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February 28, 2007
Eudoxa article wins Swedish newspaper silver medal
The Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet has been awarded a silver medal in the cathegory "informative graphics" by the Society for Newspaper Design.
The award was given for the article Sanningen om politiken avslöjas written by the Eudoxa think tank's research director Anders Sandberg based on his study of Swedish politics.
Eudoxa wishes to congratulate Svenska Dagbladet and its staffers Anders Mildner, Joakim Larsson, and Susen Schultz to the prize. It is particularly pleasing that Eudoxa could show with the article how powerful social software has become, and that modern graphics can tell new facts about network interaction. A few years ago, a study such as Eudoxa's would have taken the effort of a political science faculty at a university. Today, this work is possible to do at a PC at home and some public databases. Data mining has become commonplace.
Posted by Waldemar at 03:55 PM
Svenska Dagbladet prisas för artikel av Eudoxa
Svenska Dagbladet har blivit belönat med en silvermedalj i kategorin "informativ grafik 2006" av Society for Newspaper Design.
Priset delades ut för Brännpunkts- artikeln Sanningen om politiken avslöjas skriven av Anders Sandberg från tankesmedjan Eudoxa.
Debattartikeln bygger på Sandbergs studie Den svenska politikens geometri.
Vi på tankesmedjan Eudoxa vill gratulera Anders Mildner, Joakim Larsson, Susen Schultz och Svenska Dagbladet till priset.
Pingat på Intressant.se
Andra bloggar om: medier, journalistik, bloggar, debatt, SvD, Svenska Dagbladet, Anders Mildner
Posted by Waldemar at 11:15 AM
Making dreams come true
Written by Alexander N. Kanaev, author of Reality of virtual life- The first generation.
To think about it, virtual reality has always been with us. From the first fairytales to any art form, humankind has always been dreaming of a world that would have place for heroes, would provide everyone living there with the chance to realize exactly what we desire, and live that fantasy. And if Gutenberg’s invention allowed the mass production of those dreams, movies and media have brought them into every home.
But as art presuppose involvement, it is a pity to be a passive recipient of even the best story and the most captivating movie. What we really want is the possibility to do it all ourselves, craft our own story in a new world waiting to be conquered. We need active participation, a simulation flexible enough to allow us to be in the center of the story, weave our own path and follow our own desires.
Is this not the simplest explanation why computer games have taken the world by storm? A $12.5 billion industry for 2006 in the US only, it is no longer an amateur’s hobby. Games give us the possibility to live, in the first person mode, millions of stories, immerse ourselves in a multitude of the most fascinating of the worlds. And, most importantly, they provide an immense sense of participation and accomplishment, as the story on the screen has one central character – you.
The wide adoption of the Internet has just added the missing ingredient. If the net has proven anything so far, it surely is the fact that our desire to communicate by far exceeds any technology we have at hand. No matter the topic, no matter how much free time it takes, the amount of information we desire to exchange seems to be limitless, explaining the success of blogs and places like MySpace and Google.
It was just a matter of time till those two major forces collide, and when they did, the baby got the unpronounceable name of MMOG. Massive multiplayer online games, from the first cartoon-like parodies of online chatrooms, are today the most serious force driving the future of the entertainment industry. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft alone claims more than nine million users, and the list of MMORGs exceeds a hundred titles, with more in full development.
The complexity and scales of online worlds is growing almost exponentially, and so is the amount of knowledge they require. The mastery of any of them requires what can be viewed as an alternative education, with encyclopedias online and vast databases of items. No one can possibly claim to have visited every single place in Second Life, a virtual world created by Linden Labs. Anarchy Online, from FunCom, has an immense documentation system on the web. The price for feeling oneself confident and powerful in the new online world is, as usual, knowledge. As the amount of things to do and places to go, and number of people to meet grows faster than the maximum of 24 hours per day that a player can spend online, we are gradually facing infinite environments where the complexity rivals reality. As a consequence, the same goes for the learning and involvement contribution from the participants.
