history of, 348 three core concepts, 47–51 warnings in history of, 347 Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiener), xii, 3, 36, 51 inspiration for title, 46 second edition of, 119–20 and Whole Earth Catalog, 169 “Cybernetic War” (Post), 294–98 cybernetic warfare, 306–7; See also cyberwar cyberpunk, 209–12, 246, 297, 298 cybersecurity, global market for, x cybersex, 235–37 cyberspace Austin conference (1990), 231–35 John Perry Barlow and, 224–27 Communications Decency Act, 244–45 cybernetic myths, 345–47 Cyberthon, 240–43 cyberwar, 304–5 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 244–45 Habitat game, 228–30 and hackers, 237–40 and military research, 196–206 Operation Sundevil, 238–40 origins of term, 209–10, 219–20 parallels to 19th Century West, 240, 260 in science fiction, 206–8 teledildonics, 235–37 virtual reality, 212–19 virtual space, 195–96 cyberterrorism, 335 Cyberthon, 240–43 cyberwar, 301 Eligible Receiver exercise, 311–14, 322 Moonlight Maze, 316–39 Solar Sunrise, 314–15 “Cyberwar Is Coming” (Arquilla and Ronfelt), 303–5 Cyborg (Halacy), 140–41 Cyborg Handbook, The, 153–54 “Cyborg Manifesto, A” (Haraway), 151–54 cyborg research, 123–27 cyborgs (cybernetic organisms), 113 aviation medicine, 122–23 cybernetic myths, 344–45 feminism and, 151–54 man-machine interaction, 143–48 military research, 128–40 Pedipulator, 132–34 postmodernism, 151–54 quadruped, 134–35 radio-controlled, 138–40 space travel, 124–25, 142–43 “Cyborgs and Space” (Clynes and Kline), 125–26 Cyphernomicon (May), 265, 268–69 cypherpunks and BlackNet, 278–81 and the Clipper Chip, 274–75 early 1990s, 261–76 late 1990s, 277–93 origins of, 247 and The Sovereign Individual, 286–87 D-2 Project, 25–26, 29, 30 Daily Herald, 55 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), 111 “Darth Vader helmet,” 199–206 Dartmouth College, 29–30 data gloves, 213–15 Davidson, James Dale, 285 Davis, Erik, 242 De Anza College (Cupertino, California), 188–89 “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, The” (Jarrell), 15 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), 181–82, 191 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (Barlow), 244–45 Defense, US Department of cryptography, 252–53 cyber attacks, 309 cyberwar, 297 cyborg research, 133–34 DARPA, 111 helmet-mounted sights, 203 Moonlight Maze, 320, 321, 323, 327, 333 SAGE, 97 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 111 Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), 309, 317–19 Defense Intelligence Agency, 323 Defense Week, 329 Degtyarev, Vitaliy, 330–31 delay, organism-environment interaction and, 58–59 Del Duca, Michael, 127 DePuy, William, 299 Design for a Brain (Ashby), 61, 169 deterrence, 75 Detweiler, Lance, 280, 281 Deutsch, John, 310 Deutsch, Karl, 52 DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, 81 Dianetics (Hubbard), 159–60 Diebold, John, 97–99, 108–10 Diffie, Whitfield, 250–51 digital cash, 257, 281, 286, 287 digital computer, 343–44 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 181–82, 191 digital pseudonyms, 281–82 digital voting, 257 direction, 17–18 DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), 309, 317–19 display fascination, 203 “Diver, the,” See V-1 flying bomb Domain Name System (DNS), 186, 190, 328 domestic surveillance, foreign surveillance vs., 273 Dorsey, Michael, 321, 326, 332 Dramashop (MIT), 83–84 drones, 140 “Drugs, Space and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs” (Clynes and Kline), 124–25 drug trade, 267 duck hunting, 12–13 Dunkirk, Battle of, 24 Dynamic Simulation Lab (Rockland State Hospital), 124 dystopia in 1990s view of cybernetics, 5–6 Neuromancer, 210–12 thinking machines and, 4 utopia vs., 6 eBay, 244 ecology, 60–61 economic espionage, 281 economic theory, 105 EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), 115 EES (Escrowed Encryption Standard), 273–74; See also Clipper chips Einstein, Albert, 45 electromagnets, 54 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 240, 264, 276 “electronic Pearl Harbor,” 307–8, 310–11, 329, 333, 339 elevation, 22 elevators, 48 Eligible Receiver (cyberwar exercise), 311–14, 322 Ellis, James, 249 e-mail, 255 e-mail attachments, 312 e-mail lists, 263–65 Emirnet, 315 emotions, myths’ appeal to, xv employment, 105–6, 109–10; See also unemployment enchantment of the machine, 351 encryption, xv; See also crypto anarchy; cryptography; cypherpunks Energy, US Department of, 316–17, 320 energy infrastructure, 313 Engelbart, Douglas, 173 Engineering Man for Space: The Cyborg Study (NASA report), 127–28 English Channel, 41 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), 114–15 entropy, 48 environment organism and, 178 system and, 57–61, 63–67 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 320, 326 equilibrium, 55 Esalen Institute, 174, 221 escapism, 298 Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES), 273–74; See also Clipper Chip espionage Moonlight Maze, 316–39 VT fuse, 28, 34 evolution cyborgs and, 140–41 and mechanical self-reproduction, 117 reproduction and, 116 of self-reproducing programs, 150 technological, 121–22 Evolving Society, The (Hilton), 106 exoskeleton cyborg, 136–37 exosuit, 137 Explorers Club, 158 eye phone, 214 F-15 Eagle, 197 F-16, 197 F-86 Sabre, 299 factoring, 250 facts, myths and, xiv Fall Joint Computer Conference, 173 FANX (Friendship Annex) III, 311–13 Farmer, Randall, 228–30, 234, 241 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and BlackNet, 281 and the Clipper Chip, 274 and German espionage, 28 and Moonlight Maze, 318, 319, 321–23, 325–27, 329–32, 334 national infrastructure protection center, 307 and Solar Sunrise, 315 and the WELL, 239, 240 Federalist Papers, 277 feedback cybernetics and, 48–49 cyborgs and, 129–30, 136–37 machines and, 92 radar-controlled artillery and, 20 feedback loops Gregory Bateson and, 176 prostheses and, 50 and Sperry control systems, 36–37 and Whole Earth Catalog, 171–72 feel (tactile sensation/feedback), 129–30, 135, 138 Feinstein, Dianne, 334 feminism, 151–54 fiber-optic cables, 289 fiction, myth and, xv; See also science fiction; specific works Field Manual (FM) 100-5, 299–301 Figallo, Cliff, 194 fighter-bombers, displays in, 197 fig wasp, 146 Final Report on Project C-43 (Koenig), 249 financial transactions, 267 Finney, Hal, 273 fire control prediction, 25–26 firing table, 22 First Amendment, 275, 276 First Austin Conference on Cyberspace (1990), 231–35 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” (von Neumann), 115 fish, as theoretical cyborg, 125 flight paths/patterns, 13, 29–36, 42 FM (Field Manual) 100-5, 299–301 follower rack, 130 force feedback, 129–30 Ford Motor Company, 38 form, mythologies and, xiv–xv Fort Belvoir (Virginia), 305 Fort Hancock, New Jersey, 20 four-day workweek, 109 Frankenstein (Shelley), 343 Franklin, Benjamin, 277 Freedom of Information Act, 269 Friedman, Avi, 290 Friedman, William, 269, 270 Friendship Annex III (FANX III), 311–13 Frost, Mark, 185 FTP transfer log files, 317–18 Führer Directive number 17, 9–10 full-body data suit, 215 Fuller, Buckminster, 167 functionalism, 62, 64 Furness, Thomas, 198, 201–6 fuse, See proximity fuse future and cybernetic myths, xv–xvi and dystopian/utopian visions, 5 and machines, 4 and myths, xiv Wiener’s view of, 70–71 Fylingsdales Moor, Yorkshire, England, early-warning site, 99 Gagarin, Yuri, 126 gap-filler radar stations, 81 Garcia, Jerry, 227 Gardner, Doris, 321 Gardner, Martin, 252–53, 262 Garfinkel, Simson, 289 Garner, Jay, 306 GCHQ, x, 248, 250, 337 General Electric, 85–86, 128–37 general theory of machines, 4 genetics, 119 geometry, as analogy for cybernetics, 69 Germany, 8–10, 28, 33–34, 39–42 Getting, Ivan, 20 Gibson, William on “collective hallucination,” 196 and cyber as term, ix–x and cyberspace, 209–12 and cyberspace as term, 219, 220 and Cyberthon, 242 and cypherpunk, 266 Neuromancer, 189 Gilmore, John, 263–65, 269–71, 277 global positioning system (GPS), 296 goal-seeking, 56, 61 God, 91–92, 149 God and Golem, Inc.

Grey, 52, 61, 161 War and Anti-war (Toffler and Toffler), 308–9 war/warfare; See also specific wars automation of, 73–82, 96 computer simulation of, 71–72 control and communication during World War II, 8–42 cybernetic myths, 346–47 cyberwar, 294–339 cyborg research, 128–40 Eligible Receiver exercise, 311–14 Moonlight Maze, 316–39 Solar Sunrise, 314–15 Watergate, 254 Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), 241 Weaver, Sigourney, 136 Weaver, Warren, 25–26, 29–36 web browsers, 244, 264 Weldon, Curt, 329 WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), 191–94, 239–40, 245, 345 Western Electric, 22 whistle-blowers, 284 white-hat hackers, 309 Whitehead, Ennis, 79–80 Whole Earth Catalog, 168–72 and cybernetic myths, 345 Terence McKenna and, 186–87 and the WELL, 190–91 Whole Earth Review crypto anarchy article, 264 and cybernetic myths, 346 and cyberspace, 220 on Cyberthon, 242 end of, 243 Jaron Lanier article, 216–17 and the WELL, 191 whole-systems thinking, 180 “wholism,” 161 Wiener, Norbert on Ashby’s homeostat, 61–62 on automated warfare, 71–72, 75, 96 Gregory Bateson and, 176 on brain–computer similarities, 114 Arthur C. Clarke and, 120, 122 Manfred Clynes and, 124 conceptual framework of cybernetics, 47–53 on cyberculture as term, 103–4 and cybernetic myth, 344 Cybernetics, xii, 3, 36, 51 Cybernetics (2nd edition), 119–20 and “cyber” prefix, 304 and dangers of cybernetics, 46 death of, 104 John Diebold and, 97 and enchantment of the machine, 351 and The Evolving Society, 106 and feedback, 48–49 first encounter with computer, 30 on future of intelligent machines, 70–71 God and Golem, Inc., 89–92 and guided missile development, 44–45 L.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

An Xiao Mina, “Hashtag Memes: Breaking the Single Story through Humour,” Al Jazeera, March 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013326132026281740.html. 3. Ian Hutchby, “Technologies, Texts and Affordances,” Sociology 35, no. 2 (2001): 441–56; and Sandra K. Evans, Katy E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak, and Jeffrey W. Treem, “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, December 2016. 4. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). 5. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 69; Medhi Shadmehr and Dan Bernhardt, “Collective Action with Uncertain Payoffs: Coordination, Public Signals, and Punishment Dilemmas,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 4 (2011): 829–51. 6.

George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” The Orwell Prize, January 1949, http://www.theorwellprize.co.uk/the-orwell-prize/orwell/essays-and-other-works/reflections-on-gandhi/. 5. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 6. Sandra K. Evans, Katy E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak, and Jeffrey W. Treem, “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, December 2016; and James J. Gibson, “Theory of Affordances,” in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition (New York: Psychology Press, 2014). 7. Raymond Williams, “The Technology and the Society,” in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 2nd ed.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” pp. 47, 69; Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” pp. 79–80; Port of Oakland, “60 Years: A Chronicle of Progress,” 1987, pp. 17–18. 12. Erie, Globalizing L.A., p. 89; Walter Hamshar, “Must U.S. Approve All Pier Leases,” Herald Tribune, April 5, 1964. 13. Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” p. 82; Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” pp. 98–104. 14. Ting-Li Cho, “A Conceptual Framework for the Physical Development of the Port of Seattle,” Port of Seattle Planning and Research Department, April 1966, p. 15; Arthur D. Little Inc., Community Renewal Programming: A San Francisco Case Study (New York, 1966), p. 34. 15. Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” pp. 65 and 85–86; Worden, Cargoes, 148; Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” pp. 112, 120; Port of Oakland, “1957 Revenue Bonds, Series P, $20,000,000,” October 17, 1978, p. 15; Erie, Globalizing L.A., p. 90; Seattle Port Commission, “Container Terminals 1970–1975: A Development Strategy,” November 1969, pp. 1, 10. 16.

“Proposal for Development of the Municipally Owned Waterfront and Piers of New York City.” February 10, 1948. _. Via—Port of New York. Port of Seattle, Marine Planning and Development Department. “Container Terminal Development Plan.” October 1991. Port of Seattle, Planning and Research Department. “A Conceptual Framework for the Physical Development of the Port of Seattle.” April 1966. Port of Singapore Authority. Annual Report and Accounts. Various years. _. A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future. Singapore: Port of Singapore Authority, 1971. Scottish Executive. “Container Transshipment and Demand for Container Terminal Capacity in Scotland.”


pages: 453 words: 132,400

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, fear of failure, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vilfredo Pareto

The elementary forms of religious life. New York: Free Press. Easterlin, R. A. 1974. Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence. In P. A. David & M. Abramovitz, eds., Nations and households in economic growth. New York: Academic Press. Eckblad, G. 1981. Scheme theory: A conceptual framework for cognitive-motivational processes. London: Academic Press. Ekman, P. 1972. Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotions. In Current theory in research on motivation, Nebraska symposium on motivation, vol. 19 (pp. 207–83). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Eliade, M. 1969.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16:107–17. Hiscock, E. C. 1968. Atlantic cruise in Wanderer III. London: Oxford University Press. Hoffman, J. E., Nelson, B., & Houck, M. R. 1983. The role of attentional resources in automatic detection. Cognitive Psychology 51:379–410. Hoffman, L. 1981. Foundations of family therapy: A conceptual framework for systems change. New York: Basic Books. Holmes, T. H., & Rahe, R. H. 1967. The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychometric Research 11:213–18. Howell, M. C. 1986. Women, production, and patriarchy in late medieval cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huizinga, J. 1939 (1970).


What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

Invoking Peirce’s understanding of scientific method and scientific growth that appeals to the concept of abduction, which puts limits on what count as “admissible hypotheses,” he argues that innate structures that are determined by our genetic endowment set limits to the questions that we can formulate. The questions we can tractably formulate are called “problems,” but given the limits within which their formulation is so much as possible, there will be things that escape our cognitive powers; to the extent that we can even think them, we will, given our current conceptual frameworks and knowledge, find ourselves unable to formulate them in a way that a tractable form of scientific inquiry of them can be pursued. These he calls “mysteries.” The title of this book, What Kind of Creatures Are We?, is directly addressed by this, since other sorts of creatures, with a different biological endowment from ours, may be able to formulate problems that remain mysteries to us.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

A Report Prepared for National Science Foundation and Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, pp 185–99. R-718-NSF/CCOM/RC. Santa Monica, CA; Washington, D.C.: The RAND Corporation; distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. http://​files.​eric.​ed.​gov/​fulltext/​ED052635.​pdf *Nelson TH (1971) The route to Halftone image synthesis. Comput Decis May. Begins p. 12 Nelson TH (1973) A conceptual framework for man-machine everything. In: Proceedings of the June 4–8, 1973, National Computer Conference and Exposition, m21–26. AFIPS ‘73. ACM, New York. doi:10.​1145/​1499586.​1499776 *Nelson TH (1973) As we will think. In: Online 72: conference proceedings … International conference on online interactive computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, 4–7 September 1972, pp 439–54.


pages: 486 words: 148,485

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

These are invaluable directives, prerequisite to doing science—or, for that matter, to doing much of anything. As Alan Greenspan pointed out, during a moment in his congressional testimony when he seemed to be coming under fire for merely possessing a political ideology, “An ideology is a conceptual framework, the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology.” Greenspan was right. To exist, to deal with reality, we need a conceptual framework: theories that tell us which questions to ask and which ones not to, where to look and where not to bother. When that framework serves us well—when, say, it spares us the effort of asking what other kinds of long things a giraffe might possess, or taking seriously the proposition that behind a certain shaded rectangle we might encounter a certain naked movie star—we call it brilliant, and call it inductive reasoning.


On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume by Noam Chomsky, Mitsou Ronat

conceptual framework, finite state, language acquisition, machine translation, Paul Samuelson, tacit knowledge, theory of mind

Thus we have a concept of surface structure defined in terms of rules that generate an infinite set of objects, standing in opposition to deep structure, and considerably more abstract than before, in that properties of deep structure are captured through trace theory. On the other hand, suppose one were to discover that the structuralist concept of phoneme plays a very important role, previously unsuspected. Suppose that the arguments that have been advanced against the existence of a phonemic level could be surmounted within another conceptual framework. That would not be a return to an old idea, but an advance to a new idea, giving a new significance to an old concept. That would be progress. When theories and the concepts that appear in them are personalized, one looks to see “who” is wrong; but that is not the correct way of thinking.

Given a partially structured system that provides an evaluation of outcomes, choices that are random except for maximizing “value” may have the appearance of free, purposeful, and intelligent behavior—but one must remain skeptical about this approach, though it is the only one that seems to fall within any conceptual framework intelligible to us. Within cognitive capacity, the theory of mind has a distinctly rationalist cast. Learning is primarily a matter of filling in detail within a structure that is innate. We depart from the tradition in several respects, specifically, in taking the “a priori system” to be biologically determined. 6 Outside the bounds of cognitive capacity, an empiricist theory of learning applies, by unfortunate necessity.


pages: 863 words: 159,091

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, illegal immigration, information security, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two and twenty, W. E. B. Du Bois, yellow journalism, Zeno's paradox

Source claims that X causes Y, but maybe it doesn't. 2. Source claims that X causes Y, but maybe they are both caused by Z. 3. Source claims that X is sufficient to cause Y, but maybe it's not. 4. Source claims that X causes only Y, but maybe it also causes Z. CONTRADICTIONS OF PERSPECTIVE. Most contradictions don't change a conceptual framework, but when you can contradict a standard view of things, you urge others to think in a new way. Smith assumes that advertising is a purely economic function, but it also serves as a laboratory for new art forms. 1. Source discusses X in the context of or from the point of view of Y, but maybe a new context or point of view reveals a new truth (the new or old context can be social, political, philosophical, historical, economic, ethical, gender specific, etc.). 2.

We must also investigate the relevance of age, gender, education, and intelligence. For example, . . . 10.3 Write Your Title Last Your title is the first thing your readers read; it should be the last thing you write. It should both announce the topic of your report and communicate its conceptual framework, so build it out of the key terms that you earlier circled and underlined (review 9.2). Compare these three titles: Risk Thinking about Risk Irrational but Systematic Risk Assessment: The Role of Visual Imagination in Calculating Relative Risk The first title is accurate but too general to give us much guidance about what is to come.


pages: 608 words: 150,324

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

Seven months later, in October 1946, the New York Academy of Sciences held a special meeting on ‘Teleological mechanisms’ at which Wiener spoke, outlining the ideas in the Yellow Peril that had been withheld from public view the year before.25 Wiener explained that underlying all examples of negative feedback control there was a single unifying idea, which he called the message – all control systems involved communication, and could be understood using the same conceptual framework. Inspired by Schrödinger’s What is Life?, Wiener made a link between information and entropy, going even further than Szilárd’s discussion of Maxwell’s Demon, in that he defined entropy as ‘the negative of the amount of information contained in the message’. This was ‘not surprising’, Wiener went on, because ‘Information measures order and entropy measures disorder.

As became clear after the failed attempts to apply the strict mathematical view of information to genetic data, our way of describing information in genetics is primarily metaphorical. Although experimentation is generally the most powerful way of obtaining evidence that can test a hypothesis, to interpret this evidence we need theories and conceptual frameworks, which in turn are made up of words, metaphors and analogies. Understanding the power and limits of such metaphors will help us prepare for the breakthroughs of tomorrow, when we will reinterpret what we know and discover what we have yet to imagine. New technological and scientific developments will provide us with new metaphors, new ways of understanding how life works, and new approaches to manipulating molecules.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

., p. 132 and general discussion. 11 Joel Mokyr (2002) The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton University Press; Joel Mokyr, ‘Progress and Inertia in Technological Change’, in John James and Mark Thomas (eds) (1994) Capitalism in Context: Essays in Honor of R. M. Hartwell, University of Chicago Press, pp. 230–54. 12 See Joel Mokyr (2004) The Gifts of Athena: The Historical Orgins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton University Press. 13 Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast (2009) Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, Cambridge University Press. 14 James C. Scott (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press. See also James C. Scott (2008) ‘Everyday Forms of Resistance’, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 49, at http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/cjas/article/viewFile/1765/1785. 15 Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti (2006) ‘Patience Capital, Occupational Choice, and the Spirit of Capitalism’, UCLA Department of Economics Working Paper No. 848. 16 William Baumol (1990) ‘Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive’.

