http://indicants.com An exploration of innovation and development Wed, 27 May 2009 01:19:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://indicants.com/out-of-the-box-or-wrapper/ ...we pursue holistic, sustainable solutions to end extreme poverty. Holistic because the problems of the extreme poor are so interconnected that water and sanitation can’t be separated from education, or agriculture from micro-finance. Sustainable because the poor need solutions to lift themselves out of poverty, not programs that create dependence ... http://indicants.com/ngo-20/ From Iqbal Qaudir at MIT's Legatum Center In short, America should stop pouring billions into bureaucracies to buy short-term alliances and focus its efforts on bottom-up entrepreneurship. This would increase America's popularity, alleviate poverty, and promote real democratic change in these developing countries. We should encourage governments to be sustained by citizens' ... http://indicants.com/foreign-aid-and-bad-government/ From Xan Rice at the New Statesman: One afternoon I was interviewing Rafael Branco, a former foreign minister, when Corallo's name came up. "You see the car he drives, the simple way he lives, the things he does for this country? Don't give us aid - give us ten clones of ... http://indicants.com/international-entrepreneurs-as-foreign-aid/ From George Dyson on Edge: Instead of putting a dozen scientists in a room to come up with a better model of the existing global financial system, we should put a dozen Pierre Omidyars, Elon Musks, Salar Kamangars, and Jeff Bezoses in a room (with Danny Hillis) and let them actually build one (a new ... http://indicants.com/an-entrepreneurial-remedy-to-financial-crisis/ When to quit -- said Kamen, also the inventor of health care technologies and the Slingshot water purifier -- is "the toughest question there is" for any entrepreneur who survives on creativity and instinct. "It's not nearly as glamorous as people think to keep working on something and to keep hitting ... http://indicants.com/entrepreneurs-dilemma/ “We can observe such an information processing pattern not only in scientific domains but also in fine arts and in natural language conversation. When an artist paints a picture they are not focussing on photographic accuracy, they focus on the artistic message — and use brushstrokes to simplify the reality ... http://indicants.com/granular-computin/ From Downtime at Computerweekly: As all who read Downtime know, technology tends to be pretty predictable (Moore's Law still holds), but what people will do with it remains a mystery. Take the latest modelling tool from the University of Warwick's department of statistics and centre for complexity science (aka the chaos class). They invented ... http://indicants.com/graphical-models-and-informative-priors/