Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
by Wes Sharrock

Isbn-13: 9780745619286

Thomas Kuhn’s shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of ‘new paradigm’ and ’scientific revolution’ make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn’s…

“Chaos is always there, chaos is part of any complex system. Chaos is a means of evolving or changing the system. You have to destabilize a system before you can restabilize it some place. It’s a myth to think that a system will change by little steps, adaptive steps, they’re not major changes. So when do you need chaos? Yes, there are times when you need chaos. If your current system is at the limits of its stability, its sustainability, then you have to change it. Then it has to loosen up its structures.So chaos is a state in which new relations can come into being because there are very sensitive, complex relationships between the elements of the system and changes propagate very fast from one part of the system to another. At the present time I think we need chaos, not to reach the point where it degenerates the system, where it endangers the entire system, but to the point where it allows constructive change to unfold.” - Ervin Laslo, author and founder-director of the General Evolution Research Group

The New Gulf - How Modern Arabia is Changing the World for Good
by Edmund O’Sullivan
1 customers reviewed this article averaging 4.0

Isbn-13: 9781860632297

A new Gulf is rising one that will be radically different to the one we know. This book is about the economic, social and political transformation sweeping the 6 Gulf states of the GCC… Now the fastest growing part of the world economy. This absorbing new publication provides a concise but complete description of the Arabian countries benefiting most from the affluence sweeping the Middle East in the 21st century. The New Gulf How Modern Arabia is Changing the World for Good focuses on the economic,…

by Adam Greenfield
9 customers reviewed this article averaging 4.5

Isbn-13: 9780321384010

Ubiquitous computing–almost imperceptible, but everywhere around us–is rapidly becoming a reality. How will it change us? how can we shape its emergence?Smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing… even smart bathtubs. networked street signs and self-describing soda cans. Gestural interfaces like those seen in Minority Report. The RFID tags now embedded in everything from credit cards to the family pet.All of these are facets of the ubiquitous computing author Adam Greenfield calls “everyware.”…

In a world that is confronted with climate change, instant wars, collapsing banks, global terrorism and an oil price that is jumping up and down, the old ways of doing things just don’t work anymore. ICT has enabled us to link everything together. A digital layer of connections has merged with our old infrastructures of trains, plains and boats creating a network that has simply become to large and complex to grasp. We can no longer take the machine apart to understand its parts. Are we just going to pretend nothing is wrong, sit down and brace for impact?  Dealing with that kind of complexity has to be done bottom-up, believing in adaptiveness, self learning and letting go of control. We need new tools, new ideas, a new generation and above all, new leadership. But how are you to define a strategy in such an age of uncertainty? For a study on the Future of Work FreedomLab partnered once more with ViNT , the institute that explores the impact of new technologies.

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Vintage)

by Walter Russell Mead
17 customers reviewed this article averaging 4.5

Isbn-13: 9780375713736

A stunningly insightful account of the global political and economic system, sustained first by Britain and now by America, that has created the modern world. The key to the two countries’ predominance, Mead argues, lies in the individualistic ideology inherent in the Anglo-American religion. Over the years Britain and America’s liberal democratic system has been repeatedly challeged—by Catholic Spain and Louis XIV, the Nazis, communists, and Al Qaeda—and for the most part, it has prevailed….

“Lets take this twelve year old girl that I am a godfather to. She has a cell phone, she is on the web, she has a Facebook page, she has friends from around the world in that space and for her, that was like for me growing up when we had radio and tv, it was just part of the atmosphere. For her it is part of the atmosphere too. So I think she is growing up not so much with the sense of entitlement, but rather a sense that this is the way the world is. And because she makes those assumptions she is going to build upon that too. I don’t know where that will lead, but being an optimist I trust in the human spirit to find its own way.” - Grady Booch, Chief Scientist, Software Engineering in IBM Research

Last week I talked to various people, amongst them John Gray, Charles Leadbeater and Daniel Cohen. All interesting talks about society, technology and of course, the economy. I all asked them if they thought we’d come to the end of an era. Namely the end of capitalism. Yes, they all answered, we’ve come to the end of capitalism in the sense of the ‘financial capitalism’: the system that has lead to the build up of tremendous wealth creation in the financial sector. But we are still far from the eradication of capitalism as the ideology on which a society operates…

Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier
by Harry G. Broadman

Isbn-13: 9780821368350

China and India’s new-found interest in trade and investment with Africa - home to 300 million of the globe’s poorest people and the world’s most formidable development challenge - presents a significant opportunity for growth and integration of the Sub-Saharan continent into the global economy. Africa’s Silk Road finds that China and India’s South-South commerce with Africa is about far more than natural resources, opening the way for Africa to become a processor of commodities and a competitive…