Robinson (2000) ‘Political Losers as a Barrier to Economic Development’, American Economic Review 90 (2): 126–30. See also Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2006) ‘Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective’, American Political Science Review 100 (1): 115–31. 6 Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast (2006) ‘A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History’, NBER Working Paper No. 12795, p. 32. 7 Cited in Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer (2003) ‘The Rise of the Regulatory State’, NBER Working Paper No. W8650. 8 David Warsh (2006) Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, W.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

It’s about being resourceful, opportunity-driven, and frugal—learning to do a lot with a little, to create your own destiny. A flexible mind-set allows you to move seamlessly from one world to another, borrowing from one and bringing new perspective to the next. An effective hustler does this seamlessly, transposing conceptual frameworks, making useful and valuable connections, and bringing skills and competencies from one area to another. When you are hustling, there is no master plan; you are improvising and being responsive to what life throws your way. The hustle is about spotting an idea and just going for it. You don’t need massive resources, a perfect team, or the right environment.


On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, ghettoisation, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Stephen Hawking

This mode of operation allows Israel to continue to present itself as a “democratic state” and enjoy the many benefits attached to this status in the international arena. Hence “the peace process” and talk about “two states for two peoples” are not in any contradiction with the occupation, not even the “temporary occupation” of 1967. They are a political and conceptual framework designed to enable and perpetuate the status quo for as long as possible. Israel would find it hard to market this façade to the world if it were not assisted by many others, some serving their self-interests and others out of misled good intentions. The leadership of the Palestinian national movement also plays a key role in providing credibility for the fake peace process.


pages: 211 words: 58,677

Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout

cognitive load, conceptual framework, fault tolerance, functional programming, iterative process, move fast and break things, MVC pattern, revision control, Silicon Valley

This means deciding which aspects of the system are most important, and being able to ignore the low-level details and think about the system only in terms of its most fundamental characteristics. This is the essence of abstraction (finding a simple way to think about a complex entity), and it’s also what you must do when writing higher-level comments. A good higher-level comment expresses one or a few simple ideas that provide a conceptual framework, such as “append to an existing RPC.” Given the framework, it becomes easy to see how specific code statements relate to the overall goal. Here is another code sample, which has a good higher-level comment: if (numProcessedPKHashes < readRpc[i].numHashes) { // Some of the key hashes couldn't be looked up in // this request (either because they aren't stored // on the server, the server crashed, or there // wasn't enough space in the response message). // Mark the unprocessed hashes so they will get // reassigned to new RPCs.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

(ed). The Strengths Perspective in social work practice. 3rd edition. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Segal, U. (2002). A framework for immigration: Asians in the United States. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Serageldin, I. (1999). Foreword. In Feldman, T.R. & Assaf, S. Social capital: Conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence. Social Capital Initiative, working paper #5. Washington, DC: World Bank. Tinker, H. (1995). The British colonies of settlement. In Cohen, R. (ed). The Cambridge survey of world migration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 14–20. Tsay, C-l. & Hayase, Y. (eds). (2001).

Annual Report on Statistics on Migration, Asylum, and Return: Ireland 2002. Dublin, Economic and Social Research Institute. Interdepartmental Committee on Non-Irish Nationals (1987). Interim Report on Applications for Refugee Status 25–11–1993. Dublin, Government Publications. Marx, E. (1990). ‘‘The Social World of Refugees: A Conceptual Framework.’’ Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3. National Economic and Social Council of Ireland (2006). Managing Migration in Ireland: A Social and Economic Analysis; A Report by the International Organisation for Migration for the National Economic and Social Council of Ireland. Report Number 116, Dublin, NESC.

Transmigrants and nation states: Something old and something new in the U.S. immigrant experience. In: Hirschman, C., Kasinitz, P., & DeWind, J., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (ch. 5). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Serageldin, I. (1999). Foreword. In: Feldman, T. R., & Assaf, S. (eds.) Social Capital: Conceptual Frameworks and Empirical Evidence (working paper #5). Social Capital Initiative, The World Bank. Segal, E. A., & Brzuzy, S. (1998). Social welfare policy, programs, and practice. Itasca, IL: Peacock. Segal, U. A. (2002). A framework for immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.


pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

When the air loses too many oxygen molecules to support the oxidation process, the flame goes out. Priestley, alas, was on the wrong end of the phlogiston paradigm, and so when he happened upon an air in which flames burned more brightly than common air, he interpreted his findings using the conceptual framework of the existing paradigm. Breathable air that also exacerbated combustion was, logically, air that had been entirely emptied of phlogiston. (Or, put another way, it was air primed to be filled with phlogiston.) Within the rules of that conceptual system, Priestley’s dephlogisticated air was a fitting, if ungainly, appellation.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

For example, Steve Bannon, who helped to run Breitbart News and then joined the Trump administration, developed a close knowledge of gamer culture through his involvement in the World of Warcraft gold-mining company Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE).18 The company employed Chinese workers to grind through repetitive tasks to earn ingame money and items, which would then be sold to wealthier players, mainly in the US. As Joshua Green has argued, Bannon’s time at IGE introduced him to a hidden world, burrowed deep into his psyche, and provided a kind of conceptual framework that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politicians and helped give rise to Donald Trump.19 While there has been a rise of reactionary politics on the internet more broadly, commentators like Matt Lees have noted that “the similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the ‘alt-right,’ are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence.”20 There are clear and concrete links between the alt-right and Gamergate; they are coming together, not just out of a shared interest, but because they are being marshaled into a right-wing political force.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

They were not just prying open the black box; they were making their own. Signals were being transmitted, encoded, stored, and retrieved. Internal models of the external world were created and updated. Psychologists took note. From information theory and cybernetics, they received a set of useful metaphors and even a productive conceptual framework. Shannon’s rat could be seen not only as a very crude model of the brain but also as a theory of behavior. Suddenly psychologists were free to talk about plans, algorithms, syntactic rules. They could investigate not just how living creatures react to the outside world but how they represent it to themselves.

Elias, whose father had worked for Edison as an engineer, was himself a serious specialist—a major contributor to coding theory. He mistrusted the softer, easier, platitudinous work flooding across disciplinary boundaries. The typical paper, he said, “discusses the surprisingly close relationship between the vocabulary and conceptual framework of information theory and that of psychology (or genetics, or linguistics, or psychiatry, or business organization).… The concepts of structure, pattern, entropy, noise, transmitter, receiver, and code are (when properly interpreted) central to both.” He declared this to be larceny. “Having placed the discipline of psychology for the first time on a sound scientific basis, the author modestly leaves the filling in of the outline to the psychologists.”


pages: 549 words: 160,930

The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness by Peter Ralston

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, different worldview, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson

These are the roots of our characteristic approach to personal survival. 22:30 Thoughts, emotions, and behavior are easy to recognize in our experience. What’s far more difficult to see is the source of these—the buried conceptual framework that spurs and dictates our thinking, emotions, and actions. Self-survival has no reason to go there, and every reason to stay away, but with some concentration and sensitivity, the conceptual framework that drives us becomes increasingly recognizable. 22:31 Such consciousness, however, tends to undermine our exclusive and solid sense of self, because it reveals the foundations of this self-sense, and this interferes with blindly fulfilling the needs that stem from this foundation.


pages: 218 words: 65,422

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

So why not set a course for one of the biggest and most famous—and by far the most frequently visited—museums in the world? We’re in need of some culture. We’ll go to the Louvre. We may even catch a glimpse of the broken statue that moved Rilke to such lyrical ecstasies. But right away, things start getting confused. Not the travel arrangements or the scheduling of the visits, but the conceptual framework that underwrites the journey. The whole idea of “culture,” that is. In Keywords, his indispensable glossary of modern thought, the literary scholar Raymond Williams observes that “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” In some of its early senses, it is nearly synonymous with education, referring to the growth and tending of young minds.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

One fundamental challenge for the development of such a theory of value is the inadequacy of monetary metrics as proxies for value production, since part of what peer producers create, exchange, and consume does not pass through monetary exchanges. Thus, as part of our project, we are developing our own conceptual framework that identifies six dimensions to assess and measure value: 1. Community building 2. Social use-value of the resource created 3. Reputation 4. Achievement of the stated mission 5. Monetary value 6. Ecological value and derivative processes GOVERNANCE AND VALUE Does the type of platform provision—that is, platform cooperativism versus platform capitalism—affect the collaborative community’s capacity to generate value?


pages: 224 words: 69,494

Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future by John Whitelegg

active transport: walking or cycling, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, carbon tax, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, Donald Shoup, energy transition, eurozone crisis, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), megacity, meta-analysis, negative emissions, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-industrial society, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, Right to Buy, smart cities, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban sprawl

They can deal with shocks that might disrupt transport systems (strikes, civil unrest, and severe weather) and also with fuel price hikes that might result from peak oil and global shortages of oil as India, China and Brazil accelerate their “progress” towards Californian or Swedish levels of car ownership and use. It will be a mistake of some considerable historical significance not to build resilient cities. Holger and Dalkmann (2007) have provided a coherent structure that locates e-mobility in the sustainable transport conceptual framework. They call this the “Avoid, Shift, Improve” strategy or for short ASI. A= Avoid so that through land use planning and accessibility planning destinations are co-located with residential areas and distances are kept short. This leads to a lower level of car use and a higher level of use of non-motorised transport.


pages: 236 words: 67,953

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Two basic elements here reinforce each other: the way in which economists think in terms of models (some would say: their model Platonism); and the historical experience of the first modernity, in which the workers' fears that they would be replaced by machines proved for long to be unfounded. The conceptual framework of classical economics excludes in principle the notion that the work society could run out of paid jobs. In the model of homo oeconomicus, only certain prevailing conditions – too high a price for labour, fossilized bureaucratic structures, state intervention – can hinder the creation of new jobs.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

He deplored the rise of big government, even though his plan would distribute cash assistance to some 13 million more Americans (90% of them working poor). “Nixon was proposing a new kind of social provision to the American public,” writes the historian Brian Steensland, “but he did not offer them a new conceptual framework through which to understand it.”4 Indeed, Nixon steeped his progressive ideas in conservative rhetoric. What, we may well ask, was the president doing? There is a brief anecdote that explains it. On August 7 of that same year, Nixon told Moynihan that he’d been reading biographies of the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and the statesman Lord Randolph Churchill (the father of Winston).


pages: 221 words: 67,240

The Other Israel: voices of refusal and dissent by Tom Śegev, Roane Carey, Jonathan Shainin

bread and circuses, conceptual framework, facts on the ground, Internet Archive, open borders, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The collapse of the political course imposed by Barak under the auspices of Clinton, the widespread feeling that Israel had put the Palestinians to the test and they had failed it—thus, in effect, betraying the entire peace camp, the violent Palestinian eruption—all these created a situation in which most Israeli Jews were forced to expose the fundamental conceptual framework within which they perceive political reality. This contradictory framework portrays the relationship between the two peoples as a supposedly symmetrical relationship between two national movements of equal standing, at the same time accepting the occupation as a paradigm of asymmetrical power relations and ignoring its continuous history.


pages: 212 words: 65,900

Symmetry and the Monster by Ronan, Mark

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, G4S, Henri Poincaré, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, V2 rocket

This is equivalent to proving that if a group of symmetries has odd size, then it can’t be a symmetry atom, and this was the approach Feit and Thompson took. Fortunately for them, Michio Suzuki – he of the Suzuki family of symmetry atoms – had recently dealt with a special case of this problem, and his methods gave them a conceptual framework to work in. Thompson recalls that ‘By 1959 we were going at it hammer and tongs’, and in collaboration with Marshall Hall at the California Institute of Technology, they extended Suzuki’s result to a less specialized case. In the meantime, Thompson acquired his PhD, and a senior mathematician at the University of Chicago, named Adrian Albert, who had excellent connections to the intelligence establishment, recommended he go to the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Working for a hedge fund, he concedes, was never part of his career plan. But the appeal of working in a smaller environment in an entirely new field for him—applying artificial intelligence techniques to modeling the economy—won him over. Bridgewater strives to combine theory with data in a conceptual framework that the investment firm’s founder, Ray Dalio, terms the “economic machine.” That approach to investment, says Ferrucci, is in sync with his current thinking in what he calls “my 30-year journey in artificial intelligence.” Decades ago, the main focus of artificial intelligence research was to develop knowledge rules and relationships to make so-called expert systems.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

Mukuno, ‘Why Do Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Branson Lecture Us About Carbon Consumption While Plotting Trips to Space?’ Wall Street Journal, 7 January 2014, at online.wsj.com. 32. L. Dam, ‘Elvin Wyly Speaks at Occupy Vancouver’, UBC Geographer 7: 3 (November 2011), at geog.ubc.ca. 33. J. V. Beaverstock and J. R. Faulconbridge, ‘Wealth Segmentation and the Mobilities of the Super-Rich: A Conceptual Framework’, GaWC Research Bulletin 422 (2013), at lboro.ac.uk. 34. E. Saez, ‘The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2012 Preliminary Estimates)’, University of California, Berkeley, press release, 3 September 2013, at elsa.berkeley.edu. 35. E. N. Wolff, ‘The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class’, New York University Working Paper, 26 August 2012, at confex.com. 36.


pages: 229 words: 67,599

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

And second, because of the arbitrarily long length of the tape, a Turing machine has the ability to “remember” what has happened in the arbitrarily distant past. In developing this view of a computing machine, Turing was not suggesting it as a practical design for an actual machine. Rather, as a mathematician he used his machines as a conceptual framework in which to study the limits on just what mechanistic devices can actually compute. Indeed, the title of his 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’’—that final tongue-twister translates as “the decision problem’’—clearly shows Turing’s intent. His great accomplishment was to show that not all the numbers we can imagine are in fact actually computable.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

Both in China and around the world, businesses will inevitably have to become more “Chinese” in their manner of operating. Partly this will call for integrating their China operations into their global operations—indeed, making them a core part of their global operations—and partly this will require a reworking of their organizational and conceptual frameworks to integrate management practices now taking shape in China. Finally, in this book’s conclusion, I look at the wider implications of Chinese entrepreneurship, beyond business, in the realms of political and social disruption. Ever since Deng Xiaoping launched his country’s economic-reform program in the late 1970s, and even more so after he relaunched them in 1992, the entire country has been moving forward on a tide of innovation and risk taking.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

He had hoped things would change in the early 1960s when he began to publish; he told Bush that he was preparing "more than just a report to a government agency. To me it is the public debut of a dream, and the overdue birth attests to my emotional involvement." In 1963, thirteen years after first adopting Vannevar Bush's vision as his launching pad for the modernization of man, Engelbart published a paper called ''A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect." Like Bush before him, Engelbart complained that the accumulated knowledge of humanity had exceeded our ability to handle it. Only by "augmenting man's intellect" could we remedy this situation-resulting in better comprehension of problems, quicker solutions to those problems, and the conquest of previously insoluble problems.


Difficult Mothers: Understanding and Overcoming Their Power by Terri Apter

conceptual framework, imposter syndrome, theory of mind

The audience I have in mind consists of adults of all ages who are trying to make sense of their experiences. Some may puzzle over experiences in the distant past. Some may be grappling with continuing difficulties. Some readers will be parents who are trying to understand the bewildering distress of their own children. Some readers will be therapists and clinicians trying to improve the conceptual framework for troubled attachments. Some readers may be on the cusp of adulthood, seeking a vocabulary to shape their still-raw emotions. Many who search for understanding may function at a high level in many aspects of their lives, yet feel constrained and confused by the lingering effects of this difficult relationship.


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Such tacit recognition depends upon first being able to explicitly construct the significance of patterns and relationships in the data. Such meanings cannot be achieved without a level of intellective skill development that allows the worker to solve the problem of reference, engage in reasoning that is both inductive and deductive, and apply a conceptual framework to the information at hand. Meaning must be constructed explicitly in order to become implicit later. Intellective skill is necessary for the creation of meaning, and real mas- tery begins to emerge when such meanings are consolidated in tacit Mastering The Electronic Text 193 knowledge.

Rosenthal, "Flexible Manufactur- Notes 451 ing Systems Require Flexible People" (Manufacturing Roundtable, Research Re- port Series, Boston University School of Management, Boston, 1985). 4. Ramchandran J aikumar and Roger E. Bohn, "The Development of Intelli- gent Systems for Industrial Use: A Conceptual Framework" and "The Develop- ment of Intelligent Systems for Industrial Use: An E!Tlpirical Investigation" (Har- vard Business School Working Papers 9-786-024 and 9-786-025, Boston University Graduate School of Business Administration, May 1986); see also the discussion in Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984). 5.


pages: 819 words: 181,185

Derivatives Markets by David Goldenberg

Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, fudge factor, implied volatility, incomplete markets, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, law of one price, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, random walk, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, time value of money, transaction costs, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

On the theory side, there is a much-needed and detailed discussion of what risk-neutral valuation really means in the context of the dynamics of the hedge portfolio. The text is a balanced, logical presentation of the major derivatives classes including forward and futures contracts in Part 1, swaps in Part 2, and options in Part 3. The material is unified by providing a modern conceptual framework and exploiting the no-arbitrage relationships between the different derivatives classes. Some of the elements explained in detail in the text are: • Hedging, Basis Risk, Spreading, and Spread Basis Risk. • Financial Futures Contracts, their Underlying Instruments, Hedging and Speculating

On the theory side, a detailed discussion of what risk-neutral valuation really means in the context of the dynamics of the hedge portfolio is provided for the simplest option pricing model. A balanced, logical presentation of the major derivatives classes is given. This includes: Forward and futures contracts in Part 1; Swaps in Part 2; and Options in Part 3. The material is unified by providing a modern conceptual framework and exploiting the no-arbitrage relationships between the different derivatives classes. The goals of the text are to guide the reader through the derivatives markets; to develop the reader’s skill sets needed in order to incorporate and manage derivatives in a corporate or risk management setting; and to provide a solid foundation for further study.


Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

But even if I see someone only once, I reserve at least half the time to address each of the foregoing misconceptions and initial problems of group therapy. Misconceptions should be explored in detail and each one corrected by an accurate and complete discussion. I share with the client my predictions about the early problems in therapy and present a conceptual framework and clear guidelines for effective group behavior. Each client’s preparation must be individualized according to the presenting complaints, questions and concerns raised in the interview, and level of sophistication regarding the therapy process. Two situations require particular attention from the therapist: the therapy neophyte and the client who presents with cross-cultural issues.

The pregroup preparation sessions provide the therapist the opportunity to explore the impact of the client’s culture on his or her attitudes, beliefs, and identity and to demonstrate the therapist’s genuine willingness to enter the client’s world.65 I have found a preparatory interview with the following objectives to be of considerable value:1. Enlist clients as informed allies. Give them a conceptual framework of the interpersonal basis of pathology and how therapy works. 2. Describe how the therapy group addresses and corrects interpersonal problems. 3. Offer guidelines about how best to participate in the group, how to maximize the usefulness of group therapy. 4. Anticipate the frustrations and disappointments of group therapy, especially of the early meetings. 5.

Moreno, who first used the term group therapy, employed group methods before 1920 but has been primarily identified with psychodrama, which he introduced into America in 1925.13 These tentative beginnings in the use of group therapy were vastly accelerated by the Second World War, when the enormous numbers of military psychiatric patients and the scarcity of trained psychotherapists made individual therapy impractical and catalyzed the search for more economic modes of treatment. During the 1950s, the main thrust of group therapy was directed toward using groups in different clinical settings and with different types of clinical problems. Theoreticians—Freudian, Sullivanian, Horneyan, Rogerian—explored the application of their conceptual framework to group therapy theory and practice. The T-group and the therapy group thus arose from different disciplines; and for many years, the two disciplines, each generating its own body of theory and technique, continued as two parallel streams of knowledge, even though a few leaders straddled both fields and, in different settings, led both T-groups and therapy groups.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“It would even be useful in elementary and middle schools, as so many do not have qualified instructors in this area.” In August, Siegel was back at the Media Lab, ready to push things forward. He picked his way around the experimental bicycles, soldering kits, and, of course, LEGO blocks that filled the Lifelong Kindergarten lab. Sitting in Resnick’s office, the two laid the conceptual framework for a project far more ambitious than developing a new programming language: transforming the ways people think about learning and education. Resnick and Siegel both agreed that learning to code wasn’t just about training the computer engineers of the future. It was a terrifically efficient method to learn how to learn.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Nisbett, “Situational Salience and Cultural Differences in the Correspondence Bias and Actor-Observer Bias,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24, no. 9 (September 1998), 949–960, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167298249003; Minas N. Kastanakis and Benjamin G. Voyer, “The Effect of Culture on Perception and Cognition: A Conceptual Framework,” Journal of Business Research 67, no. 4 (April 2014), 425–433, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/50048/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY _Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Voyer,%20B _Effect%20culture%20perception_Voyer_Effect%20culture%20 perception_2014.pdf. limits of our ability to make optimal decisions: Herbert A.


