Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.

Share your ideas on what you would like to see to make news media, research materials, conceptual innovations and basic statistical evidence, and/or writing that expresses new ways of thinking, available for your consumption.

• The Hot Spring Network’s Discussion on ‘New Publishing Models to Speed Ideas to Application’

Allowing for non-identified EMR sharing across the system creates a universal pool of data in which drug side-effects, treatment failure or success rates, disease history, specific organ damage or healing, and all sorts of incidence of drug interactions and health specifics can be cross-referenced, spurring a massive amount of data-rooted research and improving quality of care and treatment success rates.

Pres. Obama has consistently touted the potential for a widespread or even national standard of EMR to help spur innovation and bring down healthcare costs, but the issue has been very little explored by mainstream media and has been consistently opposed by some critics who fear “nationalized healthcare”. The first thing we must understand in exploring EMR and its potential is that it does not mean a nationalization of healthcare.

Unbelievably, a provision in economic recovery legislation signed into law by Pres. Obama was vehemently opposed by some in the opposition on the grounds that EMR would bring about a situation in which the government “punishes” doctors who don’t comply with federal mandates. No such punitive measures were in the bill and no specific mandates for doctors either.

But it’s worth considering the degree to which the private insurance industry, so committed to its right to deny treatment, does actually take punitive measures against doctors who don’t comply with its demands. EMR can be a great efficiency booster for healthcare in general, and could actually be part of the all-important process of reducing the urge of insurers to spend money denying treatment.

But the burden to practitioners is a serious concern, so an effective EMR standard should require as little work as possible for doctors and nurses, ideally zero additional clerical work. Medical professionals should not be able to notice the “labor” involved in EMR upkeep. The best way to achieve this is to make sure the best possible tools are used universally to make EMR upkeep equivalent to or simpler than paper-record upkeep.

A letter-sized e-paper tablet touchscreen device would be ideal for fluid management of medical records in a new EMR universal standard. A flexible full-size letter-format touchscreen could be easily folded into a doctor’s pocket, taken out at any time for on-screen chart updates, and linked to an onsite or remote server that synchronizes with a universal EMR database in which all personal patient information is filtered out but medical data is stored.

Individual patient records could be accessed through the system as well, in order to maximize the delivery of relevant patient history to any doctor across the system, when needed. This would optimize the quality and precision of patient care choices, preventing unnecessary complications, reducing the incidence of human error and addressing health problems with the optimal course of treatment, ideally also reducing the number of interventions required and the long-term costs over time.

Privacy protection and the banning of data sale or resale are absolute essentials. The system must be informational and function-centered, free and open to the public as well. The benefits to be derived from opening non-identifiable pooled medical data to independent analysis are vast: speeding innovation, judging quality of care, and creating fact-based statistical analyses, not best-guess synthetic limited-pool studies (using either perfectly healthy, one-malady-only or terminally ill patients, to the exclusion of anyone reflecting a more common complex of health issues).

The EMR research database would be open and never, under any circumstances, searchable by individual patient or specific treatment centers. Personal medical records would be part of a sealed atomized patient-specific database accessible only by doctors or medical professionals authorized by virtue of providing actual treatment to that patient, in the moment or in consultation with other physicians.

Separately, an evolutionary quality of care effect could be achieved, if success rates for certain types of treatment were available in relation to specific treatment facilities. This database might need to be less wide-open, perhaps with peer-review and a kind of official rating system, so doctors are not pressured to withold information or buck or trick the system.

If this 3rd function of EMR could be implemented with optimum effectiveness and benefit to all involved, then the best centers would be elevated for their successes and others would be forced to learn from them and improve their care or else change specialty or close. Ideally, this would eliminate substandard care, and therefore medical errors, excessive complications and other costly inefficiencies.

EMR can also allow for better-targeted monitoring of individual health, even in cases requiring constant targeted screening. One of the main reasons for prolonged hospital care is continuous monitoring, doctor-assessed dosing and crisis response times. EMR can allow for far more effective at-home monitoring, reducing hospital stays, optimizing IC-use and helping to limit the overburdening of skilled healthcare professionals, thus bringing down costs.

The question now about EMR is how to make a viable national system of electronic medical records function for the benefit of everyone. First would be getting everyone covered. Second would be incentivizing the relevant technologies. Third would be showing doctors a real benefit to their own workflow and quality of care.

Then comes the big task of making sure the system works as intended: allowing patients’ medical records to arrive as they do or before, with no effort required of patients or patients’ prior doctors in the moment of record retrieval… protecting patient privacy to 100% effectiveness… allowing the pooling of non-identifying medical data across the system… and using EMR to improve quality of care and treatment options, and in the process, save and prolong lives.