The bridge from online games to online environments is apparent as the possibility to leave permanent changes. Environments such as Second Life, that allow you to make a chair, forget it in the middle of the street and walk away… or log off ... and it will be there for everyone else, unless someone deletes it. The possibility to shape one’s own world online, with permanent objects and an economy linked to real life, combined with social interaction not bound by physical constraints of reality – taken together, the driving forces for mass adoption of virtual reality online are already there.
We are facing the growth of a new community, the one that exists online and lives in an alternative, no-existing world. MMORGs have an incredible attractive force, a new, purely psychological escape from reality. It never rains online, and if it does, it is part of the scenery. Daily problems become nonexistent, and everything is possible. It is easier to meet and talk to people, safely protected by the anonymity of nicknames and professionally drawn avatars. Virtual relationships are easy, permissive and intense. A new level, a new quest or a new romance is always just a few keystrokes away, and does not require too much work.
The MMORG population has reached 14 million inhabitants in seven years. Second Life claims that the amount of daily transactions exceeds $1M. How long till the GNP of virtual worlds start exceeding the one of some of the developing countries? And, most importantly, would that give us enough excuse to move to live in a fairytale, as we always wanted, even if it’s just a digital version?
Pingat på Intressant.se
Andra bloggar om: Second Life, internet, politik, kultur, samhälle, media, ekonomi, teknik
Posted by Waldemar at 10:12 AM
February 23, 2007
Intervju i Captus Tidning med Waldemar Ingdahl
I nummer 82 av Captus Tidning, intervjuar Anders Gustafsson i artikeln "Transhumanismen är en fortsättning på upplysningstidens humanism" Waldemar Ingdahl om tankesmedjan Eudoxas verksamhet, policyfrågor och om det seminarium som Eudoxa var först med att anordna i Second Life.
Andra bloggar om: framtiden, teknik, politik, samhälle
Posted by Waldemar at 04:20 PM
Anders Sandberg on NBC News
Anders Sandberg was interviewed by NBC News. The program aired February 21st was about robotics and future developments for Artificial Intelligence.
To see the interview enter MSNBC's science section and click on the free video featured on the left called Dawn of the robot age?.
Anders Sandberg comments that we will likely transfer a part of our thinking to machines in the future, possibly even transmitting our mind to them completely when Artificial Intelligence gets more developed. Sandberg also points out that the main issue is not technical but social and political: what rights should intelligent machines be granted?
Andra bloggar om: framtiden, teknik, robotar, forskning, etik
Posted by Waldemar at 01:25 PM
February 22, 2007
Svensk organdonation räcker inte
Waldemar Ingdahls artikel "Svensk organdonation räcker inte" om hur svenskarna är sämst i Europa på att registrera sig för organdonation. Ett stort antal människor dör varje år i väntan på nya organ. Så skulle det inte behöva vara om man öppnade upp för handel med organ.
Artikeln har publicerats i Jönköpings-Posten (30/1), Falköpings Tidning (31/1), Skaraborgs Läns Tidning (31/1), Skövde Nyheter (31/1), Tidningen Ångermanland (31/1), Västgöta Bladet (31/1), Bohusläningen (1/2), Smålands-Tidningen (12/2), Tranås Tidning (12/2) och Vetlanda-Posten (12/2).
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, politik, hälsa, etik
Posted by Waldemar at 12:20 PM
February 21, 2007
Debatt om läkemedelsbranschens framtida marknadsföring
Onsdagen den 7 mars hålls heldagskonferensen Läkemedelsmarknadsdagen 2007 under rubriken "Nya förutsättningar för läkemedelsmarknaden".
Waldemar Ingdahl, VD för tankesmedjan Eudoxa, har inbjudits för att debattera förutsättningarna för marknadsföringen av läkemedel (om vilken Ingdahl har skrivit i bland annat Dagens Industri). Han kommer att debattera med Johan Thor Director External Affairs GlaxoSmithKline, Björn Beerman enhetschef och professor Läkemedelsverket, Kennert Lenhoff ordförande i landstinget Blekinges läkemedelskommitté samt Ingrid Kössler ordförande för Bröstcancerföreningarnas Riksorganisation.
