Broken Symmetry

Robert Martin on University-Industry Relations

From Inside Higher Ed:

Rather than a commercialization model to explain higher education’s woes, a better analogy is a political campaign, where the focus is to raise all the money you can and spend all the money you raise to create an image that may or may not accurately reflect reality. The conflict of values is between public relations expediency and the academy’s traditional regard for quiet substance. As faculty, we acquiesced in this takeover because it was in our financial interest to comply; more fund-raising meant more money for salaries and perks.

...

An individual faculty member’s ability to influence governance is dependent on his or her academic reputation and alternative employment opportunities. Established scholars have alternatives; they can vote with their feet. Established teachers have little opportunity to vote with their feet.

Very interesting and candid take. [This Robert Martin is of no relation. -MFM]

Networks of Economic Market Interdependence and Systemic Risk

by Dion Harmon, Blake Stacey, Yavni Bar-Yam, and Yaneer Bar-Yam:

The dynamic network of relationships among corporations underlies cascading economic failures including the current economic crisis, and can be inferred from correlations in market value fluctuations. We analyze the time dependence of the network of correlations to reveal the changing relationships among the financial, technology, and basic materials sectors with rising and falling markets and resource constraints. The financial sector links otherwise weakly coupled economic sectors, particularly during economic declines. Such links increase economic risk and the extent of cascading failures. Our results suggest that firewalls between financial services for different sectors would reduce systemic risk without hampering economic growth.

Via Brandon Keim at Wired.

Tim O'Reilly's Hymn for Open Government

A bit more poetic than usual, even for him:

There is a greater and greater gap between the systems used to manage complexity in the private sector and the same systems in the public sector. An average citizen carrying an iPhone has access to real-time "situational awareness" that outstrips military systems costing millions of dollars. From WalMart to Wall Street, from Google to the next generation of personal robotics, intelligent algorithms process massive amounts of data in real time, and respond automatically in close to real time. Meanwhile, government regulators too often rely on paper-based processes and reports that trail events by months, if not years.

...

The idea of building a platform, rather than building all of the end user applications yourself, turns out to be surprisingly relevant for government, allowing the private sector to build applications that the government might never have imagined, or been able to budget for if they did. As governments open their data and services to developers, we're seeing an explosion of innovation, and the development of new citizen services by the citizens themselves.

Ron Conway on the Patent Licensing Business Model

RC: I would never invest in a company that was a basket of patents and then made a business of litigating with people. I think that is ... I want to say "slimy," but I don't want to be that bad. I just think that's a really difficult way to think you're going to add value and make a return on investment.

Via O'Reilly Radar

Kudos to Kappos

I'm an unabashed fan of this:

So imagine the courage and leadership necessary for David Kappos and his team to look at the revenue from selling these products, and to say ‘No, that’s wrong. The President's Open Government Directive makes it clear that these should be public goods, available without fee or favor; bundle them into the bulk downloads’.

Via O'Reilly Radar