Interesting. This open blog channel lists companies that are talked about by bloggers, along with indications on where to find the links. Here's the bilingual about page.
Stones Self-Organize into Circles. Scientific American reports that scientists feel they've found an explanation to how stones manage to self-organize. In many polar and high alpine areas stones form strange circular patterns. Now they've identified how that might take place quite naturally through repeated freezing and thawing. Well, self organization IS the most natural thing in the world, whatever the medium. [Ming's Metalogue]
It seems very likely that the needed essential innovation in healthcare is sociological, more than technological innovation, more than economic innovation. We have more advanced medical technology than we can currently deliver to patients. We spend abut twice as much per person on healthcare delivery in the US as is spent in Great Britain and there is little to indicate our patients have better health or higher satisfaction as a result. The sociological innovation will be discovering how to cooperate. Some community will discover how they can cooperate among providers and with patients. That is the highly leveraged innovation. That community will change everything for the rest. The sciences of complex adaptive systems and social networks need to come together. To these we need to add the art of community conversations.
Is this mob just too smart?. Collective Detective, www.collectivedetective.org, is an online community dedicated to Collective Gaming and Immersive Entertainment. Collective Detective members who joined together to play Terraquest, www.terraquest1.com, an online game by MindQuest Entertainment, solved the first phase of the game only Three days after Terraquest's launch. Phase One, offering a $25,000 prize for it's solution, was scheduled to last for a month. However, the organized "Detectives" on Collective Detective, managed to pool information and rapidly sort through clues, leading them to the solution, long before the planned phase conclusion. There are five phases remaining in the game.
Collective Detective, located at www.collectivedetective.org, is a subscription based, member driven community, custom developed for the Immersive Entertainment genre. Collective Detective provides the community with a forum for "human information filtering," a unique problem-solving strategy consisting of group discussion, collective research and real-time information sharing. [Smart Mobs]
I wrote about a similar story a while back. Imagine if we could harness this kind of collective commitment in the real world instead of just in games. Solve wicked problems in months instead of decades. But everyone is focusing on a different problem, it seems. Maybe a group should form and agree to order them and then tackle them one after the other. But this world's problems are not easy to state. Perhaps what we need to really get our act together is a threat that is imminent and really obvious to everyone.