Programmet för Läkemedelsmarknadsdagen och en närmare beskrivning av debatten kan laddas ned i PDF-format.
Anmälan till Läkemedelsmarknadsdagen görs på arrangören Svenska Nyhetsbrev AB:s hemsida.
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, framtiden, medicin, politik, etik, marknadsföring, läkemedel
Posted by Waldemar at 05:32 PM
The rise of the Nintendo surgeons
In his The Pulse article Nintendo Surgery of February 21st, Anders Sandberg explains how the surgeon's work is changing rapidly after the introduction of laparoscopic surgery (using a video feed from flexible surgical tools inserted into the body). Will the surgeons of the future even see a patient in person?
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, framtiden, medicin, samhälle, etik, forskning, Internet, IT
Posted by Waldemar at 03:35 PM
February 19, 2007
War on snus
Waldemar Ingdahl discusses some of the recent developments in Finland where the EU ban on snus sales is seeing its first prosecutions. What will happen with the smuggling of smokeless tobacco and the brisk Internet trade betweenn Sweden and Finland?
Read more at the Eudoxa harm reduction bulletin in Ingdahl's article War on snus.
Andra bloggar om: snus, samhälle, hälsa, medicin
Posted by Waldemar at 10:53 PM
February 17, 2007
Den nya politiken i ÖstgötaAlliansen
I nummer 2 av affärstidningen ÖstgötaAlliansen intervjuas Erik Starck av Hans Ljung om Eudoxarapporten Den nya politiken- guide till 2000-talets politiska utmaningar.
Artikeln Sverige hade 552 myndigheter 2005 kan läsas på ÖstgötaAlliansens hemsida.
Andra bloggar om: teknik, samhälle, politik, framtiden
Posted by Waldemar at 03:15 PM
February 15, 2007
The EU and Rifkin's dangerous energy ideas
Waldemar Ingdahl, director of Eudoxa and Nicklas Lundblad, Chief of Staff of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce write the article The EU and Rifkin's dangerous energy ideas (subscription required) in the European Voice, issue 6, February 15th.
The following is an extended version of the text appearing in the European Voice.
The European energy debate is heating up. This is good. Less good, however, is the unfortunate mix of lofty visions, buzz-words and simply bad science that seems to range freely in the debate under various headings. One particularly horrible example is that of the Jeremy Rifkin cult now growing like wildfire in Brussels.
Dr. Rifkin, an American scholar, has made it his trademark to engage with high-profile individuals and is a kind of European Union hang-around, appearing everywhere environmental issues and technology are discussed. The man is obviously not stupid, and many of his suggestions have the unmistakable quality of provoking thought.
Obviously this is enough for many European political actors. They happily embrace Rifkins ideas and join with him in calling for things like "a green hydrogen economy" (the green part being that he wants to phase out nuclear energy because it is centralised) and "a third industrial revolution". MEPs like the charismatic Jo Leinen have quickly bought into these tasty catchphrases and now embrace Rifkin like the long-lost visionary the European Union so badly needs.
Rifkin readily offered, recently, a European dream that supposedly would surpass even the American one. This European dream is shifting the EU to a - take a deep breath – post-carbon and uranium-free Europe.
The American dream is rising in society by personal accomplishment in a free society. What we Europeans are offered dream-wise by this American professor is a dirigiste industrial energy production shift. No thanks.
This would probably not be as upsetting if it was not for the fact that Rifkin has an inordinate amount of influence in European Union-affairs. Back in 2005 he engineered a major call for subsidies for the hydrogen sector where several MEPs obediently joined him. During Energy Week in the EU a draft has been circulated containing a joint declaration on, among other things, a green hydrogen economy and a post-carbon Europe. The idea is to force even more people down under the Rifkin agenda, and to lock in other actors than the ones currently in favour.
So far Rifkin has not done irreparable harm to the European energy debate. But the fact that he has been able garner such support for his often fuzzy and ill-defined ideas, not only among Greenpeace activists and Friends of the Earth, is worrying. The draft contains a surely mistaken idea about reducing energy *consumption* by 20 percent to the year 2020!
