How to escape innovation’s Great Stagnation Ideas have been getting more expensive to find, but accelerating remote collaboration will boost productivity
Put simply, we are getting less innovation bang for the R&D buck.
Suwalki Gap named the most dangerous place on earth right now
A Ukrainian TV host crowdfunded $20 million to buy Bayraktar drones. The company making them refused the money and said it'd donate the aircraft instead.
The writer, author of ‘The Technology Trap’, is the Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford university
We have often been told that the great inventions of the past cannot be repeated, and that we have already eaten all the low-hanging fruit. And yet, time and time again, scientific progress has allowed us to pluck the fatter, juicier crop from higher branches.
The trouble is that while research inputs have been rising sharply, research productivity is dropping even faster. It now takes 18 times the number of researchers to achieve Moore’s law — that is, the doubling of computer chip power about every two years — than in the early 1970s
A new Trail of Bits research report examines unintended centralities in distributed ledgers– “Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through reproducible methods and open data. We believe the risks inherent in blockchains and cryptocurrencies have been poorly described and are often ignored—or even mocked—by those seeking to cash in on this decade’s gold rush. In response to recent market turmoil and plummeting prices, proponents of cryptocurrency point to the technology’s fundamentals as sound. Are they?
Over the past year, Trail of Bits was engaged by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to examine the fundamental properties of blockchains and the cybersecurity risks associated with them. DARPA wanted to understand those security assumptions and determine to what degree blockchains are actually decentralized. To answer DARPA’s question, Trail of Bits researchers performed analyses and meta-analyses of prior academic work and of real-world findings that had never before been aggregated, updating prior research with new data in some cases. They also did novel work, building new tools and pursuing original research. The resulting report is a 30-thousand-foot view of what’s currently known about blockchain technology. Whether these findings affect financial markets is out of the scope of the report: our work at Trail of Bits is entirely about understanding and mitigating security risk…”
"For years, both have been susceptible to a hero complex where the cause of great architecture is so exalted that almost no sacrifice is too much to be made in its name." It's simply got to end. - The Observer (UK)
"For those who know Dark Mofo for its gothic bombast, weird surprises and controversial headlines, this year's festival ... may feel a little different. But after a programming controversy last year which led to public outrage, calls to boycott and an eventual apology,
Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center, articulates the difference between community engagement and empowerment through the arts.
It's really "the near-total inability of post-World War II America and Europe to produce more than a small number of classical works that any normal person would want to hear. That failure is slowly killing classical music." - Wall Street Journal