Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: open access – Page 10

Colorado Celebrating Space Exploration

Yesterday, March 25 2013, the Colorado Legislature passed a resolution making March 25, Aerospace Day. What a great way to celebrate Colorado’s participation in space endeavors. The state is the second largest employer of space related companies. Thanks to Colorado Space Business Roundtable (CSBR), the Colorado Space Coalition (CSC), the Rocky Mountain AIAA (RMAIAA), and the many sponsors who helped make this possible.

The sponsors are Aurora Chamber of Commerce, Ball Aerospace Technologies, GH Phipps Construction, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Metro State University of Denver, United Launch Alliance, Red Canyon Software, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Webster University, and the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum.

Picture of the Colorado Senate just after passing the resolution.

Picture of the Colorado House of Representative congratulating CSBR, CSC & RMAIAA just after having passed the resolution.

If we are to become a space faring civilization it is important to celebrate our efforts in space endeavors. Our Colorado legislature recognized the need and passed the resolution to make March 25 Colorado’s Aerospace Day. I hope all the other states will would join Colorado and make March 25 Aerospace Day, and one day March 25 will be the national Aerospace Day.

———————-

I received some photos from Michael Piccone. Here they are

Picture of the inside Capitol Hill showing some of the attendees visiting with the exhibitors.

Picture of 60+ of us who attended. There were more, and we were the ones who posed for this photo.

Close up of on of our state senators.

Some of the people who planned and made this event and resolution possible. They are from CSBR, CSC, Colorado Legislature, Lockheed, Boeing, Wings Over the Rockies.…

——————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author of the 12-year study An Introduction to Gravity Modification

2012 was Great and may 2013 be Extraordinary

May peace break into your home and may thieves come to steal your debts.
May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills.
May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips!
May happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy
May the problems you had, forget your home address!

In simple words .….….……May 2013 be EXTRAORDINARY … the best year of your life!!! Simply the best New Year greeting anyone has sent to me. This was from Robert White of Extraordinary People.

This morning I checked the Lifeboat stats for 2012. When I started blogging for Lifeboat at the end of July, we ended July 2012 with 42,771 unique visitors. We closed 2012 with 90,920 unique visitors for the month December. Wow! Our blogging has become more relevant, and more thought provoking. As a community of bloggers (with the exception of one) we have moved away from the 3 Cs of pseudoscience. Clouding the field. Confusing the public’s perception. Chasing away talent.

How did we do this? By backing up our discussions with hard facts, robust debate and real numbers. From years if not decades of investigation in our field of research. By speaking from our own unique experience. By sharing that unique experience with our readers.

Once again, may 2013 be an extraordinary year.

—————————————————————————————————

Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

GMO Armaggedon

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre87f15x-us-california-gmo/

Filthy Lucre will certainly destroy us all if we cannot even pass a law that makes food companies tell us what they are feeding us.

OpenOffice / LibreOffice & A Warning For Futurists

I spend most of my time thinking about software, and occasionally I come across issues that are relevant to futurists. I wrote my book about the future of software in OpenOffice, and needed many of its features. It might not be the only writing / spreadsheet / diagramming / presentation, etc. tool in your toolbox, but it is a worthy one. OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the best open standard for these sorts of scenarios and LibreOffice is currently the premier tool to handle that format. I suspect many of the readers of Lifeboat have a variant installed, but don’t know much of the details of what is going on.

The OpenOffice situation has been a mess for many years. Sun didn’t foster a community of developers around their work. In fact, they didn’t listen to the community when it told them what to do. So about 18 months ago, after Oracle purchased Sun and made the situation worse, the LibreOffice fork was created with most of the best outside developers. LibreOffice quickly became the version embraced by the Linux community as many of the outside developers were funded by the Linux distros themselves. After realizing their mess and watching LibreOffice take off within the free software community, Oracle decided to fire all their engineers (50) and hand the trademark and a copy of the code over to IBM / Apache.

Now it would be natural to imagine that this should be handed over to LibreOffice, and have all interested parties join up with this effort. But that is not what is happening. There are employees out there whose job it is to help Linux, but they are actually hurting it. You can read more details on a Linux blog article I wrote here. I also post this message as a reminder about how working together efficiently is critical to have faster progress on complicated things.

D’Nile aint just a river in Egypt…

Greetings fellow travelers, please allow me to introduce myself; I’m Mike ‘Cyber Shaman’ Kawitzky, independent film maker and writer from Cape Town, South Africa, one of your media/art contributors/co-conspirators.

