Lifeboat Foundation

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.

Continue reading “2012 was Great and may 2013 be Extraordinary” »

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.

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.

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…

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

Continue reading “Avoiding Bubbles — The California Dream Act” »

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.

Continue reading “What's Your Dream for the Future of California?” »

About

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.

Continue reading “Crowdsourced Women's Health Books Released by CureTogether” »

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…