Alex Steffen challenges the Transition Town meme. There's just no way to see it as anything other than terrific that people are coming together, recognizing the magnitude of the problems we face, and looking for paths to more resilient prosperity... Yet, ultimately, the Transition Town approach stifles its own potential impact. The Transition movement seems saturated with what Michael Lerner called "surplus powerlessness" disguised as practicality. All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse... and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap... Even at its most ambitious, it generally focuses on building alternative systems (say, starting a local currency (LETS) scheme) rather than reforming the larger systems that shape life all around us (say, starting an actual Credit Union or rewriting banking regulations)... Worse, the strategy implicit in this vision of transitioning - that there can be local soft landings in the event of a global hard crash, that indeed the only proper scale at which to prepare for a soft landing is at the local level, and that perhaps collapse will solve some of our problems - is delusional. Collapse is not a tool for social change. It's essentially impossible to look at history and find a case where large-scale collapse (Collapse Of Complex Societies) has lead to anything other than lots of destruction, hunger, disease, suffering and a decline into widespread violence and warlordism. If you want to see what happens when large numbers of urban people encounter situational collapse, look at what happened in Liber Ia. Anyone who thinks an energy descent plan prepared by a community group future-proofs them against people like Charles Taylor has simply taken a vacation from reality... What we need is a movement of local efforts aimed at changing things that matter at scales that matter... While it is true that organized greed beats unorganized democracy every time, it's also true that organized, educated, passionate democracy is the most powerful political force ever seen, and we live amidst an exploding proliferation of tools for organizing our communities, sharing our knowledge and connecting our passions... To fight the Powers That Be, we need to see ourselves as the powers that will be, building the future we want. (more)

Larry Summers has come to Silicon Valley. Last week he joined the board of SquareUp, and now he's joined Marc Andreessen's firm. In his new role, Mr. Summers will help the firm’s portfolio companies navigate economic and geopolitical issues and the intricacies of various markets, like education, financial services and telecommunications. Meaning, he's a political fixer, based on his connections. “I don’t want to be a Rolodex man or a door opener,” he said. “I am interested in making contributions as a thinker.” Yeah, right.

The "HoneyComb" version of Android may be for Tablet-s rather than Mobile-s. (more)

sharing files (PayLoad) across people (or even just computers) (more)

The Libertarian Party. (more)

Object-Relational mapper (and more general SQL toolkit) in Python (more)

aka Grand Old Party, Republican Party (of US)

Timothy Appnel's Tiki Text is yet another lite-markup (SmartAscii) notation similar to Wiki Markup or Structured Text. He lists other markups he considered/rejected, but doesn't go into detail on why, which is a shame. I'd like to see some convergence of a "standard".

In 1999, the Institute Of Medicine issued a report (fulltext ) on Medical Error-s, estimating ~100k deaths/year, though that estimate has been disputed.

Best Practices? (more)

Jon Udell on Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto. (more)

doctor and writer (more)

having work performed by non-employees: consultants (Free Agent), contractors, vendors, etc. (more)

If I want to move Student Wiki Web forward, what do I build it on? WagN and Tiddly Space both seem promising, the way they both build Structured Wiki and Transclusion support up from atomic MicroContent (Node Web). (more)

Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule (maker of IPhone/IOS music apps like Ocarina, etc.), has been giving talks about how they develop cool products (Product Development). They got their start working with Chuck. Strong Lean Startup mentality (though note they were starting on top of Chuck which had been developed at a university over years).

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic thinks that having a "disposable Start Up" mentality (like Caterina Fake?) is immoral. His most recent Pivot was 2011-02-15-SeesmicSalesforceSocialCrm. How big a pivot defines a totally new venture, and what are the pros/cons (for employees, users, shareholders) of bringing along the legacy vs starting fresh?

Social Media app maker Seesmic has raised $4 million in new funding in a round led by SalesforceCom, a deal that the startup says will help it reach more enterprise users. Seesmic, which has now raised $16 million in total, began working with Salesforce.com last year, when it integrated Chatt Er — the CRM giant’s internal social media tool — into Seesmic Desktop. Billed as a “Facebook for the Enterprise,” Chatter competes with the likes of Yamm Er and SocialText, but has the advantage of being sold into Salesforce.com’s existing base of hundreds of thousands of business users.

Commercial Hotspot vendor/network (more)

Framework/environment for building distributed (P2P) Rich Client Collaboration Ware applications. (more)

Wiki junkie (more)