It is a sign of intellectual poverty that the European energy debate is currently dominated by an American professor that wants us to dream not about a free individual in a free society with a free market, but about welfare-state engineered technical shifts in energy production.
Let us find our own way.
Andra bloggar om: klimat, miljö, forskning, vetenskap, klimathotet, media, klimatförändringar, miljöpolitik, energi
Posted by Waldemar at 04:05 PM
February 14, 2007
Funding bias in clinical trials
In his The Pulse article Funding bias – terrible danger or just sad fact of life? of February 14th, Anders Sandberg writes about the interaction between science and profit in the area of pharmaceutics.
Sandberg notes the growing debate on funding bias in research but argues that papers in fact often are biased and as a researcher one has to learn how to read them critically. Therefore open information and reducing the cost for clinical trials is the key to improve research.
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, framtiden, medicin, samhälle, etik, forskning
Posted by Waldemar at 09:25 PM
February 13, 2007
God debatt ger god genteknik
Waldemar Ingdahl skriver artikeln "God debatt ger god genteknik" i Jönköpings-Posten (26/1)) om hur de senaste årens framsteg inom genetiken gör att vi i allt högre grad kan förändra människokroppen enligt våra önskningar och att vi behöver bygga institutioner av olika slag som gör mänsklig förändring säkrare.
Andra bloggar om: genteknik, medicin, forskning, etik, samhälle
Posted by Waldemar at 03:45 PM
February 09, 2007
Så får vi både funktion och integritet
Den 8 februari talade Waldemar Ingdahl från Eudoxa på konferensen RFID i Norden. Ingdahl höll talet Så får vi både funktion och integritet rätt, baserat på rapporten Den hänsynsfulla taggen.
Ingdahl deltog också i panelen för konferensens avslutande diskussion med bl.a. Bo Svensson från Svensk Handel.
Waldemar Ingdahl under sitt tal på "RFID i Norden"
Pingat på Intressant.se
Andra bloggar om: rfid, politik, storebror, övervakning, teknik
Posted by Waldemar at 04:57 PM
February 08, 2007
Sanguine competition
In his The Pulse article Cutting the Cord for a New Blood Bank of February 7th, Anders Sandberg tells us about how Richard Branson's Virgin Health Bank enters in competition with the UK National Blood Service. This is particularly important when it comes to the collection of umbilical cord blood as it contains stem cells that can be used to treat patients with abnormal blood production, childhood leukaemia and metabolic diseases.
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, framtiden, medicin, samhälle, blod, etik, England
Posted by Waldemar at 04:58 AM
February 07, 2007
Seminar on the virtual worlds
On February 1st the Eudoxa policy study Reality of virtual life- The first generation was presented at a seminar held at Wennergren Center in Stockholm.
The author of the report, Alexander Kanaev, discussing with Henrik Hansson of Stockholm University
Dr. Kanaev during his presentation speech, explaining the social implications of multi-player online games (MMOG).
Ana Valdés, writer and social anthropologist, commented on the study. She both commented on the immense opportunities offered by virtual worlds, but Valdés also warned that particularly the virtual world Second Life is currently being hyped.
It remains to be seen if the company maintaining the virtual world, Linden Labs, will be able to accomodate the influx of millions of new users in such short time. Valdés also noted a disconcerting trend that the virtual worlds may become too limited in their scope, and become solely modelled on their real world counterparts. The truly innovative uses, doing things that are not possible off-line, may actually be suppressed.
The seminar was well attended by guests from the media, politics, and the computer game industry. In the discussion following Kanaev's and Valdés' presentations, the audience and the speakers addressed such varied issues such as what political impact the virtual worlds have already made, how taxation will affect the virtual worlds' economies, how old businesses are changing their marketing strategies in order to have an outreach in the virtual worlds and how new social groups and associations are springing into existence thanks to virtual interaction.
Pingat på Intressant.se
Andra bloggar om: politik, Second Life, samhälle, ekonomi, framtiden
Posted by Waldemar at 09:45 AM
February 05, 2007
Please Don't Poop in My Salad!