It’s a bit daunting posting to such an illustrious board, so let me try to imagine, with you; how to regard the present with nostalgia while looking look forward to the past, knowing that a millisecond away in the future exists thoughts to think; it’s the mode of neural text, reverse causality, non-locality and quantum entanglement, where the traveller is the journey into a world in transition; after 9/11, after the economic meltdown, after the oil spill, after the tsunami, after Fukushima, after 21st Century melancholia upholstered by anti-psychotic drugs help us forget ‘the good old days’; because it’s business as usual for the 1%; the rest continue downhill with no brakes. Can’t wait to see how it all works out.

Please excuse me, my time machine is waiting…
Post cyberpunk and into Transhumanism

Avoiding Bubbles — The California Dream Act

The California Dream Act.

The banking industry is likely California Dreaming about the day when more states get their act together. …For those of us who think that the US will see a bubble in the education industry caused by its efforts to distribute human kind’s knowledge communities outside of the affluent elite, they shouldn’t hold their breath.

The Cali Dream Act could seem like an altruistic attempt to empower our desperate relatives converging on US cities, but there are some fiscally desperate economics behind this proverbial triumph over “social evil”, as if such a thing ever existed…LOL

For-profit and Not-for-profit education is big business…consider the $4.9B income of the Apollo Group, owner of University of Phoenix or the pride of the west coast’s $16.5B endowment at Stanford University. All of these are affected by the arbitrage (my favorite word smile ) in an industry… losing applicants with the confidence that a degree or certificate is honestly their best investment.

One thing is for sure, the US is the largest knowledge community on the planet currently, and one thing it can still sell the world’s consumers on, is that they’ll want to tap into the experience in their quest to secure the ideal 20th century standard of success. To be redundant, the 20th century American Dream is still the benchmark for making it in 2011 for the vast majority world around us…even as those of us investing in the future would harshly disagree. Where better to catch a dream life than in California…or even Michigan, with residents exiting at record paces.

The reality is that undocumented immigrants are a new class of Americans or non-Americans to sell long-term deferred and/or short term deferred loans. Its an ideal way to build collateral on the balance sheet of a lending company ;-). I’m not only expecting for more states to echo California’s legislative desperation/foresight (call it how you like), but I am expecting for the near future to offer American educations with State and possibly Federal assistance (at a taxable premium + interest) to undocumented immigrants of the US… and even foreign nationals with no immediate intent on coming to the US for legal or illegal residency. It’ll be called globalization…

The US education models designed by the non-profit traditional institutions and technologized (new word for me…lol) by the more agile for-profit institutions, will be distributed throughout the world at the rate of technologies acceptance in foreign countries.

And, of course, where there is government support (large pot of $), private speculation (smaller pots of $) will follow its low risks. fueling the distribution of what we know and what we are exploring.

What’s Your Dream for the Future of California?

California Dreams Video 1 from IFTF on Vimeo.

INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE ANNOUNCES CALIFORNIA DREAMS:
A CALL FOR ENTRIES ON IMAGINING LIFE IN CALIFORNIA IN 2020

Put yourself in the future and show us what a day in your life looks like. Will California keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or collapse? How are you living in this new world? Anyone can enter,anyone can vote; anyone can change the future of California!

California has always been a frontier—a place of change and innovation, reinventing itself time and again. The question is, can California do it again? Today the state is facing some of its toughest challenges. Launching today, IFTF’s California Dreams is a competition with an urgent challenge to recruit citizen visions of the future of California—ideas for what it will be like to live in the state in the next decade—to start creating a new California dream.

California Dreams calls upon the public look 3–10 years into the future and tell a story about a single day in their own life. Videos, graphical entries, and stories will be accepted until January 15, 2011. Up to five winners will be flown to Palo Alto, California in March to present their ideas and be connected to other innovative thinkers to help bring these ideas to life. The grand prize winner will receive the $3,000 IFTF Roy Amara Prize for Participatory Foresight.

“We want to engage Californians in shaping their lives and communities” said Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of IFTF. “The California Dreams contest will outline the kinds of questions and dilemmas we need to be analyzing, and provoke people to ask deep questions.”

Entries may come from anyone anywhere and can include, but are not limited to, the following: Urban farming, online games replacing school, a fast food tax, smaller, sustainable housing, rise in immigrant entrepreneurs, mass migration out of state. Participants are challenged to use IFTF’s California Dreaming map as inspiration, and picture themselves in the next decade, whether it be a future of growth, constraint, transformation, or collapse.

The grand prize, called the Roy Amara Prize, is named for IFTF’s long-time president Roy Amara (1925−2000) and is part of a larger program of social impact projects at IFTF honoring his legacy, known as The Roy Amara Fund for Participatory Foresight, the Fund uses participatory tools to translate foresight research into concrete actions that address future social challenges.