Longevity: To the Limits and Beyond (Research and Perspectives in Longevity) by Jean-Marie Robine, James W. Vaupel, Bernard Jeune, Michel Allard

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, computer age, conceptual framework, confounding variable, demographic transition, Drosophila, epigenetics, life extension, longitudinal study, phenotype, stem cell, stochastic process

According to the explications of Rowe and Kahn, successful aging is found where extrinsic factors either do not contribute to the negative effects of aging or 116 L. W. Poon et al. slow down the effects of aging. Two logical questions are whether and how successful aging contributes to longevity in general on the one hand, and to individual differences in longevity on the other hand. Given this conceptual framework, the search for sensitive predictors of successful aging is a complex task. We have only begun to untangle the web of complexity. At least six levels of complexity need to be addressed in the study of successful aging. One, the outcome criteria of successful aging need to be defined, and they may be different for different purposes.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

(According to market design guru Al Roth, one theory holds that the term “fraternity/sorority rush,” which today describes the process by which sororities and fraternities recruit new members, comes from the frenzied competition among sororities to lock in new members.4) It’s what prompted medical residency programs to develop a centralized clearinghouse in the 1940s to fend off students receiving exploding offers before they were done with their intro to anatomy course. These allocation problems all now have centralized clearinghouses, many designed with the basic deferred acceptance algorithm as their foundations. But that’s really all that Gale and Shapley provided: a conceptual framework that market designers have, for several decades now, been applying, evaluating, and refining. They’ve learned from its successes and, unfortunately, learned even more from its inevitable failures: modeling real-life exchanges is an imprecise, iterative process in which many of us find ourselves as experimental subjects.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

The quintessential phase transition in science, and paradigm shift, is that of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Everything in biology prior to evolution was sophisticated stamp collecting, ordering the living world around us and exploring its wonders. With the advent of evolution, biologists finally had a conceptual framework to make sense of the facts surrounding them. But the acceptance of evolution wasn’t immediate. While On the Origin of Species was a bestselling book, it did not find universal agreement within the Victorian populace. The same was true of the scientists themselves. David Hull, a philosopher of science, examined many of Darwin’s well-known contemporaries to see who eventually accepted the theory of natural selection, and how long it took them to do so.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

Another pioneer in the 1960s who was inspired by Bush was Douglas En glebart, who founded a research lab with the goal of “augmenting human intellect.” His lab developed a hypermedia groupware system called Augment (originally called NLS). Augment supported bookmarks, hyperlinks, recording of e-mail, a journal, and more. Engelbart, Douglas C. “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 Under Contract AF 49(638)- 1024,” SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, October 1962. ———. “Authorship Provisions in AUGMENT.” COMPCON ’84 Digest: Proceedings of the COMPCON Conference, San Francisco, California, February 27-March 1, 1984, 465-72.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

Graphs, statistical tables, pie charts—the latter illuminated with colored segments of green, yellow, and red—all can analyze from every conceivable angle the performance of an employee or group of employees over a period of hours, days, weeks, or years, with up-to-the-minute analysis. Thomas Davenport has provided a conceptual framework that well illustrates the scale and importance of present-day reengineering.29 The subject matter of reengineeiing remains the business process, and Davenport draws a distinction between what he calls operational and managerial processes. Operational processes involve the "day to day carrying out of the organization's basic business purposes" and are the kind of routine activities that feature prominently in Hammer and Champy's reengineering case studies—order fulfillment, customer services, sales, and marketing.


pages: 209 words: 13,138

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading by Joel Hasbrouck

Alvin Roth, barriers to entry, business cycle, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, discrete time, disintermediation, distributed generation, experimental economics, financial intermediation, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, payment for order flow, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, selection bias, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, two-sided market, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

The zero expected profit condition underlying the Roll and asymmetric information models is conditional on a trade, in which event the dealer simply recovers his costs. The exceptions are the inventory control models where the dealer generally prefers to trade in one direction or the other. In this section we investigate a customer’s order choice when there is a preference for trade. The conceptual framework is based on Cohen, Maier, Schwartz, and Whitcomb (1981) (CMSW). Related papers include Angel (1994) and Harris (1998). We can set up a simple order choice situation by building on the model considered in section 11.2. In one version of that model, a dealer already at his portfolio optimum set his bid to include compensation for being pulled away from that optimum.


pages: 255 words: 76,834

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

At that point in our careers, we simply didn’t know how to bootstrap a big project and set it on a course for success. Richard did. His demo was the lynchpin. He showed us that the Konqueror web browser could work on the Mac. He cut corners to highlight the potential of this code. Of course, Richard’s brilliant software shim made his breakthrough possible, but consider the conceptual framework he’d built around his plan and how he’d cornered all the difficulties of making a browser demo so that one piece of custom programming, his shim, was all that was left to close the circle. The cumulative effect created the illusion of a real browser even when only showing an incomplete portion of one.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

Digital-divide narratives have focused on three key aspects of disempowerment that have led to technological deficits between Whites and Blacks: access to computers and software, development of skills and training in computer technologies, and Internet connectivity—most recently characterized by access to broadband.18 However true the disparities between Whites and non-Whites or men and women in the traditional articulations of the digital divide, often missing from this discourse is the framework of power relations that precipitate such unequal access to social, economic, and educational resources.19 Thus, the context for discussing the digital divide in the U.S. is too narrow a framework that focuses on the skills and capabilities of people of color and women, rather than questioning the historical and cultural development of science and technology and representations prioritized through digital technologies, as well as the uneven and exploitive global distribution of resources and labor in the information and communication ecosystem. Certainly, the digital divide was an important conceptual framework to deeper engagement for poor people and people of color, but it also created new sites of profit for multinational corporations.20 Closing the digital divide through ubiquitous access, training, and the provisioning of hardware and software does address the core criticisms of the digital technology have and have-not culture in the U.S.; but much like the provisioning of other technological goods such as the telephone, it has not altered the landscape of power relations by race and gender.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

"The future of warfare," the journal of the Army War College declared, "lies in the streets, sewers, highrise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world.... Our recent military history is punctuated with city names — Tuzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles [!], Beirut, Panama City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo — but these encounters have been but a prologue, with the real drama still to come."8 To help develop a larger conceptual framework for MOUT, military planners turned in the 1990s to Dr. Strangelove's old alma mater, the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by the Air Force in 1948, was notorious for wargaming nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for helping to strategize the Vietnam War in the 1960s.


The "Talmud" by Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott.

conceptual framework, trade route

Hypothesized dates for the Stam range from the fourth to the seventh centuries.42 Where Section One is the product of the Stam, Sections Two and Three are comprised largely of material attributed to Rava and Abaye, two prominent fourthgeneration amoraim who were active around the first half of the fourth century. Even in these sections, though, there are gaps between the original fourth-generation material and editorial modifications of this material. The most basic example of the influence of the editor is terminological. Both Rava and Abaye appear to utilize the conceptual framework of the arrow/property liability debate when they use terminology that references that debate. But sensitivity to syntax demonstrates that these terminological references have been added to the inherited material by editors. One cannot know if such additions were conscious. At the same time, there can be little doubt that the reuse of identical terminology lends the entire Talmudic passage a coherence it would otherwise lack.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, put it this way: … we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spill-overs from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.16 After the peak of the crisis, when such denial was no longer possible, Alan Greenspan explained that his free-market view of reality had been flawed: Well, remember what an ideology is, it is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to – to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.


pages: 244 words: 73,966

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

Experience is what there is before we start theorizing about the world and ourselves. It takes precedence over everything else. It is the departing point and necessary substrate of all theories. All knowledge resides in consciousness, the sole canvas of reality anyone can ever know for sure. Everything else – all abstractions, all conceptual frameworks – is provisional. We must never forget this, lest we totally lose our connection to reality. There are other ways in which consciousness is an anomaly under materialism in general, not only its rather absurd eliminative formulation. For instance, today’s scientific worldview requires that every property of a living system be explainable, at least in principle, by Darwinian evolution.


pages: 439 words: 79,447

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional by Stuart Warner, Si Hussain

AOL-Time Warner, book value, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, forward guidance, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, market bubble, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, supply-chain management, time value of money

Since 2002, the IASB and FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) in the US have been working together towards ‘convergence’ of IFRS and US GAAP standards although this process has notably stalled somewhat since 2012. Optional detail IFRS versus US GAAP IFRS and US GAAP differ in their underlying conceptual frameworks: IFRS is principles-based whereas US GAAP is rules-based. In a principles-based framework, different treatments of similar transactions may be permitted where they are considered appropriate. A principles-based approach therefore requires disclosures to enable a reader to understand the impact of applying an alternative to the standard treatment proposed.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Song dynasty to posterity was the systematic approach they developed to understand the cosmos. Instead of seeking the source of meaning in transcendence, like their Indian and European contemporaries, Song thinkers found intrinsic value and meaning from the world around them. The conceptual framework developed by the philosophers of the Song dynasty remains relevant to this day and demonstrates remarkable correspondence with modern findings in systems and complexity science.4 Unlike other iconic Chinese innovations such as the compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder, the achievements of the Song philosophers have remained relatively unacknowledged.

Instead of seeing each individual as selfish and competitive, seeking only personal advantage, it offers a more nuanced understanding of humanity as also cooperative and altruistic, embedded within larger social and natural networks.41 Scientists at the forefront of systems thinking recognize the far-reaching ramifications of their findings. “We are seeking a new conceptual framework that does not yet exist,” writes researcher Stuart Kauffman. However, while this view of nature is relatively new in science, we have seen in this book how earlier cultures have already explored many of the philosophical implications of a connected cosmos. The wisdom of indigenous worldviews shares much with systems thinking, and the Neo-Confucian investigation of the li—the organizing principles of the universe—offers deep insights to modernity, with its understanding of the Tao as the metapattern of all nature's principles, discoverable in one's own nature as well as in the natural world.42 Remarkably, though, many people today remain unaware of this alternative way of understanding nature.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

The mind is not a mere associator of sensory impressions (as in the empiricism of his day and the connectionism of ours), nor does it come equipped with actual knowledge about the contents of the world (as in some versions of the rationalism of his day and in the Extreme Nativism of ours). What the innate apparatus of the mind contributes is a set of abstract conceptual frameworks that organize our experience—space, time, substance, causation, number, and logic (today we might add other domains like living things, other minds, and language). But each of these is an empty form that must be filled in by actual instances provided by the senses or the imagination. As Kant put it, his treatise “admits absolutely no divinely implanted or innate representations. . . .

Metaphorical connections saturate our language, drive our science, enliven our literature, burst out (at least occasionally) in children’s speech, and remind us of things past. On the other hand, when experimentalists lead the horse to water, they can’t make it drink. One factor is simply expertise. Tea ceremonies, radiation treatments, and invading armies are obscure to most students, so they don’t have the needed conceptual framework at their fingertips. Subsequent studies have shown that expertise in a topic can make deep analogies come more easily. For example, when students who had taken a single physics course were shown a bunch of problems and asked which ones were similar, they lumped together the ones that had pictures of the same kinds of objects—the inclined planes in one group, the pulleys in another, and so on.


pages: 246 words: 81,625

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

Would we need to map out hundreds or thousands of separate circuits before anything useful could be understood? I didn't think so. History shows that the best solutions to scientific problems are simple and elegant. While the details may be forbidding and the road to a final theory may be arduous, the ultimate conceptual framework is generally simple. Without a core explanation to guide inquiry, neuroscientists don't have much to go on as they try to assemble all the details they've collected into a coherent picture. The brain is incredibly complex, a vast and daunting tangle of cells. At first glance it looks like a stadium full of cooked spaghetti.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

Bannon didn’t stick around for the revolution. By 2005, he had left Hollywood for the other side of the globe, Hong Kong, where he became involved in what was undoubtedly the strangest business of any in his kaleidoscopic career—one that introduced him to a hidden world, burrowed deep into his psyche, and provided a kind of conceptual framework that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politics and helped give rise to Donald Trump. The business centered on a video game, World of Warcraft, a so-called “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMO), whose 10 million subscribers competed against one another in the mythical realm of Azeroth, a fantasy world of elves, dwarfs, trolls, goblins, and dragons.


The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes by Mark Douglas

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, fear of failure, financial independence, prediction markets, risk tolerance, the market place

Consequently, this sets up a conflict between what your intellect says should be happening and the purely mathematical means of predicting human behavior afforded by your technical system. This is precisely why technical systems are so difficult to relate to and execute. People aren't taught to think in terms of probabilities—and we certainly don't grow up constructing a conceptual framework that correlates a prediction of mass human behavior in statistical odds by means of a mathematical formula. To be able to execute your trading systems properly, you will need to incorporate two concepts into your mental framework—thinking in terms of probabilities and correlating the numbers or the mechanics of your system to the behavior.


pages: 271 words: 83,944

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

It’s been drilled into my head ever since I was old enough to play One of These Things Just Doesn’t Belong and my father made me point out the token white guy in the Lakers team photo. Mark Landsberger, where are you when I need you? “The distinguishing feature of Stage II blackness is a heightened awareness of race. Here race is still all-consuming, but in a more positive fashion. Blackness becomes an essential component in one’s experiential and conceptual framework. Blackness is idealized, whiteness reviled. Emotions range from bitterness, anger, and self-destruction to waves of pro-Black euphoria and ideas of Black supremacy…” To avoid detection I go under the table, but the joint’s not hitting right. I can’t get any intake. From my newfound hiding place I struggle to keep the ember burning, while catching odd-angled glimpses of photographs of Foy Cheshire, Jesse Jackson, Sojourner Truth, Moms Mabley, Kim Kardashian, and my father.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Open is Google and Wi-Fi, decentralization and entrepreneurialism, the United States and Wikipedia. Closed equals Hollywood and cable television, central planning and entrenched industry, China and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture. The fetish for openness can be traced back to the foundational myths of the Internet as a wild, uncontrollable realm. In 1996 John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and cattle ranger turned techno-utopian firebrand, released an influential manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” from Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the world’s business elite.


pages: 300 words: 79,315

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

If you’re like most people, you can use a coach—someone to walk you step by step through the experience and provide some guideposts and handy tricks along the way, until your new operational style is elegantly embedded. You’ll find that in part 2. part 2 Practicing Stress-Free Productivity 4 Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools IN PART 2 we’ll move from a conceptual framework and limited application of workflow mastery to full-scale implementation and best practices. Going through this program often gives people a level of relaxed control they may never have experienced before, but it usually requires the catalyst of step-by-step procedures to get there. To that end, I’ll provide a logical sequence of things to do, to make it as easy as possible for you to get on board and glean the most value from these techniques.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

This may not require institutional support or a Google budget. The AI-risk think tanks have bright people confronting ethical, political, and philosophical questions that may not be foremost in the minds of AI engineers. The longer the think tanks are able to do that, the more likely they are to come up with conceptual frameworks, options, and solutions that would be useful when an intelligence explosion becomes imminent. Better that than for an isolated team of engineers to have to invent an ethical universe over the weekend that AI becomes all-powerful. As Yudkowsky said, “I don’t think we should ignore a problem we’ll predictably have to panic about later.”


pages: 333 words: 86,628

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

The paradigm determines not only the interpretation that a scientist gives the facts, but also what facts there are to be interpreted: The “facts” that scientists consider admissible for discussion are those that easily conform to the dominant paradigm, or that can be made to conform to it by extending the paradigm or introducing minor repairs into it. Those that cannot be made to conform are overlooked entirely or dismissed as unimportant. Even a mountain of facts, Kuhn suggests, will not change the mind of a scientist who has been trained in a given paradigm, because the conceptual framework through which he views the world is fundamentally incapable of assimilating them. How, then, do scientists come to change their minds? Kuhn argues that in many cases, they never do. The prejudices of the old guard run too deep, and it takes a new generation of scientists, whose commitments are not quite so dogmatic, to be able to consider a new theory fairly.1 Kuhn’s ideas have had an immense impact on the way the scientific enterprise is understood.


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

But if nothing else, it is an extraordinarily intolerant position, since it implies that one’s opponents are not just wrong, but in a certain sense, wouldn’t even know what it would mean to be right, unless, by some miracle, they could come around and accept the light of reason and decide to accept your own conceptual framework and point of view. This tendency to enshrine rationality as a political virtue has had the perverse effect of encouraging those repelled by such pretentions, or by the people who profess them, to claim to reject rationality entirely, and embrace “irrationalism.” Of course, if we simply take rationality in its minimal definition, any such position is absurd.


pages: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

Master’s Thesis, Amherst: University of Massachusetts 2 Spending Time in Nature 1 Morris, C. (Ed.) (1949) The Journeys of Celia Fiennes. London: The Cresset Press, 67 2 Korpela, K.M. (2003) ‘Negative Mood and Adult Place Preference’. Environment and Behavior, 35 (3), 331–46 3 Jonson, S.A.K. (2011) ‘The Use of Nature for Emotional Regulation: Towards a Conceptual Framework’. Ecopsychology, 3 (3), 175–85 4 You can hear the interview I did with Richard Mabey in All in the Mind. BBC Radio 4, 26 06 2012. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01k1nl3 5 Ulrich, R.S. (1984) ‘View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery’. Science, 224, 420–1 6 Ulrich, R. et al (1993) ‘Exposure to Nature and Abstract Pictures on Patients Recovering from Open Heart Surgery’.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

I: The Central Islamic Lands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 64–65. 11 Fred M. Donner, “The Formation of the Islamic State,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 2 (1986): 283–96. 12 See, for example, Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast, and John Wallis, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), who tend to see the state as a collective action problem among a group of relatively equal oligarchs. 13 One of the practical consequences of this was that monarchs often intervened to lower the predatory taxes imposed by local elites on their dependent populations.

New York: Cambridge University Press. ———, and Barry R. Weingast. 1989. “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England.” Journal of Economic History 49(4):803–32. ———, Barry R. Weingast, and John Wallis. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1993.


pages: 297 words: 91,141

Market Sense and Nonsense by Jack D. Schwager

3Com Palm IPO, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Brownian motion, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Jim Simons, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, negative equity, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, tail risk, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, yield curve

Much like chess, it seems only reasonable to expect a few highly skilled market participants to interpret the same information—the current position of the market chessboard, so to speak—differently from the majority, and reach variant conclusions about the probable market direction. In this conceptual framework, mistakes by a majority of less skilled market participants can drive prices to incorrect levels (that is, prices out of line with the unknown equilibrium level), creating opportunities for more skilled traders. Quite simply, equal dissemination of knowledge does not imply equal use of knowledge.


pages: 337 words: 93,245

Diaspora by Greg Egan

conceptual framework, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, Fermat's Last Theorem, gravity well, Jacquard loom, stem cell, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing machine

"But they couldn't have avoided making a few assumptions about the way we'd think, and the kind of technology we'd be using-and some of those assumptions are hound to be wrong. I can easily imagine a space-faring civilization that wouldn't have tried the neutron phase experiment in a million years. So maybe the meaning of the rest of the data will be inaccessible to us ... but if it is, that won't be out of malice, and it won't be because their whole conceptual framework was beyond our comprehension. It will just be sheer bad luck." Paulo gave up his smirk of tolerant amusement, as if reluctantly conceding that this was an appealing vision of the Transmuters, however naive. Yatima seized the• moment. "And whatever you think about the map yourself, just remember that Orlando can't dismiss it the way you can.


pages: 329 words: 93,655

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

The less avid fans remembered fewer important facts about the game and were more likely to recount superficial details like the weather. Because they lacked a detailed internal representation of the game, they couldn’t process the information they were taking in. They didn’t know what was important and what was trivial. They couldn’t remember what mattered. Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics. Could any less be said of those two thirds of American teens who don’t have a clue when the Civil War occurred? Or the 20 percent who don’t know who the United States fought against in World War II? Or the 44 percent who think that the subject of The Scarlet Letter was either a witch trial or a piece of correspondence?


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

This emerges from the oldest Chinese strategic thinker, Sun Zi, who argued that ‘every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.’”18 The United States understands how to handle a traditional military-political advance. After all, this was the nature of the Soviet threat and the Nazi rise to power. The United States has a conceptual framework as well as the tools—weapons, aid packages, alliances—with which to confront such an advance. Were China to push its weight around, anger its neighbors, and frighten the world, Washington would be able to respond with a set of effective policies that would take advantage of the natural balancing process by which Japan, India, Australia, and Vietnam—and perhaps others—would come together to limit China’s emerging power.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The military and political success of ISIS, and the ineptitude of Western powers in constructing a multi-religious Iraq have planted the seeds of yet another endless war in the most unstable and strategically decisive region of the planet. The investigation presented in this book stops at the threshold of understanding this barbaric confrontation, as it would require a different set of information and a different conceptual framework. I would simply add that the inability of authentic social movements to overcome the violence of the state, and their subsequent attempt to engage in the same kind of violence usually end up in the destruction of the social movement, and in justifying additional violence. Under such conditions, the actors, state or non-state, able to implement the highest level of violence are the winners, while people at large are the dramatic losers under all circumstances.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

The experimental tinkering of games—a parallel universe where rules and conventions are constantly being reinvented—creates a new supply of metaphors that can then be mapped onto more serious matters. (Think how reliant everyday speech is on metaphors generated from games: we “raise the stakes”; we “advance the ball”; we worry about “wild cards”; and so on.) Every now and then, one of those metaphors turns out to be uniquely suited to a new situation that requires a new conceptual framework, a new way of imagining. A top-down state could be described as a body or a building—with heads or cornerstones—but a state governed by contractual interdependence needed a different kind of metaphor to make it intelligible. The runaway success of The Game of Chess—first as a sermon, then as a manuscript, and finally as a book—suggests just how valuable that metaphor turned out to be.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

We have neither the mental capacity nor the understanding to decipher the full web of cause-and-effect relations in our social existence. So, our daily behavior and reactions must be based on incomplete, and occasionally misleading, mental models. The best that social science has to offer is in fact not much different. Social scientists—and economists in particular—analyze the world using simple conceptual frameworks that they call “models.” The virtue of such models is that they make explicit the chain of cause and effect, and therefore render transparent the specific assumptions on which a particular prediction rests. Good social science turns our unexamined intuitions into a map of causal arrows. Sometimes it shows how those intuitions lead to surprising, unanticipated results when extended to their logical conclusions.


pages: 353 words: 91,211

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

Hacker, ‘Military institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History of Military Technology’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 35 (1994), pp. 768–834. 2. J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York: Scribners, 1945). 3. Van Creveld, for example, is clear that there are differences: ‘since technology and war operate on a logic which is not only different but actually opposed, the conceptual framework that is useful, even vital, for dealing with the one should not be allowed to interfere with the other’. Martin Van Creveld, Technology and War: from 2000 BC to the Present (London: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 320. 4. Bernard Davy, Air Power and Civilisation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1941), p. 116. 5.


