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As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at…
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I walked into the open-plan office upstairs and heard the girls mournfully talking about how the new printer was no good. I asked whether it was slow, or had poor print quality. No: they didn’t like the newly upgraded printer’s song, which was mechanical and annoying. The old printer’s noise had been repetitive but musical,…
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Plick is an interactive building toy. It is made of different robotic parts that are connected through elastic wiring. The behavior of the toy can be “programmed” by clicking the various parts in different combinations. The connection is made with this special elastic wiring that allows the toy to be attached to everyday objects, to…
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we have the wrong models of motivation and how we understand business and education. What has changed and what we ought to do about it? Looked at 50 years of research in behavioral psychology and in recent years a little bit in behavioral economics. What it says is that the classic set of motivators we…
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The neoliberal self as personal brand first appeared in business self-help literature. In 1997, management guru Tom Peters wrote the definitive treatise on it for the business magazine Fast Company, “The Brand Called You,” which advises: “You’re not a worker…You are not defined by your job title, and you’re not confined by your job description.…
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Social media, besides serving as an omnipresent factory and distribution center for immaterial labor, also supplies a scoreboard by which we can track our performance in the attention economy—number of Twitter followers, number of comments on a recent Facebook update, number of reblogs on a Tumblr post, et cetera. Because there are so many options,…