Please Don't Poop in My Salad and Other Essays Opposing the War Against Smoking is a book that collects the essays of the Heartland Institute's President Joseph L. Bast during the past several years concerning the taxes and regulations imposed on tobacco and its consumers.
Defending smokers is a thankless task in today’s politically correct environment, and Bast doesn’t deny that smoking is an unhealthy habit. But today’s taxes and bans go far beyond a reasonable public policy response to a public health problem. Bast asks for a reasoned debate that respects the rights of smokers and the owners of bars and restaurants.
Chapter 4- An International Perspective on Smoking was co-authored with Lene Johansen of the Eudoxa think tank.
Please Don't Poop in My Salad can be bought from the Heartland Institute's web store.
The book can also be downloaded as a PDF-file from the Heartland Institute's website.
Pingat på Intressant.se
Andra bloggar om: hälsa, tobak, snus, samhälle, frihet
Posted by Waldemar at 12:33 PM
February 01, 2007
Eudoxa Policy Study #7: Reality of virtual life- The first generation
The Eudoxa Policy Study Reality of virtual life- the first generation written by Alexander N. Kanaev, explains the increased social, economical, cultural and political significance of virtual worlds.
The policy study discusses the social implications of massive multi-player online games (MMOG). It is argued that the opportunities they offer switch the concept of gaming towards an environment with deeper implications than just entertainment. Modern society is ready to extend the concept of virtuality, already commonplace, to whole virtual worlds.
MMOGs offer a model for a new society, a virtual environment attractive enough to become the testbed for a new breed of online communities. Examples from massive multi-player online role-playing games such as World Of Warcraft (Blizzard Inc.), Anarchy Online (FunCom) and Second Life (Linden Lab Inc.) are used to emonstrate that, under the word “online gaming� lies a far more serious development trend with deep social implications.
Download the PDF-file here >>>
* About Eudoxa
* Preface
* Dreams reloaded
* Tool for the brain
* Modeling a new world
* A brand new world of gaming
* Connecting people
* The information overdose
* Defining "virtual"
* Virtuality of split identities
* Introducing MMORPG- the unpronounceable abbreviation
* MMOGs- not your conventional game
* Scale, details and upgradeable worlds
* PVP and cooperation
* Paper doll heaven, or the art of avatars
* Social emulation
* Inventing our own game
* Implications
* MMOG addiction
* Discussion
Pingat på Intressant.se
Andra bloggar om: Second Life, internet, politik, kultur, samhälle, media, ekonomi, teknik
Posted by Waldemar at 09:28 PM
Genteknikens nytta
Waldemar Ingdahl skriver artikeln God debatt ger god genteknik i Gotlands Allehanda (1/2) om hur de senaste årens framsteg inom genetiken gör att vi i allt högre grad kan förändra människokroppen enligt våra önskningar och att vi behöver bygga institutioner av olika slag som gör mänsklig förändring säkrare.
Andra bloggar om: genteknik, medicin, forskning, etik, samhälle
Posted by Waldemar at 11:23 AM
Svensk organdonation räcker inte
Waldemar Ingdahl debatterar den 1 februari i Ljusnan om organdonationer. I artikeln Svensk organdonation räcker inte framför Ingdahl att svenskarna är sämst i Europa på att registrera sig för organdonation. Ett stort antal människor dör varje år i väntan på nya organ. Så skulle det inte behöva vara om man öppnade upp för handel med organ.
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, politik, hälsa, etik
Posted by Waldemar at 10:45 AM
Det är hög tid att åter ta upp frågan om ersättningar för donerade organ
Waldemar Ingdahl debatterar den 1 februari i Sundsvalls Tidning om organdonationer. I artikeln Svensk organdonation räcker inte framför Ingdahl att svenskarna är sämst i Europa på att registrera sig för organdonation. Ett stort antal människor dör varje år i väntan på nya organ. Så skulle det inte behöva vara om man öppnade upp för handel med organ.
Andra bloggar om: sjukvård, politik, hälsa, etik
Posted by Waldemar at 04:40 AM