The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

Only then can we get a sense as to how meaningful are the causes of the correlation. While the idea that data can speak for themselves free of bias or framing may seem like an attractive one, the reality is somewhat different. As Gould (1981: 166) notes, ‘inanimate data can never speak for themselves, and we always bring to bear some conceptual framework, either intuitive and illformed, or tightly and formally structured, to the task of investigation, analysis, and interpretation’. Making sense of data is always framed; examined through a particular lens that casts how it is interpreted. Even if the process is automated in some way, the algorithms used to process the data are imbued with particular values and contextualised within a particular scientific approach.


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

Leah Krubitzer reminds us of the risks in assuming that science can be accomplished on a timetable, and Arthur Caplan highlights the practical and ethical concerns, and consequences, of a brain mapping project, including how to fund it, what to do with the data, and how to decide when we’ve succeeded. Finally, Gary Marcus argues that current conceptual frameworks for understanding complex cognition and behavior are impoverished, and that in order to make progress the field of neuroscience must significantly broaden its search for computational principles. Plate 1. a. Allen Reference Atlas plate for a sagittal section (i.e., front to back) of the mouse brain. b.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

Scholars across a range of disciplines have documented the rise and dominance of an approach to governance, across a variety of scales, informed by key principles of contemporary neoliberalism, including, most notably, the preeminence of the “free market” in allocating goods and services, the retreat or reconfiguration of the state to accommodate the requirements of transnational market forces, and an emphasis on policies promoting and protecting free trade, foreign direct investment, and private property rights.21 The following section discusses why the urban scale is of particular importance for understanding this project, the politics of urban security governance that are integral to defining it, and the specific role that policing, crime, and the criminal play in its execution; doing so will provide the necessary theoretical and conceptual framework for the subsequent discussion of Cape Town. Neoliberal principles of economic reform originally came to prominence through their application at the national level in the global South. Although change was already afoot in the nations and cities of the global North as well, it was the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s, and the intimately related prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, that first drew attention and notoriety to the ascent of neoliberalism as a global governance force.22 The requirements for installing this new governance regime were substantial, and their implementation often Introduction╇ ·â•‡ 11 necessitated significant restructuring of the state and the strict management of often intense political resistance to all or part of the project.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

With 1.49 billion active monthly users, the value of each active account is about $211. 11 “Ocean Tomo Releases 2015 Annual Study of Intangible Asset Market Value,” Ocean Tomo Insights Blog, 05 March 2015, www.oceantomo.com/blog/2015/03-05-ocean-tomo-2015-intangible-asset-market-value/. 12 “Asset,” Merriam-Webster, accessed 09 February 2017, www.merriam-webster.com/ C:\Users\dlaney\Google Drive\InfonomicsBook\Manuscript\Merriam-Webster. http:\www.merriam-webster.com\dictionary\asset. 13 Investopedia Staff, “Asset,” Investopedia, 01 April 2016, www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp. 14 “Statement of Financial Accounting, Concepts No. 6, Elements of Financial Statements, a Replacement of FASB Concepts Statement No. 3 (Incorporating an Amendment of FASB Concepts Statement No. 2),” Financial Accounting Standards Board, December 1985, www.fasb.org/resources/ccurl/792/293/CON6.pdf. 15 “The Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting,” IFRS Foundational Staff, 01 January 2014, www.ifrs.org/IFRSs/Documents/Technical-summaries-2014/Conceptual%20Framework.pdf. 16 “IAS 38—Intangible Assets,” IASPlus, Deloitte, www.iasplus.com/en/standards/ias/ias38. 17 Additionally, information meets each of the IFRS criteria for intangible assets. 18 “Technical Summary, IAS 38 Intangible Assets,” IFRS, 01 January 2014, www.ifrs.org/IFRSs/Documents/Technical-summaries-2014/IAS%2038.pdf. 19 IFRS criteria for intangible assets include: a) an intention to complete and use or sell it, b) an ability to use or sell it, c) it will generate probable future economic benefits and/or there is a market for it, d) an ability to measure reliably the expenditure attributable to it during its development. 20 “Technical Summary, IAS 38 Intangible Assets,” IFRS, 01 January 2014, www.ifrs.org/IFRSs/Documents/Technical-summaries-2014/IAS%2038.pdf. 21 It is generally understood that “similar items in substance” includes information assets. 22 “International Financial Reporting Standard 3, Business Combinations,” IFRS, 18 February 2011, http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/accounting/docs/consolidated/ifrs3_en.pdf. 23 “Discussion Paper, Initial Accounting for Internally Generated Intangible Assets,” The Office of the Australian Accounting Standards Board, 2008, www.saica.co.za/Portals/0/Trainees/documents/DPInitialAccountingInternallyGeneratedIntangibleAssets.pdf. 24 “FASB Invitation to Comment, Agenda Consultation: Financial Accounting Standards Board,” FASB, 04 August 2016, www.fasb.org/cs/ContentServer?


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

Hilbert argued for a large-scale mathematical initiative to devise mechanical procedures that they could follow by rote, that in the end could lead to the proof of any mathematical proposition, giving a decided yes or no to the question. Of course, if the process is mechanical, why not develop a machine to do it—a “computing machine” that does the same rote, mechanical tasks that the human computers can do?6 This is what Turing set himself to do. He developed a conceptual framework for a computer that could take in any set of instructions, execute them faithfully, and deliver the result. Turing’s colleague Alonzo Church (who, independently of Turing, had also demonstrated the impossibility of Hilbert’s program) called this the Turing machine. Turing went a step further, and added to the machine a set of instructions that were internal to the machine and were not altered over the course of execution.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Soule, A Primer on Social Movements (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 2 For an in-depth analysis of the impact of communication technology on social movements, see Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015). 3 Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (Boston: Albert Einstein Institution, 2003). 4 Micah White in discussion with the authors, January and March 2020. 5 Micah White, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2016). 6 Julie Battilana, “Power and Influence in Society,” Harvard Business School note 415-055 (2015); Julie Battilana and Marissa Kimsey, “Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate?”


pages: 923 words: 516,602

The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup

combinatorial explosion, conceptual framework, database schema, Dennis Ritchie, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, higher-order functions, index card, iterative process, job-hopping, L Peter Deutsch, locality of reference, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, Parkinson's law, premature optimization, sorting algorithm

In each case, one must wonder if the implementation language was well chosen, if the design method was well chosen, or if the designer had failed to adapt to the tool in hand. There is nothing unusual or shameful in such a mismatch. It is simply a mismatch that delivers sub-optimal designs and imposes unnecessary burdens on programmers. It does the same to designers when the conceptual framework of the design method is noticeably poorer than C++’s conceptual framework. Therefore, we avoid such mismatches wherever possible. The following discussion is phrased as answers to objections because that is the way it often occurs in real life. 24.2.1 Ignoring Classes [lang.ignore.class] Consider design that ignores classes. The resulting C++ program will be roughly equivalent to the C program that would have resulted from the same design process – and this program would again be roughly equivalent to the COBOL program that would have resulted from the same design process.

These are then refined repeatedly (§23.4.3.5) to reach a set of class relationships that are sufficiently general, flexible, and stable to be of real help in the further evolution of a system. The best tool for finding initial key concepts/classes is a blackboard. The best method for their initial refinement is discussions with experts in the application domain and a couple of friends. Discussion is necessary to develop a viable initial vocabulary and conceptual framework. Few people can do that alone. One way to evolve a set of useful classes from an initial set of candidates is to simulate a system, with designers taking the roles of classes. This brings the inevitable absurdities of the initial ideas out into the open, stimulates discussion of alternatives, and creates a shared understanding of the evolving design.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

., Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 2006). 2. S. N. Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1973). 3. Douglass C. North, John Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 4. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012). 5. For definitions of these terms, see Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, pp. 12–24; also the discussion in Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 450–51. 6.

Lessons from America. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. North, Douglass C., and Robert Paul Thomas. 1973. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. New York: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C., John Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nunn, Nathan. 2007. “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to Its Current Underdevelopment.” Journal of Development Economics 83(1):157–75. ______. 2008. “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades.”


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

I do this out of a sense of responsibility to the historical record, and so that readers will know 10 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. I NTRODUCTION where I'm coming from. The book is therefore divided into halves: the first half is my effort to retrace the arc of my learning curve, and the second half is a more objective effort to use this as the foundation on which to erect a conceptual framework for understanding the new global economy. Along the way I explore critical elements of this emerging global environment: the principles of governing it that arose out of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; the vast energy infrastructure that powers it; the global financial imbalances and dramatic shifts in world demographics that threaten it; and, despite its unquestioned success, the chronic concern over the justice of the distribution of its rewards.

Since millions of transactions are involved in the rebalancing, the process is very difficult to grasp. The abstractions of the classroom can only hint at the dynamics that, for example, enabled the U.S. economy to stabilize and grow after the September 11 attacks. Economic populism imagines a more straightforward world, in which a conceptual framework seems a distraction from evident and pressing need. Its principles are simple. If there is unemployment, then the government should hire the unemployed. If money is tight and interest rates as a consequence are high, the government should put a cap on rates or print more money. If imported goods are threatening jobs, stop the imports.


pages: 920 words: 233,102

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Where feasible, that would help confine disagreements to differences over the interpretation of facts or the prospective effects of alternative courses of action, reducing the likelihood of higher-level discord. Indeed, it can help balance the centrifugal forces inherent in 1P-1V systems with centripetal forces, encouraging members to agree on broad strategy where they can. Where, however, differences of conceptual framework or strategy occur, minority voters should make clear the alternative principles lying behind their votes. THE FOURTH DESIGN PRECEPT: TRANSPARENCY AND POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY If, as the Delegation Criteria posit, the purpose of and warrant for IA regimes is harnessing policy makers to a monitorable objective that reflects an agreed public purpose, then, very obviously, Transparency and Accountability are vital components of regime design.

“Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25. Bourdieu, Pierre, Loic D. Wacquant, and Samar Farage. “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (1994): 1–18. Bovens, Mark. “Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework.” European Law Journal 13, no. 4 (2007): 447–68. Bown, Stephen R. Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600–1900. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Braun, Benjamin. Two Sides of the Same Coin? Independence and Accountability of the European Central Bank. Transparency International EU, 2017.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

His observation, back in 2002, was that, of all the scientists and engineers working in the AI field: 1. 80 percent don’t believe in the concept of General Intelligence (but instead, in a large ­collection of specific skills and knowledge). 2. Of those that do, 80 percent don’t believe it’s possible – either ever, or for a long, long time. 3. Of those that do, 80 percent work on domain-specific AI projects for reasons of commercial or academic politics (results are a lot quicker). 4. Of those left, 80 percent have the wrong conceptual framework. 5. And nearly all of the people operating under basically correct conceptual premises lack the resources to adequately realize their ideas. I think Peter’s argument is basically on-target. Of course, the 80 percent numbers are crude approximations, and most of the concepts involved are fuzzy in various ways.

See Bartley 1962. 3 Examples include World Wide Web anchors, Microsoft Word bookmarks, Lotus Notes, and Folio Views Popup text. 4 The use of bidirectional links for decentralized consumer reports is already happening on the American Information Exchange. 5 This essay was written well before 1997, thus the fictitious tongue-in-cheek story is actually a hypothetical scenario about electronic media. References Bartley, William W. III (1962) The Retreat to Commitment. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Drexler, K. Eric (1991) “Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge.” Social Intelligence 1/2. Engelbart, Douglas C. (1962) “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” SRI Project 3578 (October). Popper, Karl R. (1950) The Open Society and its Enemies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Popper, Karl R. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Harper & Row. Weinberg, Gerald M. (1985) The Secrets of Consulting. New York: Dorset House Publishing.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Occasionally, courts forgot this lesson and decided that by delivering a physical copy like a book manuscript, an author necessarily transferred their copyright interest.8 In an effort to underscore the distinction between the work and the copy, Congress provided in the Copyright Act of 1976 that “ownership of a copyright ... is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied.”9 This copy/work distinction has helped resolve disputes over transfers of copyright ownership. But even more important, it has shaped copyright law’s exhaustion rules in profound ways. The distinction provided the conceptual framework and vocabulary copyright law uses today to think about the relationship between the rights of consumers and creators. Relying on the copy/work distinction, exhaustion rules have drawn an easily understood line separating those respective rights. Creators own their intangible works; but purchasers own the copies they buy.


Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts

business logic, conceptual framework, database schema, index card, MVC pattern, no silver bullet, place-making, sorting algorithm

Bill investigated the refactorings that would be useful for C++ framework development and researched the necessary semantics-preserving refactorings, how to prove they were semantics preserving, and how a tool could implement these ideas. Bill's doctoral thesis [Opdyke] is the most substantial work on refactoring to date. He also contributes Chapter 13 to this book. I remember meeting Bill at the OOPSLA conference in 1992. We sat in a café and discussed some of the work I'd done in building a conceptual framework for healthcare. Bill told me about his research, and I remember thinking, "Interesting, but not really that important." Boy was I wrong! John Brant and Don Roberts have taken the tool ideas in refactoring much further to produce the Refactoring Browser, a refactoring tool for Smalltalk. They contribute Chapter 14 to this book, which further describes refactoring tools.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

The daily decisions he made on Wall Street were based on probability: “Success came by evaluating all the information available to try to judge the odds of various outcomes and the possible gains or losses associated with each.”15 This creation of a thought construct is reminiscent of George Soros’s theory of reflexivity, developed while he was a student at the London School of Economics. Within this conceptual framework, which Soros credits for much of his success, he focuses on the relationship between thinking and reality. Klaus Schwab pioneered the stakeholder principle, “according to which the management of an enterprise is not only accountable to its shareholders, but must also serve the interests of all stakeholders . . . who may be affected or concerned by its operations.”


Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Alistair Cooke, commoditize, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, full employment, Future Shock, Herbert Marcuse, invention of agriculture, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics

If we don't experience a wider informa- tion field, we lose knowledge of that field's existence. We become the hermit in the cave who knows only what the TV offers. We experience what is, not knowing what isn't. The people who control television become the choreog- raphers of our internal awareness. We give way to their pro- cess of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send us through this instrument of theirs. The kind of people who control television is certainly a problem.


pages: 357 words: 100,718

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

Most pollution has been eliminated from the smoke stacks and outflow pipes of factories in the rich world, and leading firms are pushing successfully for ever higher eco-efficiency. These apparent successes made it difficult to talk about problems of overshoot around 1990. The difficulty was increased by the lack of basic data and even elementary vocabulary related to overshoot. It took more than two decades before the conceptual framework-for example, distinguishing growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from growth in the ecological footprint-matured sufficiently to enable an intelligent conversation about the limits to growth issue. And world society is still trying to comprehend the concept of sustainability, a term that remains ambiguous and widely abused even sixteen years after the Brundtland Commission coined it.'


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

That unbroken record continues to reinforce belief in Bitcoin’s cost-and-incentive security system. If we view the bitcoin currency from this angle—and not merely as it is popularly portrayed, as a strange new digital unit of value that some geeky guys think is a good alternative to dollars, euros, or yen—we can build a conceptual framework for understanding the wider implications of Satoshi’s invention. The currency, bitcoin (lowercase “b”), is first and foremost a store of value that rewards people for securing Bitcoin (uppercase “B”), the system. That, and not the hope that it will become an everyday medium of exchange, is its primary purpose.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

All of this great energy and enthusiasm can be harnessed to protect and enhance our natural capital. Upon its creation as an independent advisory committee to the government, the NCC set about two main tasks: first, defining what natural capital is, identifying which bits matter most, and creating a conceptual framework around science and accounting; and second, putting the overarching generational objective into a practical and deliverable framework. Against the odds, and in the face of much scepticism from environmentalists, we did this. The NCC has already achieved a great deal. It established natural capital as the way of thinking about our natural environment, as a hard and rigorous concept, and not simply another slogan that can mean anything to anyone according to their vested interests.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

They are paying more for their labor than needed merely to get their labor force to show up for work. In contrast it would make no sense to have a theory of the stock market or the wheat market in which buyers do not want to pay less for what they buy. The efficiency wage theory further contradicts economists’ theoretical intuitions because it violates their usual conceptual framework of how to set up a theoretical problem. The usual methodology of economics is to ask questions, first on the demand side of the market and then on the supply side. According to this protocol, regarding the purchase of labor one would first ask: who are the potential employers? And then, at any given wage, how much labor would they want?


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

My aim here is to tie together the broader set of overlapping, complex issues in a way that makes sense to an informed reader who does not have special Internet-related expertise—beyond simply being an Internet and cell phone user. For people who are experts on some of these issues, I have tried to provide a fresh conceptual framework and geopolitical context, which I hope will be useful to experts and nonexperts alike who are concerned about the future of freedom in the Internet age. It is not possible to document in one concise book all the violations of Internet freedoms and rights happening everywhere in the world.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It was through the process of reading these forums that Bannon realized he could harness them and their anonymous swarms of resentment and harassment. This was especially true after Gamergate, in the late summer of 2014, right before Bannon was introduced to SCL. In many ways, Gamergate created a conceptual framework for Bannon’s alt-right movement, as he knew there was an undercurrent populated by millions of intense and angry young men. Trolling and cyberbullying became key tools of the alt-right. But Bannon went deeper and had Cambridge Analytica scale and deploy many of the same tactics that domestic abusers and bullies use to erode stress resilience in their victims.


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

However much the early forecasters believed themselves to be men of pure, scientific enquiry, they all held cherished, implicit beliefs about how the world worked, about what mattered and what did not. Alan Greenspan later called these beliefs ideologies. Testifying before Congress following his failure to foresee the banking crisis of 2008, he said, ‘Ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality, everyone has one. You have to.’8 Between 1994 and 2008, his own belief – that deregulated markets are safe – had caused him to ignore a whole series of failures in the unregulated derivatives market, right up to the crash in 2008. He hasn’t changed his mind about regulation, but what he has done, as many others have not, is acknowledge that his mental model is an ideology and that forecasts always contain an agenda.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These streams have not historically served collective living. Embodied and situated cognition were also part of the imperial and capitalist machine, and these streams’ language of collectivist dynamics, embodiment, decentralization, and emergence could be readily absorbed by military generals. Likewise, the conceptual frameworks offered by embodied and situated perspectives happily reinforced a neoliberal vision of the individual as entrepreneur. One might have hoped that a more integrative scientific practice—one that seeks to link mind and body, reason and emotion, individual and collective—would yield different results, but this does not appear to be the case.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

., bank teller) forming/testing hypotheses medical diagnosis legal writing persuading/selling managing others Computer impact substantial substitution strong complementarities MANUAL TASKS Examples picking or sorting repetitive assembly janitorial services truck driving Computer impact substantial substitution limited opportunities for substitution or complementarity Source: David H. Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,”Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 4 (November 2003), 1279–333. The task model’s conceptual framework has shaped how today’s researchers make sense of automation’s prospects for human work. But its specific predictions have proved remarkably prescient and surprisingly durable as well. When the task model was first published in 2003, much of the routine, cognitive tasks that Autor, Levy, and Murnane identified were already heavily automated.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

For a visual, conceptual breakdown of modeling methods that’s clickable: Saed Sayad, PhD, “An Introduction to Data Mining.” http://chem-eng.utoronto.ca/~datamining/dmc/data_mining_map.htm. Merger that made Chase the largest U.S. bank holding company in 1996: JPMorgan Chase & Co. website, “History of Our Firm.” www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/About-JPMC/jpmorgan-history.htm. The history of risk scoring: Vitalie BUMACOV and Arvind ASHTA, “The Conceptual Framework of Credit Scoring from Its Origins to Microfinance (Draft),” Burgundy School of Business, June 2, 2011. http://tinyurl.com/c7fs9cz. David Durand, Risk Elements in Consumer Instalment Financing (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1941), ISBN: 0-870-14124-4. www.nber.org/books/dura41–1. A perspective on micro-risk management: James Taylor, JT on EDM.


Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

State-building, done (as Sutton indicates in his chapter) without regard for the democratic legitimacy of the governments involved, implicated foreign donors in the human rights abuses of recipients and failed to prevent coups, revolutions, and wars that led to political breakdown. Pakistan, an early target of foreign development efforts, is a prime example. Economic planning fell out of favor intellectually with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the late 1980s and was replaced by orthodox • 5 • • Francis Fukuyama economic liberalism as the dominant conceptual framework. But most importantly, none of the approaches popular in any given decade proved adequate to promote sustained long-term growth in countries with weak institutions or where local elites were uninterested or incapable of managing the development process themselves. The record is particularly horrendous in the world’s poorest region, sub-Saharan Africa, many of whose countries have experienced negative per capita growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and regression in institutional development, even though some 10 percent of the entire region’s GNP is provided by outside donors.7 Where sustained economic growth did occur, particularly in East Asia, it tended to come about under the leadership of domestic elites and not as a result of the efforts of foreign donors, lenders, or allies.8 To the extent that there has been intellectual progress in this area, it lies in an appreciation for the complexity and multidimensionality of the development problem.


pages: 363 words: 109,374

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Many readers find this book tough going, especially the first half, but it is one of the earliest classics of the popular psychology genre and still has the power to change minds. Conceptual beings Branden devotes many pages to highlighting how humans are different to other animals. His chief point is that while other animals may have consciousness, or at least awareness, only humans require a conceptual framework by which to view themselves. Other animals can perceive green-colored objects, but only we have the idea of “green.” Dogs can perceive individual people, but only we have the concept of “humankind.” Only humans can ask questions about the meaning of life. There is nothing automatic about such conceptualizing; thinking, therefore, is for us an act of choice.


pages: 407 words: 109,653

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

.), Emotions in Sport, ch. 4, pp. 93–112, Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics (2000) Robazza, Claudio, Laura Bortoli, Filippo Nocini, Giovanna Moser, & Carlo Arslan, “Normative and Idiosyncratic Measures of Positive and Negative Affect in Sport,” Psychology of Sport & Exercise, vol. 1(2), pp. 103–116 (2000) Roland, David, “How Professional Performers Manage Performance Anxiety,” Research Studies in Music Education, vol. 2(1), pp. 25–35 (1994) Salminen, Simo, Jarmo Liukkonen, Yuri Hanin, & Ari Hyvönen, “Anxiety and Athletic Performance of Finnish Athletes: Application of the Zone of Optimal Functioning Model,” Personality & Individual Differences, vol. 19(5), pp. 725–729 (1995) Skinner, Natalie, & Neil Brewer, “The Dynamics of Threat and Challenge Appraisals prior to Stressful Achievement Events,” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, vol. 83(3), pp. 678–692 (2002) Tenenbaum, Gershon, William A. Edmonds, & David W. Eccles, “Emotions, Coping Strategies, and Performance: A Conceptual Framework for Defining Affect-Related Performance Zones,” Military Psychology, vol. 20(supp. 1), pp. S11–S37 (2008) Yoshie, Michiko, Eriko Kanazawa, Kazutoshi Kudo, Tatsuyuki Ohtsuki, & Kimitaka Nakazawa, “Music Performance Anxiety and Occupational Stress among Classical Musicians,” In: Janice Langan-Fo & Cary L.


pages: 482 words: 106,041

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

“Raising the Quality: Treatment and Disposal of Sewage Sludge.” Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (U.K.), September 23, 1998, 13. Reaney, Patricia. “Cultivated Land Disappears in AIDs-ravaged Africa."Reuters, September 8, 2005. “Report of Workshop of Experts from Parties to the Montreal Protocol to Develop Specific Areas and a Conceptual Framework of Cooperation to Address Illegal Trade in Ozone-Depleting Substances.” Montreal, April 3, 2005, United Nations Environment Programme. “Reprocessing and Spent Nuclear Fuel Management at the Savannah River Site.” Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Takoma Park, Maryland, February 1999.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Just, “Altering Cortical Connectivity: Remediation-Induced Changes in the White Matter of Poor Readers,” Neuron 64 (2009): 624–31. * T. F. Oberlander et al., “Prenatal Exposure to Maternal Depression, Neonatal Methylation of Human Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene (NR3C1) and Infant Cortisol Stress Responses,” Epigenetics 3, 2 (2008): 97–106. * D. C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Summary Report AFOSR-3233, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., October 1962. * “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, 3 (1977): 231–59.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

Hammond, J.S., R.L. Keeney, and H. Raiffa (1999). Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kasperson, R. E., O. Renn, P. Slovic, H. S. Brown, J. Emel, R. Goble, J. X. Kasperson, and S. Ratick (1988). “The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework.” Risk Analysis 8: 177-187. Keeney, R. L. (1980). “Evaluating Alternatives Involving Potential Fatalities.” Operations Research 28: 188-205. U.S. Geological Survey Staff (1990). “The Loma Prieta California Earthquake: An Anticipated Event.” Science 247: 286-293. 28 Decision Making A View on Tomorrow HOWARD RAIFFA A WIDER SCOPE FOR THE DECISION SCIENCES When I began studying decision making some sixty years ago, I was mainly oriented toward the ways that analytics can help the decision-making process.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

As an economist with an engineering background, I have always sought to understand a technology in terms of the problems it purports to solve, which allows for the identification of its functional essence and its separation from incidental, cosmetic, and insignificant characteristics. By understanding the problems money attempts to solve, it becomes possible to elucidate what makes for sound and unsound money, and to apply that conceptual framework to understand how and why various goods, such as seashells, beads, metals, and government money, have served the function of money, and how and why they may have failed at it or served society's purposes to store value and exchange it. The second part of the book discusses the individual, social, and global implications of sound and unsound forms of money throughout history.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press. Walker, Renee E., Christopher R. Keane, and Jessica G. Burke. 2010. “Disparities and Access to Healthy Food in the United States: A Review of Food Deserts Literature.” Health and Place 16:876–84. Weber, Lynn. 2001. Understanding Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolff, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

In 1962, Glushkov imagined the OGAS as a “brainlike” (mozgopodnobyi) network for managing the national economy and extending the life experience of the nation and its inhabitants. Consider the implications for the cybernetic analog between neural networks and national computer networks. As already noted, cybernetics brings to bear powerful conceptual frameworks for imagining structural analogies between ontologically different information systems—organisms, machines, societies, and others. The cybernetic instinct rushes many visionaries to profound structural insights but also to overly determined design decisions. The circuitry of a computer chip and the neural networks of a mind do not resemble each other, although cybernetics earns its keep by finding usable analogs between them.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

This skepticism has been fueled, among other things, by the fact that AI has been with us for some time – at least in theory – and it has not yet produced anything really dramatic. It grew out of digital computing, which was explored and developed at Bletchley Park in England during the Second World War, famously enabling the Nazis’ Enigma code to be broken. That feat is closely associated with the name of Alan Turing. Turing was also responsible for AI’s early conceptual framework, publishing in 1950 the seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” The subject was subsequently developed mainly in the USA and the UK. But it waxed and waned in both esteem and achievement. Over the last decade, however, a number of key developments have come together to power AI forward: • Enormous growth in computer processing power


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“The Politics of Real-Time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines.” Theory, Culture, and Society 31 (6): 125–50. WEST, SARAH MYERS. 2017. “Raging against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms.” Media and Communication 5 (3): 28–36. ———. Forthcoming. “A Conceptual Framework for the (Private) Public Sphere: Surveying User Experiences of Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms.” Manuscript submitted for publication. WOOLGAR, STEVE. 1990. “Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials.” Sociological Review 38 (S1). WU, TIM. 2010. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Our discussions battle-tested and greatly improved the concepts that found expression in Why Startups Fail. Many past and present faculty colleagues have been my collaborators in building courses and writing cases about startups; they’ve taught me a lot and I’ve had great fun working with them. These colleagues were also partners in developing and refining the conceptual frameworks used in this book, including the diamond-and-square model, the Six S’s of scaling, and the RAWI test. For their rich insights and invaluable feedback, I wish to thank Julia Austin, Joe Fuller, Shikhar Ghosh, Felda Hardymon, Scott Kominers, Josh Krieger, Joe Lassiter, Stig Leschly, Alan MacCormack, Jim Matheson, Ramana Nanda, Jeffrey Rayport, Mark Roberge, Toby Stuart, Noam Wasserman, and Russ Wilcox.


pages: 358 words: 106,951

Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics by Don Hanlon Johnson

BIPOC, clean water, colonial rule, complexity theory, conceptual framework, deep learning, emotional labour, epigenetics, imposter syndrome, liberation theology, mass incarceration, microaggression, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, W. E. B. Du Bois, working poor

There has been much research done to situate racism along a spectrum of trauma. In her 2009 study of embodied oppression, Rae Johnson concluded that hypervigilance and somatic tension were also a shared phenomenon among those faced with various oppressive circumstances based on race, gender, ability, or sexual orientation.15 Racism is not just a conceptual framework, but a lived and embodied wound that shapes how we move through the world. It creates certain tensions that manifest into certain realities. This study gave voice to an experience I had long known but was not yet clear on how to articulate. Hypervigilance became a part of my experience at the earthy-connection gathering named above, where over the course of my time there, I began experiencing a form of somatic pain in the shape of muscle tension in my body as the collective wounds continued to remain unaddressed. 15 Rae Johnson, “Oppression Embodied: The Intersecting Dimensions of Trauma, Oppression, and Somatic Psychology.”


pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

This is the paradox of the human niche.10 A paradox in science is like an X on a treasure map: It tells us where to dig. Our unrivaled breadth of specialization is a paradox that marks the location of a spectacular trove, not so much of riches, but of tools. By unraveling the human paradox, we can unlock a conceptual framework that allows us to understand ourselves, and to navigate our lives with intention and skill. This book unpacks the human paradox, and describes the tools we discover there; it is also an exercise in their application. Campfire In our discussion of the first Americans, we have already seen one tool in this treasure trove, though it might not seem to be a tool at all.


pages: 402 words: 107,908

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--And Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M. Palmer Md

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Drosophila, epigenetics, impulse control, it's over 9,000, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, neurotypical, personalized medicine, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury

Nonetheless, they are both required for health and longevity, and mitochondria play a role in both. There are even more types of cell death, beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, one review was able to link all of them to the functions of mitochondria.37 Putting It All Together Change is hard. Models, practices, and conceptual frameworks are difficult to shift. But what if our ideas about the control of cells have been all wrong? If we go back to our automotive analogy, I suggested that each cell was like a car in the congested traffic of a large city. If we look inside that car, there are many drivers—all the mitochondria.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

To contest the construction of in-fill development is to debate the idea of what kind of community one wishes to live in; to contest the construction of windmills on Nantucket Sound is to debate the idea of how, not if, Nantucket Sound will be used by people. And those questions are about which uses best serve our multiplicity of needs—for shelter, for community, for warmth and sustenance, for recreation—not about whether a particular place will be preserved in its essential state. 4. The problem with having a conceptual framework that is unable to distinguish between good and bad development and that constantly focuses on preserving nonhuman natures, preventing development, and limiting growth is that when the time comes, environmentalists are ill prepared to support projects like Cape Wind or the development of dense cities as vigorously as they defend places like the Arctic refuge.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

It’s also tempting to believe games like Civilization and SimCity can teach us useful lessons about world history and city planning, that they both aim to reflect the real world and are successful in doing so, but in reality, they have done neither very well. Civilization’s “technology tree” is an elegant way of giving players meaningful strategic choices, but it promotes a flawed understanding of scientific discovery and cultural development. The conceptual framework that governs SimCity is based on a “capitalistic land value ecology” which may fit one corner of America in the late twentieth century but hardly describes cities in other countries, let alone alternative ideas of what a city can or should be.23 Again, there’s nothing wrong with optimising games for fun, as Sid Meier and Will Wright did when designing these classics.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

No, Engelbart realized, if his augmentation ideas were ever going to fly, he would have to create a new discipline from scratch. And to do that, he would have to give this new discipline a conceptual framework all its own-a manifesto that would layout his thinking in the most compelling way possible. Creating that manifesto took him the better part of two years. "Augmenting the Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" wouldn't be completed until October 1962. But Engelbart was nothing if not dogged. "By 'augmenting man's intellect,' " he wrote, struggling to articulate his own gut feelings, "we mean in- creasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to prob- lems. . . .


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

There’s some truth to that, and Xerox didn’t cash in on PCs or networking, but the laser printer did so well for the company that it more than covered the whole pricey R & D effort. Merely making money is only a problem by Silicon Valley standards, and Xerox is from Rochester. Still, Licklider and Engelbart couldn’t help feeling like there was something about the work that their eastern bosses didn’t get. In his conceptual framework for augmenting human intellect, Doug Engelbart posed the question of whom to augment first. His unsurprising conclusion was that computer programmers should be at the head of the line—specifically, those working on human augmentation, because the more they self-augmented, the faster they could produce further augmentations.

., 2010), 124. 4. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945, 101–08. 5. “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (March 1960): 4–11, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html. 6. Douglas C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Prepared for Director Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Washington, DC: SRI, October 1962), para. 2b7, https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/#2b7. 7. M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 216. 8.


pages: 918 words: 260,504

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

., Reminiscences of Chicago during the Great Fire (1915). Recent analytical histories of the fire include Christine Meisner Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (1986), which is summarized in part in Rosen, “Infrastructural Improvement in Nineteenth-Century Cities: A Conceptual Framework and Cases,” J. Urban Hist. 12 (1986): 211–56; John J. Pauly, “The Great Chicago Fire as a National Event,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): 668–83; and Karen Sawislak, “Smoldering City,” Chicago History 17, nos. 3–4 (Fall-Winter 1988–89): 70–101. Sawislak’s forthcoming dissertation from Yale University, “Smoldering City: Class, Ethnicity, and Politics in Chicago, 1867–1877,” examines class conflict in the relief efforts following the fire.

“The Evolution of the Great Lakes Logging Camp, 1830–1930.” Journal of Forest History 30 (1986): 17–28. ———. “Place-names: Relics of the Great Lakes Lumber Era.” Journal of Forest History 28 (1984): 126–35. Rosen, Christine Meisner. “Infrastructural Improvement in Nineteenth-Century Cities: A Conceptual Framework and Cases.” J. Urban Hist. 12 (1986): 211–56. Rothstein, Morton. “America in the International Rivalry for the British Wheat Market, 1860–1914.” MVHR 47 (1960): 401–18. ———. “Antebellum Wheat and Cotton Exports: A Contrast in Marketing Organization and Economic Development.” Ag. Hist. 40 (1966): 91–100. ———.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Cloward When this ground-breaking work was first published in 1971, it dramatically revised our understanding of the welfare system and its hidden role in the larger socioeconomic framework of the United States. Substantially updated for 1990s, this analysis ranges from the early history of poor relief through the inception of welfare during the Great Depression to its massive erosion during the Reagan and Bush years. The authors provide a conceptual framework that sharply illuminates the problems current and future administrations will encounter as they attempt to rethink the welfare system. Political Science/Sociology/Social Work/0-679-74516-5 THE WORK OF NATIONS Preparing Ourselves for list-Century Capitalism by Robert B. Reich “An elegant and penetrating analysis of the forces that are leading the globalization of the international system and to the growing anachronism of thinking solely in ‘national’ terms.


pages: 395 words: 115,753

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America by Jon C. Teaford

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, conceptual framework, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, East Village, edge city, estate planning, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, plutocrats, Potemkin village, rent control, restrictive zoning, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, young professional

Exceptions to the prevailing black–white conception of American society, Asians, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans were not deemed of sufficient significance to warrant a national advisory commission or extended hand-wringing over their impact on the future of the nation. For policy makers, scholars, journalists, and the American public in general, the race problem meant the antagonism between whites and blacks. Other groups were outside the dominant conceptual framework. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, however, the ethnic composition of the nation changed markedly, giving rise to a new vision of ethnicity in metropolitan America. A massive influx of immigrants from Latin America and Asia compelled Americans to accept a more complex picture of the metropolitan population.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But there is no reason why his approach cannot be applied to other fields—which is what I do in this book. A third big advantage of this way of looking at power is that it lets us distinguish among concepts such as power, might, force, authority, and influence. For instance, people commonly confuse the difference between power and influence. Here, MacMillan’s conceptual framework is very helpful. Both power and influence can change the behavior of others or, more specifically, make others do something or stop them from doing it. But influence seeks to change the perception of the situation, not the situation itself.2 So the MacMillan framework helps show that influence is a subset of power, in the sense that power includes not only actions that change the situation but also actions that alter the way the situation is perceived.


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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Mayors travel routinely, cruising for ideas in the cities deemed the world’s Greenest—Reykjavik, Iceland; Portland, Oregon; Curitiba, Brazil; Malmö, Sweden; Vancouver, Canada; Copenhagen, Denmark; London, England; San Francisco, California; Bahi de Caráquez, Ecuador; Sydney, Australia; Barcelona, Spain; Bogotá, Colombia; Bangkok, Thailand; Kampala, Uganda; and Austin, Texas. Urban ecotourism is a growth industry. To manage the ecology of cities, we first have to understand it. A 2008 article in Science framed the necessary new discipline in meaty language I find delicious:Evolving conceptual frameworks for urban ecology view cities as heterogeneous, dynamic landscapes and as complex, adaptive, socioecological systems, in which the delivery of ecosystem services links society and ecosystems at multiple scales. . . . The changes in chemical environment, exposure to pollutants, simplified geomorphic structure, and altered hydro-graphs of urban streams combine to create an urban stream “syndrome” of low biotic diversity, high nutrient concentrations, reduced nutrient retention efficiency, and often elevated primary production. . . .


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

In 1808, John Dalton in England and Joseph Gay-Lussac in France independently derived similar laws about the constituents of gases that led directly to the theory that all gases—all everything—were composed of impossibly small distinct elements known as atoms. The science had, for the first time, a usable conceptual framework. Elements would be discovered over the course of the nineteenth century, including ones essential to life: sodium and potassium in 1807, calcium in 1808, iodine in 1811. Chemical analysis grew sharper and more precise with the introduction of dozens of apparatus. Since the time of Lavoisier, scientists have used combustion to examine the constituents of organic matter: burning the sample using a hollow glass blowpipe, trapping the carbon dioxide and water vapor produced, and measuring their volume in order to calculate how much hydrogen and carbon the sample originally contained.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

This leveling of the medical knowledge landscape will ultimately lead to a new premium: to find and train doctors who have the highest level of emotional intelligence. My friend and colleague, Abraham Verghese, whom I regard as one of the great humanists of medicine, has emphasized these critical points in the foreword of the book, which I hope you have taken the time to read carefully. This is what deep medicine offers. TO DEVELOP THE conceptual framework of deep medicine, I’ll start with how medicine is practiced now and why we desperately need new solutions to such problems as misdiagnosis, errors, poor outcomes, and runaway costs. That, in part, hinges on the basics of how a medical diagnosis is made today. To understand the reward and risk potential of AI, we will explore the AI precedents, the accomplishments ranging from games to self-driving cars.


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Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

He saw himself as the one person with the sagacity and temperament to effect a resolution among all the players in the region. During the summer of 2018, Kushner prepared what he thought might be the ultimate initiative, his personal Oslo move. His idea was to build a platform for pan–Middle East economic development; through joint-venture lending programs, the platform would lead to political discussion and a conceptual framework for lasting peace. The sheer size of what he envisioned would create a structure of cooperation and codependence. As he described it, the shared platform would be like nothing the region had ever seen before. In pursuing this notion, Kushner was operating outside of diplomatic channels. He was also charging ahead without much involvement from the White House itself, although he promised his father-in-law that his initiative was going to be something “very big.”


