moritherapy/technology

Something I've often thought about: The connection between the deeply democratic, almost anarchistic quality of open source, and peace and social justice. From the page: "Our efforts in search of peace, although well intentioned and energetically pursued, appear destined to the fate of Sisyphus who was condemned to roll a boulder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back over him as he reached the top. It is not for lack of trying, but the Peace we seek always seems beyond our grasp.

Perhaps we are working too hard in the pursuit of something that will arrive all by itself, given sufficient space and time? Fond hope? Dangerous delusion? Outrageous possibility? Or â€" a workable reality requiring only that we give up our eternal (and illusory) quest for control?

Based upon the serendipitous and remarkable discovery of twenty years†experience with Open Space Technology, the outrageous possibility comes tantalizingly close to being an established fact. Through thousands of applications in 107 countries, groups of all sorts and sizes (up to 2000 people) have discovered that hugely complex and conflicted issues can be dealt with productively in an environment of respect, hope, trust â€" and even a degree of intimacy and affection amongst prior sworn enemies. Even more remarkably, all of this occurred without prior training in conflict resolution or the intervention of an army of facilitators and mediators. Observably, it seems to happen all by itself. The people do it themselves with minimal to no assistance. Some have called it magic."

My Russian blogger, Twitter and SU friend Svetlana asks this important question about news consumption: there are many things that matter to people on Earth and they are not necessary related to technology and web 2.0. I have come up with some kind of solution - I will create a virtual friend on FriendFeed and will feed myself some local news using it not to keep myself totally disconnected from reality. And if you are a tech blogger yourself, share your thoughts in the comments please: do you feel this kind of imbalance in your news consumption as well and if so are you concerned about it?"

Getting Wordle to help you with your mission statement. Like this one here: "We are called to be Godpersons who bring Life to the World."

A very intriguing post on how Twitters both helps and wastes time.

Very thoughtfully written insights on technology as a culture versus technology as a business, with interesting comments, too, hauling in Gladwell's Tipping Point to help think about the whole thing.

"Welcome to the RobotCub website - home of the iCub. RobotCub is a 5 years long project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 "Cognition". Our main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 2 year old child: the iCub. This is an open project in many different ways: it will distribute its platform openly, it will develop software open-source, and we are open to including new partners and form collaboration worldwide."

"Nanotechnology researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing a shirt that harvests energy from the wearer's physical motion and converts it into electricity for powering small electronic devices worn by soldiers in the field, hikers and other users."