PANEL OF COMPETITION JUDGES

Gina Bianchini, Entrepreneur in Residence, Andreessen Horowitz

Alexandra Carmichael, Research Affiliate, Institute for the Future, Co-Founder, CureTogether, Director, Quantified Self

Bill Cooper, The Urban Water Research Center, UC Irvine

Poppy Davis, Executive Director, EcoFarm

Jesse Dylan, Founder of FreeForm, Founder of Lybba

Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, Institute for the Future

David Hayes-Bautista, Professor of Medicine and Health Services,UCLA School of Public Health

Jessica Jackley, CEO, ProFounder

Xeni Jardin, Partner, Boing Boing, Executive Producer, Boing Boing Video

Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future

Rachel Pike, Clean Tech Analyst, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Howard Rheingold, Visiting Professor, Stanford / Berkeley, and theInstitute of Creative Technologies

Tiffany Shlain, Founder, The Webby Awards
Co-founder International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences

Larry Smarr
Founding Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), Professor, UC San Diego

DETAILS

WHAT: An online competition for visions of the future of California in the next 10 years, along one of four future paths: growth, constraint, transformation, or collapse. Anyone can enter, anyone can vote, anyone can change the future of California.

WHEN: Launch – October 26, 2010
Deadline for entries — January 15, 2011
Winners announced — February 23, 2011
Winners Celebration — 6 – 9 pm March 11, 2011 — open to the public

WHERE: http://californiadreams.org

For more information on the California Dreaming map or to download the pdf, click here.

DIYbio.org

About

DIYbio is an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.

What is DIYbio in 4 minutes?

Get Involved

You can read about current events and developments in the DIYbio community by reading or subscribing to the blog.

Get in contact or get involved through discussions on our mailing list, or by attending or hosting a local DIYbio meetup.

The mailing list is the best way to find out what’s happening with DIYbio right now. There is also a low-traffic announce list.

Find out about our featured projects, including our plans for public wetlabs, global FlashLab experiments, and our innovation of next-gen lab equipment on the Projects page.

Crowdsourced Women’s Health Books Released by CureTogether

Over 300 Women Share Experiences, Treatments for Painful, Common Chronic Conditions

CureTogether, a Health 2.0 Startup based in Silicon Valley, has released the first crowdsourced books on vulvodynia and endometriosis: two common, poorly understood conditions causing daily pain for millions of women. Assembled from the input of 190 and 137 women living with these respective conditions, “Vulvodynia Heroes” and “Endometriosis Heroes” are the product of an ongoing online research study at http://www.curetogether.com.

“Patients came together and decided what symptoms and treatments they wanted to track. They went on to diligently gather detailed, quantitative data on their bodies and experiences,” said Alexandra Carmichael, co-Founder of CureTogether. “The hope of this book is to spread awareness, reach out to people in pain who may not have heard of endometriosis, and increase interest and funding for future research.”

“These heroes are pioneers not just in investigating their own condition, but in developing self-cure practices that others can follow.”, said Gary Wolf, Contributing Editor of Wired and Blogger at The Quantified Self. “Many other women who are suffering will find this very helpful and inspiring,” said Elizabeth Rummer, MSPT at the Pelvic Health and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco. A patient with endometriosis added, “This is great. I am just starting to really appreciate what awesome power CureTogether can have.”

Endometriosis is a painful chronic condition that affects 5–10% of women, and vulvodyna affects up to 16% of women at some point in their lives. They are two of the most active condition communities at CureTogether, with information about symptoms, treatments, and causes added by over 300 women. The books are available at http://www.curetogether.com/VHeroes and http://www.curetogether.com/EHeroes.

About CureTogether

CureTogether launched in 2008 to help people anonymously track and compare health data — to better understand their bodies, make more informed treatment decisions and contribute data to research. Starting with 3 conditions (Migraine, Endometriosis and Vulvodynia), its members have since expanded it to support 228 conditions.

*Please note that the information in Vulvodynia Heroes and Endometriosis Heroes and at CureTogether.com does not constitute medical advice.

For more information, please contact Alexandra Carmichael at 650−533−2163 or [email protected]

Open Source Health Research Plan

Open source has emerged as a powerful set of principles for solving complex problems in fields as diverse as education and physical security. With roughly 60 million Americans suffering from a chronic health condition, traditional research progressing slowly, and personalized medicine on the horizon, the time is right to apply open source to health research. Advances in technology enabling cheap, massive data collection combined with the emerging phenomena of self quantification and crowdsourcing make this plan feasible today. We can all work together to cure disease, and here’s how.

Read more…

/* */