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Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

the Promise TV box: Rupert Goodwins, “Four-Strong Team Builds Digital TV Revolution,” ZDNet, March 25, 2012, accessed March 23, 2013, www.zdnet.com/four-strong-team-builds-digital-tv-revolution-3040154872/; “What is Promise.tv?” Promise TV Web site, accessed March 23, 2013, www.promise.tv/what-is-it.html. “You can integrate your new ideas more easily”: Douglas C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” (Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1962), accessed March 23, 2013, www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html. when we use word processors we’re more iterative: Christina Haas, “How the Writing Medium Shapes the Writing Process: Effects of Word Processing on Planning,” Research in the Teaching of English 23, no. 2 (May 1989): 181–207; Ronald D.


pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

“There is little formal geometry in it, and, of course, no mention of Euclid, mostly heuristics, the kind of knowledge that comes out of a master guiding his apprentices . . . Builders could figure out the resistance of materials without the equations we have today—buildings that are, for the most part, still standing.”6 These examples do not show that theoretical knowledge is worthless. Quite the reverse. A conceptual framework is vital even for the most practical men going about their business. In many circumstances, new theories have led to direct technological breakthroughs (such as the atom bomb emerging from the Theory of Relativity). The real issue here is speed. Theoretical change is itself driven by a feedback mechanism, as we noted in chapter 3: science learns from failure.


pages: 587 words: 119,432

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, hindsight bias, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban decay, éminence grise

Again, for similar (and, for this book, very apt) thinking, see Clark, Sleepwalkers, xxix: “a single, symbolic event—however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes—can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency.” 28. For more on the challenges facing nonviolent protest, see Roberts and Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance; see also Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (New York: New Press, 2012); Sidney Tarrow, The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Sidney Tarrow, Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 29.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

pagewanted=all; Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 29. See John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), which describes pioneering IA work by Doug Engelbart and a long line of proteges. See also Doug Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (Washington, DC: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1962). 30. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460. 31. Ryan Calo, “Robotics and the Lessons of Cyberlaw,” California Law Review 103, no. 3 (2015): 513–563. 32.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). that has only one veto gate (the dictator’s will), to a perfect consensual democracy in which all citizens have to agree to a policy. The concept of veto gates in a sense reprises the conceptual framework laid out by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock to explain the principle of majority voting, where they posited a clear trade-off between legitimacy and effectiveness (see figure 8.2).21 The more members of a society who participate in a decision, the higher are the expected decision costs; for large societies, the costs rise exponentially as one approaches consensus.


pages: 405 words: 121,531

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini

Albert Einstein, attribution theory, bank run, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, desegregation, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Norman Macrae, Ralph Waldo Emerson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds

Lee, F., Peterson, C., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2004). Mea culpa: Predicting stock prices from organizational attributions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 1636–1649. Lee, K. M., & Nas, C. (2004). The multiple source effect and synthesized speech: Doubly disembodied language as a conceptual framework. Human Communication Research, 30, 182–207. Lefkowitz, M., Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1955). Status factors in pedestrian violation of traffic signals. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51, 704–706. Leippe, M. R., & Elkin, R. A. (1987). When motives clash: Issue involvement and response involvement as determinants of persuasion.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

“Its nerve center sits in New York,” the Sunday Times wrote in 1997. “Its managing partner works in Chicago. Its Global Institute is in Washington. But its truest address is in the world’s capital and industrial centers. It is a United Nations of consulting, with one crucial difference: It works.”8 “McKinsey always had great conceptual frameworks for analyzing problems,” added Fisher. “But what was better was that you could go to a place like Argentina and have market analysis done by people with familiarity with the market—Argentinians—but that had been American-trained. It’s astounding to me that they can run a global firm the way that they do.


pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

., ‘Inaccuracy in death certification: where are we now?’, J Public Health Med 1996; 18: 59-66 Mott, J. ‘Crime and Heroin Use’ in Policing and Prescribing: The British System of Drug Control, eds. Whynes, D.K., Bean, P.T. Macmillan: London, 1991. Newcombe, R. (1992), ‘The reduction of drug-related harm: a conceptual framework for theory, practice, and research’ in O’Hare et al (eds.), The Reduction of Drug Related Harm. London: Routledge, 1992 Newcombe, R., ISDD Druglink 1996: 11(i), pp.9–12 Newcombe R, Parker H., ‘Heroin use and acquisitive crime in an English Community’, Br J Sociol 1987, 38: 331–350 Payne-James, J.J., Dean, P.J., Keys, D.W. (1994), ‘Drug misusers in police custody’, J R Soc Med 1994; 87: 13–14 Plant, M.A., Drugs in Perspective.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

I believe that packaged interventions should be verified by RCTs more often. I’m on the board of JPAL’s sister organization, Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit that also runs RCTs and whose work I deeply respect and support. But if RCTs are an essential tool of decision-making for social policy, they still need to be placed within a larger conceptual framework. If a world-renowned economist and careful experimentalist such as Duflo can’t avoid the pathologies of packaged interventions, it’s not clear that other researchers running RCTs can either. A single methodology cannot be the sole paradigm for determining what’s right for social change. The problem is not RCTs themselves as much as careless interpretation of their results.19 An RCT is just one good tool in the toolbox of program evaluation.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

New York: NYU Press. Gruber, J., & Trickett, E. J. (1987). Can we empower others? The paradox of empower­ ment in the governing of an alternative public school. American Journal of Community Psychology, 15(3), 353–371. Guo, C., & Musso, J. A. (2007). Representation in nonprofit and voluntary organizations: A conceptual framework. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 36(2), 308–326. Hafner, K. (2007, August 19). Seeing corporate fingerprints in Wikipedia edits. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/tech nology/19wikipedia.html Haley, H., & Sidanius, J. (2005). Person-organization congruence and the maintenance of group-based social hierarchy: A social dominance perspective.


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

The empire that emerged from the war was a much less top-down association. It was soon time to send for the now septuagenarian Arthur Balfour, who chaired a committee which agreed that the white Dominions of the empire could in future be as independent as they chose. At the end of the war, the whole conceptual framework of empire looked shaky. Empire had become an official project and the awful loss of life had done nothing at all to enhance belief in the wisdom of government. (The great celebrant of empire, Rudyard Kipling, had lost his own son at the battle of Loos in September 1915: just turned eighteen when he was last seen staggering through the mud, half his face hanging off.)


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

The video of Engelbart’s 1968 demo is at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.htm. “store ideas, study them”: From the Invisible Revolution Web site, devoted to Engelbart’s ideas, at http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/nls.htm. “successful achievements can be utilized”: From the “Whom to Augment First?” section of Engelbart’s 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/EngelbartPapers /B5_F18_ConceptFrameworkPt4.htm. “an improving of the improvement process”: Bootstrap Institute home page at http://www.bootstrap.org/. “the feeding back of positive research”: In the “Basic Regenerative Feature” section of Engelbart’s 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” at http:// sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/EngelbartPapers/ B5_F18_ConceptFramework Pt4.htm.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Strategic Deterrence Reconsidered. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Paper No. 116 (Spring). ______. 1986. The Rise of the Trading State: Conquest and Commerce in the Modern World. New York: Basic Books. Rosenberg, David Alan. 1994. “The History of World War III, 1945–1990: A Conceptual Framework.” In On Cultural Ground: Essays in International History, ed. Robert David Johnson. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 197–235. Ross, Brian. 2005. “Secret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilities: No ‘True’ Al Qaeda Sleeper Agents Have Been Found in U.S.” ABC News 9 March. abcnews. go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

There are artists’ renderings that suggest possible concepts without addressing the quantitative process known as design engineering, where a structure is conceived (material, dimensions, mechanical and electrical components, reliability estimates, construction sequencing) with specific consideration of the constraints of the environment, and the survival characteristics of the structure over significant periods of time (design life). The artists’ concepts developed in conjunction with engineers are important, however, since they help generate and develop nascent ideas, and set up a conceptual framework that can be used by designers to engineer a particular structure to make it work in the lunar environment. Often, concept and design work together and iteratively. 4.4 Interview with Marc Cohen This interview with Marc Cohen was conducted via email beginning on June 23, 2017 and concluding on July 16, 2017.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

In economic terms, this would be a classic externality; but constitutional law is not about policing externalities, but about policing rights and wrongs. 20. Levi, “The Predatory Theory of Rule”; but see also Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge 276 n ote s to c h a P te r 9 University Press, 2009), who argue that law-bound public orders have become open-access orders; the public order sets the rules of the game that allows private parties to pursue their own interests, but marvelously, without affecting open access. 21.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

J., Lenz, B., Winner, H., Autonomous Driving, Berlin, 497 522. [109] Redzic, O., Rabel, D., 2015: A Location Cloud for Highly Automated Driving, in: Meyer, G., Beiker, S., Road Vehicles Automation 2, Berlin, 49 60. [110] Reilhac, P., Millett, N., Hottelart, K., 2016: Shifting Paradigms and Conceptual Frameworks for Automated Driving, in: Meyer, G., Beiker, S., Road Vehicles Automation 3, Berlin, 73 90. Bibliography 422 [111] Reschka, A., 2016: Safety Concept for Autonomous Vehicles, in: Maurer, M., Gerdes, C. J., Lenz, B., Winner, H., Autonomous Driving, Berlin, 473 496. [112] Reuben, S., Ward, J., 2016: Smart Mobility: Systems and Modeling for Accelerated Research inTransportation, in: Meyer, G., Beiker, S., Road Vehicles Automation 3, Berlin, 39 53. [113] Roland Berger Consultants, 2014: Autonomous Driving. [114] Roland Berger Consultants, Automotive Competence Center at the Technical University of Aachen, 2015: Automated Vehicle Index, Munich, Aachen. [115] Roland Berger Consultants, 2016: A CEO Agenda for the (R) Evolution of the Automotive Ecosystem. [116] Rosenzweig, J., Bartl, M., 2015: A Review and Analysis of Literature on Autonomous Driving, in: The Making of Innovation E-Journal, 1 57. [117] Ross, P.


pages: 448 words: 123,273

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, COVID-19, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, food desert, Gary Taubes, George Floyd, global supply chain, Helicobacter pylori, Kinder Surprise, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, microbiome, NOVA classification, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, twin studies, ultra-processed food, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, Wayback Machine

Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. Quaternary Science Reviews 2019; 207: 13–36. 12 Clark MA, Domingo MGG, Colgan K, et al. Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets. Science 2020; 370: 705–08. 13 Anastasioua K, Baker P, Hadjikakou M. A conceptual framework for understanding the environmental impacts of ultra-processed foods and implications for sustainable food systems. Journal of Cleaner Production 2022; 368: 133155. 14 Soil Association. Ultra-processed planet: the impact of ultra-processed diets on climate, nature and health (and what to do about it). 2021.


pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

For this odd Assertion, I find to be contradicted by frequent practice of Diamond Cutters: And particularly having enquir’d of one of them, to whom abundance of those Gems are brought to be fitted for the Jeweller and Goldsmith, he assur’d me, That he makes much of his Powder to Polish Diamonds with, only, by beating board Diamonds (as they call them) in a Steel or Iron Morter, and that he has that way made with ease, some hundreds of Carrats of Diamond Dust.73 The assertion that goat’s blood softens diamonds seemed odd to Boyle, because he had escaped from the old conceptual framework of sympathy and antipathy, according to which there was a natural sympathy between the lodestone and goat’s blood and a natural antipathy between the diamond and goat’s blood. But all that was required to abolish this conceptual scheme was an insistence on direct as opposed to indirect experience.xi The result of such an approach, which looks to us just like common sense but was revolutionary at the time, was a transformation in the reliability of knowledge.74 William Wotton, in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), put it like this: Nullius in verba [‘Take no man’s word for it’, i.e. defer to no authority]xii is not only the motto of the ROYAL SOCIETY, but a received Principle among all the Philosophers of the present Age.

Science offers reliable knowledge (that is, reliable prediction and control), not truth.29 One day we may discover that some of our most cherished forms of knowledge are as obsolete as epicycles, phlogiston, caloric, the electromagnetic aether and, indeed, Newtonian physics. But it seems virtually certain that future scientists will still be talking about facts and theories, experiments and hypotheses. This conceptual framework has proved remarkably stable, even while the scientific knowledge it is used to describe and justify has changed beyond all recognition. Just as any progressive knowledge of natural processes would need a concept akin to ‘discovery’, so as further advances occurred it would need a way of representing knowledge as both reliable and defeasible: terms that do the work done by ‘facts’, ‘theories’ and ‘hypotheses’ would have to play a role in any mature scientific enterprise.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Historians or economists focused on one locale, such as Britain, are liable to miss similar conditions elsewhere that belie their celebration of, say, the English common law (but oddly not the Scottish civil law, considering that Scotland, too, had an Industrial Revolution) or the British empire (but oddly not also the French empire, whose trade with France grew faster in the eighteenth century than Britain’s imperial trade with Britain). A wide angle of view disciplines speculation. The North, Wallis, and Weingast book I have mentioned from time to time is modestly subtitled A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Yet it omits recorded human history except England’s, France’s, and the United States’, and treats the trinity partially and often erroneously. The framework for interpreting recorded human history has no mention in the index or the text of Africa, Arabia, China, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughals, the Netherlands, or Russia except for a few pages on the USSR.3 One province of the world, it must be said, does not constitute a believable human history.

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C., and Robert P. Thomas. 1973. The Rise of the Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novak, Michael. 1984. Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom with Justice. New York: Harper and Row. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Nunziata, Luca, and Lorenzo Rocco. 2014.


Human Nature: The Categorial Framework by P. M. S. Hacker

conceptual framework, discovery of DNA, move 37, profit maximization

Similarly, the fact that physics is, in a readily explicable sense, the fundamental science does not imply that the vocabulary of physics is adequate for the sciences of life or that its forms of explanation constrain those that are to be used in biological sciences. Indeed, it is only to be expected that the conceptual framework for description and explanation of living beings and their behaviour should differ from that of inanimate matter. The most comprehensive investigation of teleological (functional) explanation in biology by a logical empiricist is to be found in chapter 12 of Ernest Nagel’s monumental treatise The Structure of Science (1961).


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

From my freshman year at Davidson College when Professor Laban introduced me to Thucydides, to the China Working Group that now meets monthly at Harvard, I have been learning daily in ways that inform this analysis. My senior thesis adviser Crane Brinton (author of Anatomy of a Revolution ) taught me to recognize patterns in history. Studying analytic philosophy at Oxford, I learned from A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, and Peter Strawson the differences between conceptual frameworks and the real world. As a PhD student at Harvard, I had the extraordinary opportunity to be tutored by three legends in applying history to clarify current challenges: Henry Kissinger, Ernest May, and Richard Neustadt. My doctoral thesis examined the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to illuminate the complexities of decision-making in government, as well as the special dangers posed by superpower nuclear arsenals that welded an unbreakable bond between adversaries.


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Little more was said on the issue, but an inexorable process had begun. (James Robinson had dispatched Sandy Weill in part by co-opting Peter Cohen. Weill would be damned if that was going to happen to him again. This time, he wasn’t going to go “up and out.”) Over the next two days, the teams hashed out much of the conceptual framework for a merger, including a name—Citigroup—and a plan that the company would have three main divisions: the corporate investment bank, the consumer business, and asset management. Dimon quite reasonably assumed that he would be put in charge of running the corporate investment bank, the same job he had shared with Maughan at Salomon Smith Barney.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

There’s something that seems almost universal about the devices, maybe because their inventors were drawing from a rich shared history of technological concepts and pop-culture predictions. It’s hard to shake the sense that the Simon was the iPhone in chrysalis, however obscured by black plastic and its now-comical size. The point isn’t that Apple ripped off the Simon. It’s that the conceptual framework for the smartphone, what people imagined they could do with a mobile computer, has been around far, far longer than the iPhone. Far longer than Simon, even. “It’s this push and pull,” Novak says. “There’s this 2012 Tim Cook interview with Brian Williams. Tim Cook holds up his iPhone and says, ‘This is The Jetsons.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Despite its limitations, our experience in introducing this model and earlier versions of it across the professions has been encouraging, and seems to capture the substance and direction of change as well as the choices that the professions are facing. Our hope for the model is that it helps professionals explain and predict the developments they are witnessing within their own fields, and that it offers a common vocabulary and conceptual framework for comparative analysis across different professional disciplines. There is one further characteristic of the model that should be borne in mind from the outset. We are not suggesting, for any particular piece of professional work—for instance, the treatment of a patient, the resolution of a dispute for a legal client, the teaching of a class, the auditing of a company’s accounts, the investigation of events or the reporting of a story for a reader—that the challenge for professionals is to determine into which of our boxes their work sits.


pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

I think this question shows the extent to which a major paradigm shift depends on more than just some additional empirical data and more than just a brilliant new theory using a new concept. It really depends on a much larger context so that the seed of a potentially powerful idea falls on a whole different soil, out of which this organism, this new conceptual framework, can grow—literally a “conception” in a new cultural and historical womb or matrix. Richard Tarnas and Dean Radin, “The Timing of Paradigm Shifts,” Noetic Now, January 2012. 15 In the corporate sector, worker cooperatives have failed to achieve any meaningful traction. The ones that prevail are often run on practices that are a combination of Orange and Green.


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Or you can make that bet with yourself, what Ainslie calls a “private side bet.” You could say to yourself, “I won’t watch the game on television tonight until I finish [some task you are tempted to postpone].” Armed with the insights of Strotz, Mischel, and Ainslie, I set out to create a conceptual framework to discuss these problems that economists would still recognize as being economics. The crucial theoretical question I wanted to answer was this: if I know I am going to change my mind about my preferences (I will not limit myself to a few more cashew nuts, as I intend, rather I will eat the entire bowl), when and why would I take some action to restrict my future choices?


pages: 504 words: 139,137

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

GEORGE SOROS’S THEORY OF BOOM/BUST CYCLES AND REFLEXIVITY George Soros is one of the most successful investors of all times. In addition to being a successful investor, he is a philanthropist, opinion maker, and philosopher. Soros has developed a theory of boom/bust cycles and reflexivity, as he describes in the following excerpt from a recent lecture.5 Let me state the two cardinal principles of my conceptual framework as it applies to the financial markets. First, market prices always distort the underlying fundamentals. The degree of distortion may range from the negligible to the significant. This is in direct contradiction to the efficient market hypothesis, which maintains that market prices accurately reflect all the available information.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Even such shrewd observers of modern politics as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich told readers of their 1965 classic, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, to forget institutions altogether: “The reader may wonder why we do not discuss the ‘structure of government,’ or perhaps ‘the constitution’ of these totalitarian systems. The reason is that these structures are of very little importance.” Such rigid conceptual frameworks may have helped in understanding Stalinism, but this is too simplistic of a perspective to explain much of what is going on inside today’s authoritarian states, which are busy organizing elections, setting up parliaments, and propping up their judiciaries. If authoritarian regimes are bold enough to allow elections, for reasons of their own, what makes us think they wouldn’t also allow blogs for reasons that Western analysts may not be able to understand yet?


Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

After all, virtually everyone has had experiences with a Machiavellian, and the new test provided the first easy-to-use tool to assess Machiavellian traits and personalities. Even working blindly, without the tools of modern technology, the fellows, through their methods and ideas, would provide a groundbreaking conceptual framework for studying the successfully sinister. Their findings would flesh out a context for the imaging and genetic studies to come. But one major problem persisted. Christie's group was onto a new personality type—a “high Mach.” This was too new a concept to have a relationship with any personality type or disorder listed in the trusty Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the “DSM”—currently on its fourth, text revision edition—the DSM-IV-R).


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

In 1968, he advised Richard Nixon during his successful run for the presidency, and under Gerald Ford he acted as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In 1987, he returned to Washington, this time permanently, to head the Fed and personify the triumph of free market economics. Now Greenspan was on the defensive. An ideology is just a conceptual framework for dealing with reality, he said to Waxman. “To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by that fact.” Waxman interrupted him.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Co-Directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have summarized the field this way in a 1994 descriptive brochure: Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems— programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature. In his new book, How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton, 1997), Steven Pinker describes these specialized computational devices as "mental modules."


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

Sequencing the genome of single cells has made it clear that we’re all mosaics.16,17 For example, researchers at the Salk Institute did single-cell sequencing of brain cells from individuals who had died and found striking differences from one cell to the next.17 Part of this mosaicism is explained by so-called de novo mutations, which occur in cells when they divide over the course of one’s life. We’ve also learned about the remarkable extent of heterogeneity that exists from one cancer cell to another. So moving from the conceptual framework of sequencing an individual’s DNA to that of a cell has already taught us some invaluable, disease-relevant lessons. There are important limitations to acknowledge about sequencing. When a person undergoes sequencing (some are now calling this getting “genomed”) there will typically be about 3.5 million variant bases compared with the human reference genome.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

These are the unacknowledged agorae of modern life. When the automobilecentric, suburban, fast-food, shopping-mall way of life eliminated many of these "third places" from traditional towns and cities around the world, the social fabric of existing communities started shredding. Oldenburg explicitly put a name and conceptual framework on that phenomenon that every virtual communitarian knows instinctively, the power of informal public life: Third places exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

., ‘Neural Synchronization During Face-to-Face Communication’, Journal of Neuroscience 32, no. 45 (November 2012), 16,064–9, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2926-12.201. 38 Emily Green, ‘How technology is harming our ability to feel empathy’, Street Roots, 15 February 2019, https://news.streetroots.org/2019/02/15/how-technology-harming-our-ability-feel-empathy; see also Helen Riess and Liz Neporent, The Empathy Effect (Sounds True Publishing, 2018). 39 F. Grondin, A.M. Lomanowska and P.L. Jackson, ‘Empathy in Computer-Mediated Interactions: A Conceptual Framework for Research and Clinical Practice,’ Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice e12298, https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12298. 40 Kate Murphy, ‘Why Zoom is Terrible’, New York Times, 29 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/sunday-review/zoom-video-conference.html. 41 Hannah Miller et al., ‘“Blissfully happy” or “ready to fight”: Varying interpretations of emoji’, Grouplens Research, University of Minnesota, 2016, https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~bhecht/publications/ICWSM2016_emoji.pdf. 42 M.A.


pages: 511 words: 139,108

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

But Kuhn is mistaken in thinking that holding a paradigm blinds one to the merits of another paradigm, or prevents one from switching paradigms, or indeed prevents one from comprehending two paradigms at the same time. (For a discussion of the broader implications of this error, see Popper's The Myth of the Framework.) Admittedly, there is always a danger that we may underestimate or entirely miss the explanatory power of a new, fundamental theory by evaluating it from within the conceptual framework of the old theory. But it is only a danger, and given enough care and intellectual integrity, we may avoid it. It is also true that people, scientists included, and especially those in positions of power, do tend to become attached to the prevailing way of doing things, and can be suspicious of new ideas when they are quite comfortable with the old ones.


