By Ryan Parmenter. Ever plodded through flood waters to get to a conference? In late January, the Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) held their 3rd annual conference in Venice, Italy at the impressive Ca’ Foscari University. More than 200 experts from universities, governments and agencies converged to discuss the role that fiscal policies can play in greening growth. With the streets filling rapidly with water, nature (influenced by a changing climate) provided extra motivation to act immediately on this issue as participants flocked to indoor heaters and radiators to dry out their drenched shoes and socks. More...

Today’s post is the first of two articles by Rupert Read, Reader in Philosophy in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Languages at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House and parliamentary candidate for Cambridge for the UK Green Party.
Piketty’s alleged-updating of Marx, Capital in the 21st century, is taking the intellectual world by storm. I’m delighted that such an improbable happening can occur in our rather-impoverished public sphere, and pleased to cheer him on. More...

By Rupert Read. Piketty has shied away from grasping the uncomfortable implication of his own data: that growthist capitalism is an engine for inequality both in the present and over much longer timescales. For growthist capitalism – and there is no other kind – systematically leads to inequality. It leads to inequality-in-the-future in part because the exponential return on debt, so as not to lead to excessive human exploitation, has instead relied on exploitation of the planet as an alternative property-right-claim to reduce the cumulative impact of the impossibility of paying returns to money: but this exploitation results in brutally depleting the future. And it leads to inequality-in-the-present in part because we still insist on paying returns to money anyway, and in most of the world are no closer to implementing a debt-jubilee or even a debt-audit than we were in 2007. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Allerject epinephrine
Allerject, 2015/02/16
As long as I have been giving talks I have been talking about the idea of learning being embedded in objects (crediting Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction). My favorite story was always the fishing pole that teaches you to fish. Then last year we actually saw the teaching tennis racket. Now they're becoming more and more commonplace. My colleague Rod Savoie points to this item, a "new epinephrine tool, an example of Performance Support. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rights, restrictions and photos of Cats
Stuart Myles, W3C | ODRL | Slideshare, 2015/02/13

I haven't covered the nuances of version upgrades - Open Digital Rights Language is in final comments for version 2.1 - but the spectrum of automated rights referencing is maturing gradually. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
Jon Ronson, New York Times, 2015/02/13

Around 13 months ago Justine Sacco was on her way to South Africa when she sent off a tweet from Heathrow that for all appearances was insensitive and racist. The Twittersphere descended on her while she sat unknowing on a 12 hour flight and by the time she landed she was vilified and fired from her public relations job. This article reports on the fallout. A related article, posted by Gawker Media's Sam Biddle has a similar theme. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The best way to win an argument
Tom Stafford, BBC | Future, 2015/02/10
As Doug Belshaw summarizes, "Basically, get your 'opponent' to explain step-by-step how their position would work in practice (and avoid doing likewise)." In my case, however, all you'll get is a detailed explanation of how it would work and why I'm right. More...