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

From the beginning of shooting, I’d asked Daniel to focus on our characters’ faces so we could catch all the nuances of the emotions they were feeling in this time when you were supposed to pretend like you didn’t care. I wanted the film to be fast-paced, at times almost jarring as it jumped from subject to subject, mirroring the way people experience swiping. I knew I needed to have experts talking, to give the film a conceptual framework and highlight the significance of this unprecedented social shift. And I wanted to include the stories of the young women who had told us about their experiences of sexual assault and harassment by men they’d met on dating apps, because this wasn’t being talked about enough anywhere. I felt grateful to them for telling their stories, which felt like sacred material.


pages: 485 words: 133,655

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Confucians thought that constraining the river into ever higher dikes would lead the river to flow in place, scouring and deepening the channel bed. But in the case of catastrophic breaches, the damage to the population, which entrusted its safety to solid levees, could be unimaginable, posing substantial risks for the legitimacy of central power. These conceptual frameworks therefore implied a different relationship between people, the state, and the territory. The Confucian view prevailed and evolved alongside the management of the Yellow River. From the fifth century BCE, agriculture in the middle Yellow River grew, and as irrigation works and farming increased, more and more artificial levees were needed to constrain the increasingly muddy river downstream.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

This term and laws preventing mixed marriages were then adopted by other German colonies, in East Africa and German Togo in 1906 and 1908 respectively, making the subsequent work of the Nuremberg Laws much simpler for those drafting the legislation, as Olusoga and Erichsen note: ‘The Mischlinge concept provided the lawyers and civil servants with both a conceptual framework and quasi-legal terminology, allowing them to formulate a system by which Germany’s ancient Jewish community, with its deep and complex roots, could be classified, isolated and ultimately extracted.’2 By the mid-1930s there was a veritable army of race scientists and eugenicists operating across the Reich – literally thousands of well-paid and well-funded doctors, lecturers, research supervisors and teachers, ultimately creating the intellectual and scientific authority for the measures Hitler and Himmler were now beginning to contemplate.

I have enormous admiration for the work of all these writers, but this chapter owes a substantial debt to Olusoga and Erichsen’s brilliant research, which forms the backbone of what I’ve written here. 1 ‘The most righteous of all wars is a war with savages …’ Theodore Roosevelt quoted in ‘Theodore Roosevelt, Geopolitics, and Cosmopolitan Ideals’ by Greg Russell, Review of International Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3 (July 2006). 2 ‘The Mischlinge concept provided the lawyers and civil servants with both a conceptual framework and quasi-legal terminology …’ is from The Kaiser’s Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen. Chapter Six: A Coda: The Power of History and the Burning of Books 1 ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings too.’ Heine’s famous words come from his 1821 play Almansor – ‘Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.’ 2 ‘You do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.’


pages: 636 words: 140,406

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, behavioural economics, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, deskilling, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, future of work, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, hive mind, job satisfaction, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, profit maximization, publication bias, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, school choice, selection bias, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

McDaniel, Michael, Frank Schmidt, and John Hunter. 1988. “Job Experience Correlates of Job Performance.” Journal of Applied Psychology 73 (2): 327–30. McKeough, Anne, Judy Lupart, and Anthony Marini, eds. 1995. Teaching for Transfer: Fostering Generalization in Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McMahon, Walter. 1998. “Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of the Social Benefits of Lifelong Learnings.” Education Economics 6 (3): 309–46. McMurrer, Jennifer. 2007. Choices, Changes, and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era. Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy. http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=McMurrer%5FFullReport%5FCurricAndInstruction%5F072407%2Epdf.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Norton, president of Morgan’s First National Bank of New York; and Professor A. Piatt Andrew, head of the NMC staff, who had recently been made an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Taft, and who was a technician with a foot in both the Rockefeller and Morgan camps.31 But of course the conceptual framework for the central bank already was in place long before the Jekyll Island meeting. The architect of that design, Lawrence Laughlin, became the most visible and credible national advocate of the Federal Reserve proposal. Laughlin testified before the Congress and made statements in favor of the proposal put forward by the National Monetary Commission.


pages: 868 words: 149,572

CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric A. Meyer

centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, conceptual framework, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Put another way, it's as though the b element has a z-index of 7,36 while the em's value is 7,-42. These are merely implied conceptual values; they don't conform to anything in the specification. However, such a system helps to illustrate how the overall stacking order is determined. Consider: p#one 10 p#one b 10,-404 p#two b 7,36 p#two 7 p#two em 7,-42 p#three b 1,23 p#three 1 This conceptual framework precisely describes the order in which these elements would be stacked. While the descendants of an element can be above or below that element in the stacking order, they are all grouped together with their ancestor. It is also the case that an element that establishes a stacking context for its descendants is placed at the 0 position of that context's z-axis.


Programming Android by Zigurd Mednieks, Laird Dornin, G. Blake Meike, Masumi Nakamura

anti-pattern, business process, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, general purpose technology, Google Earth, interchangeable parts, iterative process, loose coupling, MVC pattern, revision control, RFID, SQL injection, systems thinking, web application

It replaces records in the database with updated records. Delete The delete method of the ContentProvider class is analogous to the REST DELETE operation. It removes matching records from the database. Tip REST stands for “Representational State Transfer.” It isn’t a formal protocol the way that HTTP is. It is more of a conceptual framework for using HTTP as a basis for easy access to data. While REST implementations may differ, they all strive for simplicity. Android’s content provider API formalizes REST-like operations into an API and is designed in the spirit of REST’s simplicity. You can find more information on REST on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Schivelbusch’s assessment of train travel is an instructive point of comparison here because he is explicitly concerned with the effect of transportation technologies on the collective experience of space and time. according to his thesis, the high speed of train travel fundamentally distorted passengers’ perception of the natural environment by inhibiting their ability to take in the details of their surroundings. at the same time, the train cultivated a new perspective that he calls the panoramic view: one that frames the landscape as an object to be aesthetically contemplated and appreciated, much like a painting.167 This techno-aesthetic practice encouraged the objectification of the landscape and contributed to the development of a broader industrialized consciousness that frames space and time in the abstract.168 Bicycling did not create the same subject/object split as the passenger train, but like train travel it facilitated a unique way of seeing that was both a literal vantage point as well as a conceptual framework that gave meaning to one’s point of view, and by extension, one’s form of mobility. an aptly titled 1895 magazine piece called “Some Thoughts on landscape” hints at some of the ways in which bicycling constructs the landscape as both a subject of auto-mobile desire and an object of the bicyclist’s gaze: Our high pressure, our covetous greed of the minute, have placed the bicycle upon the road in its thousands; and out of evil there has in this way come good, for it is to the green country that the fevered youth of the nation race, with rustling rubber and sharp-sounding bell. as they rush through the air and flash past the village and field, there is borne in upon them the educational germ of a love for land scape; they see, and they cannot help noting, the contrast between smoke-grimed cities and “fresh woods and pastures new.”169 Here one can see bicycling contributing to a specifically aesthetic conceptualization of nature; one that resonated with a population that sought to preserve landscapes through photography. indeed, several companies produced and marketed cameras explicitly for cyclists, including models that could be mounted directly to the bicycle itself.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

But either way, awe figures in much of the phenomenology of psychedelic consciousness, including the mystical experience, the overview effect, self-transcendence, the enrichment of our inner environment, and even the generation of new meanings. As Keltner has written, the overwhelming force and the mystery of awe are such that the experience can’t readily be interpreted according to our accustomed frames of thought. By rocking those conceptual frameworks, awe has the power to change our minds. Three: Depression Something unexpected happened when, early in 2017, Roland Griffiths and Stephen Ross brought the results of their clinical trials to the FDA, hoping to win approval for a larger, phase 3 trial of psilocybin for cancer patients.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

April 15, 1999. be made about overall firm types, rather than being forced to rely on simple judgments that only apply to one specific firm. The result is a system of classification that not only reflects the unique complexion of the military service industry, but also, ultimately, yields theoretically informed findings that cross the political and business arenas. The proviso of any such typology, however, is that it is a conceptual framework rather than a fixed definition of each and every firm. Some firms are clearly placed within one sector. However, similar to other industries and equivalent military functions, other firms lie at the sector borders or offer a range of services within various sectors. Moreover, with ongoing global consolidation into ever larger multinational PMFs, there is a potential growth in the number of these firms, such as Armorgroup, that cross sectors.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

UNDERLYING TENDENCIES AND VARIABLE FORMS: MATURE AND SUBORDINATE FINANCIALIZATION Empirical analysis of financialization in this chapter is undertaken on three levels. First, financialization is gauged in the aggregate with the aim of identifying its general form and features. To this purpose a conceptual framework is developed drawing on the distinction between real and financial accumulation within Marxist political economy. By deploying this framework financialization can be compared across the four reference countries: the US, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Comparison reveals systematic differences in the form of financialization, partly reflecting the traditional contrast between market-based finance, characteristic of the US and the UK, versus bank-based finance characteristic of Japan and Germany.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

The degree of exploitation corresponds to the quantity of surplus labor time, that is, the portion of the working day that extends beyond the time necessary for the worker to produce value equal to the wage he or she is paid. Surplus labor time and the surplus value produced during that time are the key to Marx’s definition of exploitation. This temporal measure gave Marx a clear and convenient conceptual framework and also made his theory directly applicable in his era to the workers’ struggle to shorten the length of the working day. But today, in the paradigm of immaterial production, the theory of value cannot be conceived in terms of measured quantities of time, and so exploitation cannot be understood in these terms.


pages: 525 words: 153,356

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 by Selina Todd

"there is no alternative" (TINA), call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, different worldview, Downton Abbey, financial independence, full employment, income inequality, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, Red Clydeside, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, sexual politics, strikebreaker, The Spirit Level, unemployed young men, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

.), British Fascism. Essays on the Radical Right in Interwar Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980) Reay, D., ‘Surviving in Dangerous Places: Working-class Women, Women’s Studies and Higher Education’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 21, no. 1 (1998) ——‘A Useful Extension of Bourdieu’s Conceptual Framework? Emotional Capital as a Way of Understanding Mothers’ Involvement in Children’s Schooling’, Sociological Review, vol. 48, no. 4 (2000) Saltzman, R., ‘Folklore as Politics in Great Britain: Working-class Critiques of Upper-class Strike Breakers in the 1926 General Strike’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 3 (1994) Savage, M., ‘Affluence and Social Change in the Making of Technocratic Middle-Class Identities: Britain, 1939–55’, Contemporary British History, vol. 22, no. 4 (2008) Smyth, J., ‘Resisting Labour: Unionists, Liberals, and Moderates in Glasgow between the Wars’, Historical Journal, vol. 46, no. 2 (2003) Thane, P., ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’


pages: 499 words: 152,156

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

conceptual framework, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, financial independence, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, land reform, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, Mohammed Bouazizi, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rolodex, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

Before he flew, he visited a bookstore in Chengdu and happened on the memoir of a monk. He was not prepared for the effect it had on him. “I found Buddha to be an inspiration. He invited me to think bravely about this world,” Lin said. “Buddha could challenge any social norms, such as the caste system of India,” he went on. “He rethought the conceptual framework he had from day one.” Lin spent the trip to Thailand in his hotel room, absorbed in the book—“I never even went to the pool”—and when he returned, he began frequenting a Buddhist institute near his apartment in Beijing. His moment of transformation came when he grasped the idea, as he put it, that “this world is a fantasy.”


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

But mass media outlets require such brevity that anything remotely resembling a comprehensive explanation of something as complex as the financial crisis is out of the question. Twelve seconds of TV time constitutes a journalistic essay. While this book tells the story in what I hope is an intelligible manner, its more important goal is to provide a conceptual framework through which both the salient facts and the litany of policy responses can be understood. More concretely, I want to provide answers to the following three critical questions: How Did We Ever Get into Such a Mess? The objective here is not to affix blame, though some of that will inevitably (and deservedly) be done, but rather to highlight and analyze the many mistakes that were made so we don’t repeat them again.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

., Women Teachers: issues and experiences, Open University, 1989, p. 87. 16 Interview with June Hannam by Jim Hinks. 17 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, S3035. 18 ‘Margaret Thatcher interview for the Sun, 28 Feb 1983, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105089, consulted 6 February 2019. 19 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Higher Education, D4736. 20 Ibid. 21 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, A4127. 22 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, D4736. 23 Diane Reay, ‘A useful extension of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework?: Emotional capital as a way of understanding mothers’ involvement in their children’s education’, Sociological Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2000, pp. 579–80; Diane Reay, ‘Doing the dirty work of class? Mothers’ work in support of their children’s schooling’, Sociological Review, vol. 53, no. 2, supplement, 2005, pp. 104–15. 24 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, D4736. 25 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, A3623. 26 Mike Savage et al, Social Class in the 21st Century, Penguin, 2015, pp. 227–9. 27 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, A3623. 28 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, D4736. 29 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, A3623. 30 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, D4736. 31 Ibid. 32 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, D4127. 33 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, A3623.


pages: 499 words: 148,160

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, delta neutral, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, implied volatility, index card, junk bonds, locking in a profit, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, money market fund, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, short selling, Teledyne, transaction costs, uptick rule, yield curve, zero-sum game

Much like chess, it seems only reasonable to expect a few highly skilled market participants to interpret the same information—the current position of the market chessboard, so to speak—differently from the majority, and reach variant conclusions about the probable market direction. In this conceptual framework, mistakes by a majority of less skilled market participants can drive prices to incorrect levels (i.e., prices out of line with the unknown equilibrium level), creating opportunities for more skilled traders. Efficient market hypothesis proponents are absolutely correct in contending that markets are very difficult to beat, but they are right for the wrong reason.


A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

Young was also the first to try, but without complete success, to give a phonetic value to the hieroglyphs making up the two names Ptolemy and Berenice.41 In the end, despite their radically different characters and temperaments, Young and Champollion both made essential, if not quite equal, contributions to decipherment. Young developed the conceptual framework, recognizing the hybrid nature of the demotic script and its connection with hieroglyphics. Had he stuck at the task, and not been distracted by his numerous other scientific interests, he might well have cracked the problem. Instead, it took Champollion’s linguistic abilities and his single-minded focus to solve the riddle.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

As he said, “how futile is the attempt of materialism to find the ‘cause’ of life in any one set of material elements, and how equally futile is the attempt of vitalism to find the significance of the whole in some intangible ‘force’ … Both attempt to explain everything in terms of ‘something else,’ and this in essence amounts to a denial of the reality of the organic beings we actually see and deal with.” But Ritter never really explained what conceptual frameworks organicists would use to understand the beings they observed. Organicism remained more a rhetoric than an organizing principle, and never posed the question that so bedeviled philosophical and scientific vitalists: What does it mean for an organism to be alive? Outside the academy, popularizers continued to pose it, and contented themselves with open-ended answers.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Capital employed always has an equilibrium value, and the entrepreneur must ultimately recognise it. This approach should be incorporated into the methodology of financial decision-making. Some strategies are based on maximising other types of value, for example the capability to cause harm to competitors. They are particularly risky and are outside the conceptual framework of corporate finance. The first reflex when faced with any kind of financial decision is to analyse whether it will create or destroy value. If values are in equilibrium, financial decisions will be immaterial. Does this mean that, ultimately, financing or diversification policies have no impact on value?

Financial synergies do not exist. It is important to understand that the creation of value is not just the outcome of a calculation of returns. It has an economic basis, which is an economic rent that comes out of a strategy, the purpose of which is to “skew” market mechanisms. Accordingly, the conceptual framework of the theory of markets in equilibrium alone fails to explain corporate finance. Signal and agency theory were developed to make up for the shortcomings of the theory of markets in equilibrium. Signal theory is based on the assumption that information is not equally available to all parties at the same time, and that information asymmetry is the rule.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

This dispassionate description of beer contrasts with what became the common Greek attitude, for starting from the fifth century BC, Greeks began to denounce beer as making men “effeminate.” It is possible that the association of beer and effeminacy resulted from the humoral understanding of the body, where men were considered to be warm and dry and women to be cold and moist. Within the same conceptual framework, wine was considered to be a hot beverage (there were some exceptions), so that it aligned with men. Hippocrates considered cereal to be a cold substance, although hot when it was processed as bread. But when later medical writers wrote about beer (Hippocrates did not), they designated it as a cold beverage and therefore more like a woman than a man.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

Lifton, successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which described a cluster of symptoms that was common, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of our veterans. Systematically identifying the symptoms and grouping them together into a disorder finally gave a name to the suffering of people who were overwhelmed by horror and helplessness. With the conceptual framework of PTSD in place, the stage was set for a radical change in our understanding of our patients. This eventually led to an explosion of research and attempts at finding effective treatments. Inspired by the possibilities presented by this new diagnosis, I proposed a study on the biology of traumatic memories to the VA.


pages: 504 words: 89,238

Natural language processing with Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper

bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, duck typing, elephant in my pajamas, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, information retrieval, language acquisition, lolcat, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, P = NP, search inside the book, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, text mining, Turing test, W. E. B. Du Bois

Here’s another pair of examples that we created by computing the bigrams over the text of a children’s story, The Adventures of Buster Brown (included in the Project Gutenberg Selection Corpus): (4) a. He roared with me the pail slip down his back b. The worst part and clumsy looking for whoever heard light You intuitively know that these sequences are “word-salad,” but you probably find it hard to pin down what’s wrong with them. One benefit of studying grammar is that it provides a conceptual framework and vocabulary for spelling out these intuitions. Let’s take a closer look at the sequence the worst part and clumsy looking. This looks like a coordinate structure, where two phrases are joined by a coordinating conjunction such as and, but, or or. Here’s an informal (and simplified) statement of how coordination works syntactically: Coordinate Structure: if v1 and v2 are both phrases of grammatical category X, then v1 and v2 is also a phrase of category X. 8.2 What’s the Use of Syntax?


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. North, Douglass C., and Robert P. Thomas (1973). The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. New York: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C., John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast (1989). Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. North, Douglass C., and Barry R. Weingast (1989). “Constitutions and Commitment: Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England.” Journal of Economic History 49: 803–32. Nove, Alec (1992).


pages: 1,243 words: 167,097

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

This, then, pins the origin of any serious planning for a raid on Dieppe to the last weeks of March and the first week of April.4 At close to 80 pages, this extensive and intricate document displayed the best that the ISTD had to offer. Everything from terrain and targeting information was laid out, which not only provided a conceptual framework for the operation but clearly shows that NID was working hand in glove with Mountbatten’s headquarters to shape and design the Dieppe Raid before the outline or detailed planning commenced. Given the necessary run-up time to produce such a detailed report, it affixes the origins of serious work for a raid on Dieppe to some time within the last ten days of March, which corresponds to the process for target selection outlined by Godfrey: When a target is suggested, it is examined by an examination committee to decide whether it is worth proceeding with.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Cognitive skills valued by educators: Historical content analysis of testing in Ohio. Journal of Educational Research, 96, 101–14. Ghosn, F., Palmer, G., & Bremer, S. 2004. The MID 3 Data Set, 1993–2001: Procedures, coding rules, and description. Conflict Management & Peace Science, 21, 133–54. Giancola, P. R. 2000. Executive functioning: A conceptual framework for alcohol-related aggression. Experimental & Clinical Psychopharmacology, 8, 576–97. Gibbons, A. 1997. Archeologists rediscover cannibals. Science, 277, 635–37. Gigerenzer, G. 2006. Out of the frying pan into the fire: Behavioral reactions to terrorist attacks. Risk Analysis, 26, 347–51.

Newman, M.E.J. 2005. Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law. Contemporary Physics, 46, 323–51. Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. 1996. Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South. New York: HarperCollins. North, D. C., Wallis, J. J., & Weingast, B. R. 2009. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nowak, M. A. 2006. Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 314, 1560–63. Nowak, M. A., May, R. M., & Sigmund, K. 1995. The arithmetic of mutual help. Scientific American, 272, 50–55. Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. 1998.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

Significantly, O’Donnell and Schmitter note that . . . liberalization and democratization are not synonymous, although their historical relationship has been close . . . without the accountability to mass publics and constituent majorities institutionalized under the latter, liberalization may prove to be easily manipulated and retracted at the convenience of those in government. (1986, p. 9) The research of Moore (1966), Therborn (1977), and Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992) is also problematical because they assume that political conflict is always along the lines of class. There is much evidence, however, that a richer conceptual framework is needed to provide a satisfactory general approach to democracy. The framework we develop applies to a much wider set of cases. A long tradition from Moore (1966) and Dahl (1971) onward emphasizes that democracy is not feasible in agrarian societies. Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992, p. 8) explain the reason for this in the following way: “The landed upper-class which were dependent on a large supply of cheap labor were the most consistently anti-democratic force.


pages: 667 words: 186,968

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, conceptual framework, coronavirus, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, index card, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, means of production, scientific management, seminal paper, statistical model, the medium is the message, the scientific method, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

Little medical research was being done in America—although the little that was done was significant—but even that little he had no part of. In Europe science was marching from advance to advance, breakthrough to breakthrough. The most important of these was the germ theory of disease. Proving and elaborating upon the germ theory would ultimately open the way to confronting all infectious disease. It would also create the conceptual framework and technical tools that Welch and others later used to fight influenza. Simply put, the germ theory said that minute living organisms invaded the body, multiplied, and caused disease, and that a specific germ caused a specific disease. There was need for a new theory of disease. As the nineteenth century progressed, as autopsy findings were correlated with symptoms reported during life, as organs from animals and cadavers were put under a microscope, as normal organs were compared to diseased ones, as diseases became more defined, localized, and specific, scientists finally discarded the ideas of systemic illness and the humours of Hippocrates and Galen and began looking for better explanations.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

. $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009. Stewart, Amy. Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2007. Stock, Gregory N., John D. Kasarda, and Noel P. Greis. “Logistics, Strategy and Structure: A Conceptual Framework.” International Journal of Operations & Production Management 18, no. 1–2 (January 1998): 37–52. Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917. Thompson, Wilbur R. A Preface to Urban Economics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. Toffler, Alvin.


pages: 1,387 words: 202,295

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

Andrew Wiles, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, functional programming, Gödel, Escher, Bach, higher-order functions, industrial robot, information retrieval, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, loose coupling, machine translation, Multics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Richard Stallman, Turing machine, wikimedia commons

In effect, map helps establish an abstraction barrier that isolates the implementation of procedures that transform lists from the details of how the elements of the list are extracted and combined. Like the barriers shown in Figure 2.1, this abstraction gives us the flexibility to change the low-level details of how sequences are implemented, while preserving the conceptual framework of operations that transform sequences to sequences. Section 2.2.3 expands on this use of sequences as a framework for organizing programs. Exercise 2.21: The procedure square-list takes a list of numbers as argument and returns a list of the squares of those numbers. (square-list (list 1 2 3 4)) (1 4 9 16) Here are two different definitions of square-list.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

The great divergence: America’s growing inequality crisis and what we can do about it. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Nolan, B. 2007. “Long-term trends in top income shares in Ireland.” In Atkinson and Piketty, eds. 2007a: 501–530. North, Douglass C., Wallis, John J., and Weingast, Barry R. 2009. Violence and social orders: a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nunn, Nathan, and Qian, Nancy. 2010. “The Columbian exchange: a history of disease, food, and ideas.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24: 163–188. Ober, Josiah. 2015a. The rise and fall of classical Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

That’s an irresistible combination, particularly in the context of the developing strategic alliance with U.S. power. JP: You wrote that Henry Kissinger’s memoirs “give the impression of a middle-level manager who has learned to conceal vacuity with pretentious verbiage.” You doubt that he has any subtle “conceptual framework” or global design. Why do such individuals gain such extraordinary reputations, given what you say about his actual abilities? What does this say about how our society operates? NC: Our society is not really based on public participation in decisionmaking in any significant sense. Rather, it is a system of elite decision and periodic public ratification.


pages: 893 words: 199,542

Structure and interpretation of computer programs by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

Andrew Wiles, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, Fermat's Last Theorem, functional programming, Gödel, Escher, Bach, higher-order functions, industrial robot, information retrieval, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, loose coupling, machine translation, Multics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Richard Stallman, Turing machine

In effect, map helps establish an abstraction barrier that isolates the implementation of procedures that transform lists from the details of how the elements of the list are extracted and combined. Like the barriers shown in figure 2.1, this abstraction gives us the flexibility to change the low-level details of how sequences are implemented, while preserving the conceptual framework of operations that transform sequences to sequences. Section 2.2.3 expands on this use of sequences as a framework for organizing programs. Exercise 2.21. The procedure square-list takes a list of numbers as argument and returns a list of the squares of those numbers. (square-list (list 1 2 3 4)) (1 4 9 16) Here are two different definitions of square-list.


Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964) by Unknown

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mars Society, means of production, Norbert Wiener, price mechanism, profit motive, rising living standards, road to serfdom, spinning jenny, technological determinism, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

It does not have to be judge of the rules which it is commissioned to apply. 2) The dissociated judicial element gains more efficiency to the degree that it is made completely technical. It becomes possible to divorce judicial reasoning from a “dangerous empiricism, by con­ fining the infinite diversity of judicial situations to a limited num­ ber of conceptual frameworks.” Fundamental legal institutions thereby derive simplicity and vigor because they are more directly based in the techniques which give them their logical foundation. This logical foundation is doubtless compensated by a certain sclerosis of the legal framework and by a certain stiffness of judicial will.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

In other words, there are a variety of ways that a single event such as a lunch with an old friend can be contextualized. For all of these attributes to be associated with the event, the brain has to toss and turn and analyze the experience after it happens, extracting and sorting information in complex ways. And this new memory needs to be integrated into existing conceptual frameworks, integrated into old memories previously stored in the brain (shrimp is seafood, Jim Ferguson is a friend from high school, good table manners do not include wiping shrimp off your mouth with the tablecloth). In the last few years, we’ve gained a more nuanced understanding that these different processes are accomplished during distinct phases of sleep.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement (sperm, menstrual blood, urine, fecal matter) and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvellous: a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud can be seen as characteristic of this unity. BATAILLE, “THE USE VALUE OF D.A.F. DE SADE”1 Having looked at money’s relationship to capital in Chapter 2, its configuration as a form of debt in Chapter 3, and its underlying structures of guilt in Chapter 4, we now turn to a fourth conceptual framework for exploring the theory of money, namely, notions that connect it to waste. This conception of money emerges with particular clarity when it is viewed through the perspective of general economy. The central thinker here is Georges Bataille, who although he remains largely a peripheral figure in anthropology and sociology, is best known for his theory of expenditure and the accursed share.


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Her task was to investigate how those changes had affected in turn the distribution, prevalence, and spillover likelihood of the virus. Plowright’s project, like much work in ecology these days, entailed a combination of data-gathering from the field and mathematical modeling by computer. The basic conceptual framework, she explained, “was developed by two guys in the 1920s, Kermack and McKendrick.” She meant the SIR model (susceptible-infected-recovered), which I described earlier. Having alluded to the intellectual heritage, she began talking about susceptible individuals, infected individuals, and recovered individuals in a given bat population.


pages: 1,085 words: 219,144

Solr in Action by Trey Grainger, Timothy Potter

business intelligence, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fault tolerance, finite state, full text search, functional programming, glass ceiling, information retrieval, machine readable, natural language processing, openstreetmap, performance metric, premature optimization, recommendation engine, web application

We took a deep dive into Solr relevancy, laying out the default relevancy formula Solr uses and explaining conceptually how each piece of relevancy scoring works and why it exists. We then provided a brief overview of the concepts of Precision and Recall, which serve as two opposing forces within the field of information retrieval and provide us with a good conceptual framework from which to judge whether or not our search results are meeting our goals. Finally, we discussed key concepts for how Solr scales, including discussions of content denormalization within documents and distributed searching to ensure that query execution can be parallelized to maintain or decrease search time, even as content grows beyond what can be reasonably handled by a single machine.


pages: 695 words: 219,110

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

If that were so, our universe would be but one among many that sprouted—and perhaps continue to sprout—when chance fluctuations made the conditions right for an inflationary burst, as illustrated in Figure 11.2. As these other universes would likely be forever separate from ours, it’s hard to imagine how we would ever establish whether this “multiverse” picture is true. However, as a conceptual framework, it’s both rich and tantalizing. Among other things, it suggests a possible shift in how we think about cosmology: In Chapter 10, I described inflation as a “front end” to the standard big bang theory, in which the bang is identified with a fleeting burst of rapid expansion. But if we think of the inflationary sprouting of each new universe in Figure 11.2 as its own bang, then inflation itself is best viewed as the overarching cosmological framework within which big bang–like evolutions happen, bubble by bubble.


pages: 1,294 words: 210,361

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

Varmus and Bishop’s theory—that oncogenes were activated cellular genes—was recognized to be widely true for many forms of cancer. And the two-hit hypothesis—that tumor suppressors were genes that needed to be inactivated in both chromosomes—was also found to be widely applicable in cancer. A rather general conceptual framework for carcinogenesis was slowly becoming apparent. The cancer cell was a broken, deranged machine. Oncogenes were its jammed accelerators and inactivated tumor suppressors its missing brakes.* In the late 1980s, yet another line of research, resurrected from the past, yielded a further bounty of cancer-linked genes.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Irwin, eds. The Computer Utility: Implications for Higher Education. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1969. Dwyer, D. “We’re in This Together.” Educational Leadership 54(3), 1996, 24–26. Ellul, J. The Technological Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964. Engelbart, D. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1962. Evans, Rupert. Another String to My Bow. Urbana, IL: Prairie Publications, 2001. Fields, C., and J. Paris. “Hardware-Software,” in Computer-Based Instruction: A State-of-the-Art Assessment, H. F. O’Neill, Jr., ed. New York: Academic Press, 1981, 65–90.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

But, as Kitcher says, the sociobiology of nonhuman animals has always been conducted with greater care and caution. (See also Ruse 1985.) In fact, it includes some of the most important (and widely heralded) advances in recent theoretical biology, such as the classic papers of Hamilton, Trivers, and Maynard Smith. Hamilton could be said to have inaugurated the field with his introduction of the conceptual framework of kin selection, which solved, among other things, many of Darwin's puzzles about eusociality in insects — the way ants, bees, and termites live "selflessly" in large colonies, most of them sterile servants to a single fertile queen. But Hamilton's theory didn't solve all the problems, and among Richard Alexander's important contributions was his characterization of the conditions under which eusocial mammals {484} might evolve — a "prediction" stunningly confirmed by the subsequent studies of the amazing South African naked mole rats (Sherman, Jarvis, and Alexander 1991).


Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

active measures, Amazon Web Services, billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, blockchain, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, distributed ledger, Donald Knuth, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, exponential backoff, fake news, fault tolerance, finite state, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, full text search, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Hacker News, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kubernetes, Large Hadron Collider, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, no silver bullet, operational security, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, place-making, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, social web, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SPARQL, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, web application, WebSocket, wikimedia commons

Later in the book, in Part III, we will look at patterns for systems that consist of sev‐ eral components working together, such as the one in Figure 1-1. References [1] Michael Stonebraker and Uğur Çetintemel: “‘One Size Fits All’: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone,” at 21st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2005. [2] Walter L. Heimerdinger and Charles B. Weinstock: “A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance,” Technical Report CMU/SEI-92-TR-033, Software Engi‐ neering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, October 1992. [3] Ding Yuan, Yu Luo, Xin Zhuang, et al.: “Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Criti‐ cal Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Sys‐ tems,” at 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), October 2014. [4] Yury Izrailevsky and Ariel Tseitlin: “The Netflix Simian Army,” techblog.net‐ flix.com, July 19, 2011. [5] Daniel Ford, François Labelle, Florentina I.


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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems.11 They also accused Wilson of discussing “the salutary advantages of genocide” and of making “institutions such as slavery…seem natural in human societies because of their ‘universal’ existence in the biological kingdom.” In case the connection wasn’t clear enough, one of the signatories wrote elsewhere that “in the last analysis it was sociobiological scholarship…that provided the conceptual framework by which eugenic theory was transformed into genocidal practice” in Nazi Germany.12 One can certainly find things to criticize in the final chapter of Sociobiology. We now know that some of Wilson’s universals are inaccurate or too coarsely stated, and his claim that moral reasoning will someday be superseded by evolutionary biology is surely wrong.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

We are shrinking the key feature size of technology, in accordance with the law of accelerating returns, at the exponential rate of approximately a factor of four per linear dimension per decade.68 At this rate the key feature sizes for most electronic and many mechanical technologies will be in the nanotechnology range—generally considered to be under one hundred nanometers—by the 2020s. (Electronics has already dipped below this threshold, although not yet in three-dimensional structures and not yet self-assembling.) Meanwhile rapid progress has been made, particularly in the last several years, in preparing the conceptual framework and design ideas for the coming age of nanotechnology. As important as the biotechnology revolution discussed above will be, once its methods are fully mature, limits will be encountered in biology itself. Although biological systems are remarkable in their cleverness, we have also discovered that they are dramatically suboptimal.


pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

Robin: I don’t like the term “computer scientist” because it puts too much emphasis on the computer, and I think the computer is just an instance of informatic behaviour, so I would say “informatic scientist.” Of course it depends on what you mean by informatics. I tend to think it means acts of calculation and communication, communication being very important. What is your role as informatic scientist? Robin: My role, I think, is to try to create a conceptual framework within which analysis can happen. To do this you have to take account of what is actually happening in software, like for example this notion of ubiquitous system, but you try to abstract from that in some ways. This is truly difficult; you will make mistakes, you will invent the wrong concepts, they won’t fly in a sense, they won’t scale up.


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Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Rand agreed that new facts may sometimes create new truths but insisted that fundamental concepts, such as, “A thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature,” remain permanently and self-evidently true. Their spirited exchanges resembled those she’d had with Paterson in the 1940s, except that, by this time, Rand’s conceptual framework was set and nothing would alter her thinking. Hospers had the unusual privilege of meeting with her alone. But he also sat in on a number of NBI lectures and even gave one or two himself. At one lecture he attended, on aesthetics, which was his academic specialty, he was almost shouted down when, speaking from the floor, he tried to defend the artistry of William Faulkner and Pablo Picasso, which the speaker had casually “relegated to the fcrap-heap.”


The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

always be closing, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, business climate, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, database schema, discounted cash flows, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, friendly fire, functional programming, hiring and firing, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, machine readable, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, the scientific method, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, web application, Y2K

And as we’ve stated throughout this book thus far, our jobs are to maximize—not destroy— shareholder value. In this chapter, we will give our definition of management and define some elements and characteristics of great managers. From there, we will move on to describe the need for focusing on and continually improving and upgrading one’s team, and to provide a conceptual framework to accomplish that task. We’ll then move to a description of the importance of measurements and metrics within management and provide a tool for your consideration to tie metrics to the creation of shareholder wealth (the ultimate metric). We end this chapter with the need for management to remove obstacles for teams so that they can reach their objectives. 89 90 C HAPTER 5 M ANAGEMENT 101 What Is Management?


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Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

“An economic theory of the rise of the Western world.” Economic History Review 23: 1–17. North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert P. 1973. The rise of the Western world: A new economic history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C., Wallis, John J., and Weingast, Barry R. 2009. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. New York: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C. and Weingast, Barry R. 1989. “Constitutions and commitment: The evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England.” Journal of Economic History 49: 803–32. North, John A. 1981.


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Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann

active measures, Amazon Web Services, billion-dollar mistake, bitcoin, blockchain, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, distributed ledger, Donald Knuth, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, exponential backoff, fake news, fault tolerance, finite state, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, full text search, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Hacker News, informal economy, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, iterative process, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kubernetes, Large Hadron Collider, level 1 cache, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, microservices, natural language processing, Network effects, no silver bullet, operational security, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, place-making, premature optimization, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, social web, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SPARQL, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, web application, WebSocket, wikimedia commons

In practice, the running time is often longer, due to skew (data not being spread evenly across worker processes) and needing to wait for the slowest task to complete. References [1] Michael Stonebraker and Uğur Çetintemel: “‘One Size Fits All’: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone,” at 21st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2005. [2] Walter L. Heimerdinger and Charles B. Weinstock: “A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance,” Technical Report CMU/SEI-92-TR-033, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, October 1992. [3] Ding Yuan, Yu Luo, Xin Zhuang, et al.: “Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems,” at 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), October 2014


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Why we reason: Intention-alignment and the genesis of human rationality. Biology and Philosophy, 31, 685–704. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. 2016. Populist-authoritarianism. https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/populistauthoritarianism/. North, D. C., Wallis, J. J., & Weingast, B. R. 2009. Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. New York: Cambridge University Press. Norvig, P. 2015. Ask not can machines think, ask how machines fit into the mechanisms we design. Edge. https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26055. Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York: Basic Books.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

34 Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the apparent uniformity of the Ukrainian mega-sites arose from the bottom up, through processes of local decision-making.35 This would have to mean that members of individual households – or at least, their neighbourhood representatives – shared a conceptual framework for the settlement as a whole. We can also safely infer that this framework was based on the image of a circle and its properties of transformation. To understand how the citizens put this mental image into effect, translating it into a workable social reality at such enormous scales, we cannot rely on archaeology alone.


pages: 764 words: 261,694

The Elements of Statistical Learning (Springer Series in Statistics) by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jerome Friedman

algorithmic bias, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, data science, G4S, Geoffrey Hinton, greed is good, higher-order functions, linear programming, p-value, pattern recognition, random walk, selection bias, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, The Wisdom of Crowds

The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book’s coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 65.4 (2009b), pp. 72–81. ———. “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2010.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 66.1 (2010) pp. 74–81. North, Douglass. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton, 1981. North, Douglass, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Norton, Christopher, and Kidong Bae. “The Movius Line Sensu Lato (Norton et al., 2006) Further Assessed and Defined.” Journal of Human Evolution 55 (2008), pp. 1148–50. Norwich, John Julius. The Normans in Sicily.


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Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Shin Bet, “Elimination of the Awadallah Brothers and Deciphering the Archive of the Military Arm of Hamas in Judea and Samaria,” March 2014 (author’s archive, received from “Twins”). “the best operational chief the agency had ever had” Interview with Ayalon, January 21, 2013. That man was Yuval Diskin Diskin introduced a new conceptual framework into the Shin Bet: Most terror attacks, especially suicide attacks, are preceded by a number of actions by the terrorist organizations that are largely similar from one attack to the next. These actions, Diskin argued, leave a trail behind them in both the digital and the physical world. If they can be defined and identified, it’s possible to stop a future attack in its early stages.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Hew Strachan notes how Jomini’s confidence in his principles, his “rational and managerial,” “prospective and purposeful” theory of war and self-contained view of battle appealed to generations of American generals and admirals.12 Clausewitz’s Strategy In On War, Clausewitz was attempting something very ambitious. More than a textbook for an aspiring general, this was a whole theory of war. His achievement was to develop a conceptual framework that captured war’s essence sufficiently for subsequent generations to return to it when seeking to make sense of the conflicts of their own time. The ambiguities and tensions in On War allowed Marxists, Nazis, and liberals to claim it as authoritative support for their own theories and strategies.13 Even those who considered On War wrongheaded and out of date entered into direct competition, as if their own credibility depended on undermining Clausewitz.14 Contributing to the advanced scholarship on Clausewitz now requires discussing the adequacy of the available translations, the interaction of biography and intellectual development, what might be read into occasional phrases that are suggestive of larger thoughts, and the dual meanings carried by key concepts and their application in particular cases.15 With this in mind, we can explore the theory of strategy that emerged from Clausewitz’s theory of war.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

And Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Moscow Arts Theatre.”86 Together, Raisa and Mikhail went to bookstores, museums, and exhibits of foreign art.87 “By the third year, he knew as much about art, literature, culture and sports as anyone in the class,” remembered Kolchanov. “Of course,” Mikhaleva conceded, “Raisa Maksimovna played an early role in his cultural development.”88 She “had read more philosophy than I had,” Gorbachev recalled, and “was always there alongside me. I didn’t just learn historical facts, but tried to put them in a philosophical or conceptual framework.”89 At MGU, students studied the great philosophers in textbooks, outlines, and carefully selected translations. But Raisa insisted on trying to read Hegel, Fichte, and Kant in the original German, and recruited Mikhail to help her.90 Raisa tried to read Western political theorists in primary sources—Thomas Jefferson, for example, whose vow of “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man” made a great impression on Gorbachev.”91 “She read more political theory books than he did,” Liberman recalled.


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Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury

accelerated depreciation, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, ASML, barriers to entry, Basel III, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, energy security, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two and twenty, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Discuss why the ranking of industries by growth varies more over time than their ranking by ROIC. 8. If growth from gaining market share through product promotion and pricing rarely creates much value, why do most consumer goods companies put so much effort into it? Part Two Core Valuation Techniques 8 Frameworks for Valuation In Part One, we built a conceptual framework to show what drives the creation of value. A company’s value stems from its ability to earn a healthy return on invested capital (ROIC) and its ability to grow. Healthy rates of return and growth produce high cash flows, the ultimate source of value. Part Two offers a step-by-step guide for analyzing and valuing a company in practice, including technical details for properly measuring and interpreting the drivers of value.


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Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Each new layer is built from all those nodes that (i) have not already been discovered in earlier layers, and that (ii) have an edge to some node in the previous layer. This technique is called breadth-first search, since it searches the graph outward from a starting node, reaching the closest nodes first. In addition to providing a method of determining distances, it can also serve as a useful conceptual framework to organize the structure of a graph, arranging the nodes based on their distances from a fixed starting point. 2.3. DISTANCE AND BREADTH-FIRST SEARCH 43 Of course, despite the social-network metaphor we used to describe breadth-first search, the process can be applied to any graph: one just keeps discovering nodes layer-by-layer, building each new layer from the nodes that are connected to at least one node in the previous layer.


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The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

The hunter had pushed his quarry out of the long grass: rather than going after him on regulatory detail, he was gunning for nothing less than his entire ideology. Now Greenspan made a fatal error. Rather than unpicking Waxman’s exaggerations, he urged him to refine his thoughts on the nature of ideology. Ideology, Greenspan explained earnestly, was “a conceptual framework . . . [governing] . . . the way people deal with reality. “Everyone has one,” Greenspan continued. “You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. “The question is, whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw, I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by that fact.”


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Be careful that you don’t wait and learn that a competitor has moved first.17 Given these hurdles, you can understand why systematic, quantitative valuation of real options is restricted mostly to well-structured problems like the examples in this chapter. The qualitative implications of real options are widely appreciated, however. Real options give the financial manager a conceptual framework for strategic planning and thinking about capital investments. If you can identify and understand real options, you will be a more sophisticated consumer of DCF analysis and better equipped to invest your company’s money wisely. Understanding real options also pays off when you can create real options, adding value by adding flexibility to the company’s investments and operations.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

The Allied scheme of history grew naturally out of the politics and sympathies of two world wars, and has never been consciously or precisely formulated. In the hurly-burly of free societies it could never establish a monopoly, nor has it ever been systematically contested. Yet half a century after the Second World War it was everywhere evident in academic discussions and, perhaps unknowingly, in the conceptual framework which informs the policy decisions of governments. It was the natural residue of a state of affairs where Allied soldiers could be formally arrested for saying that Hitler and Stalin ‘are equally evil’.104 In the academic sphere, the Allied scheme can be seen at work in institutional priorities and structures, as well as in debates on particular issues.