• As part of The Hot Spring’s Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com

The device may, after one or two initial iterations, come to have the computing power of today’s less expensive laptop computers, and will capitalize on the great discoveries in user-interface technology that have emerged from the introduction of the iPhone into the mainstream consumer market.

Whether it will belong to Apple, or be the next generation of the Amazon Kindle, or whether an as-yet-unknown pioneer in consumer electronics will pull it off, e-paper technology is certainly advanced enough to make it possible, and it’s just a matter of time until someone figures out the best way to market such a product, building on the success of the Kindle, the iPhone, the inexpensive streamlined netbook, and ever more available flat-rate unlimited mobile web services.

What is happening right now in the investigation of e-paper technology, at MIT especially, is promising in the extreme, warranting enthusiasm about great leaps in speed and ease of use, as computing circuitry advances to make the tactile e-paper device more like a fully-functional touchscreen.

What looks and feels a lot like paper and will produce ultra-sharp black-and-white text displays, will also be able to produce high-quality color and a mutable graphic-user-interface that allows for typing, searching, scrolling and all sorts of more agile file-search and manipulation. One-touch downloading and nearly full-sized qwerty-keyboard interaction will make the page-perfect tablet into a replacement for today’s netbooks.

Such a device may even use state of the art plastics and be flexible, so it can be used like a laptop when the user desires and like a tablet when more comfortable for reading. The art of the page-perfect reader will be in its ability to make the experience of reading electronic text more natural and more comfortable for the end-user, mimicking better the experience of reading a magazine or newspaper than today’s smaller-screen, reformatted reading devices.

Molecular or chemical computing advances must also be considered, as their impact on the power of ultra-thin devices cannot be overstated. The ability to pack as much computing power as today’s laptops have into a space literally millions of times smaller, with circuitry operating at the molecular level and with circuits that can process not just 16 or 32 commands simultaneously, but 1024 or 2048 or more, means far higher speeds and far less space needed.

The potential for creating impact-resistant or flex-resistant panels that display text and images with the fidelity of paper, is also advancing. What some saw as pure science fiction in the movie Minority Report, newspapers that adapt and update spontaneously, based on environment, time, and the service’s own updating schedule, will likely be one phase in the convergence of the web, news content and personal reading devices.

It will not happen tomorrow, but such levels of connected browsing and communication are possible, and will be available, possibly within a decade. Engineers of reading devices, mobile phones, and even publication networks, should take into account these many coming advances in order to best shape their projects and offerings to the desire consumers have for maximum potential portability, maximum natural feel while reading, and maximum available information, at the lowest possible cost.

• As part of The Hot Spring‘s Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com

The traditional newspaper or magazine has a limited amount of space, as well as the physical constraints of materials used, weight, shipping, cost, etc., that necessarily interfere with the length and scope of materials contained within. And yet, one can often find far longer profile or investigative pieces printed in the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair, than one tends to find on even probing, serious investigative online publications.

Indeed, traditional print news sources are often the most reliable sources of lengthy, in-depth online writing and analysis. The paradox here is that the online medium lends itself to length, as costs for storage and “global distribution” are so low as to be almost zero for any given article published. What we do not have is an established tradition of treating web media as primary sources for serious journalism and cultural analysis, and so we have not come to devote our attention spans to reading the fullest, most in-depth writing available online.

There are legitimate reasons relating to both craft and content for longer, even meandering essays. An essay, as such, is an experiment with an idea, or a series of ideas, a rehearsal of thought-processes and rhetoric, aimed at behaving like a forum for exploration of related themes and the testing of certain challenges to a central thesis or guiding set of principles. This is a vital part of our literary and philosophical collective endeavor, as a species, as a civilization, and the online medium is ideally suited to “give place” (a phrase taken from the Spanish language) to that rehearsal.

One key drawback for realizing this special quality of the online medium is end-user interface: the conventional laptop or desktop computer monitor does bias the reader toward a chronic confinement to “above the fold” content. For whatever reason, the human intellect is less willing or less able (probably due to an instinctual bias toward efficiency in gathering information) to locate links and media that occur outside the main featured areas highlighted by above-the-fold or page-load site layout. As one scrolls down, sidebar content is increasingly “buried”, harder for the loosely attentive eye or impulsive browser to locate.

But hardware is being developed that will better harness the capabilities of the website format for long-text reading. E-paper technologies and ultra-thin full-color monitor designs are evolving to a point where letter-sized single-sheet edge-to-edge panels will be able to store massive amounts of data and present book-length documents in a much more physically and visually comfortable format. This will allow web-pages to evolve, to develop better approaches to the end-user interface issue related to buried marginal content and scroll-to-read obstacles.

If it were possible to actually “sit with” a long piece of writing, the way we do with magazines and books, online writing would be better able to start exploiting the vast storage and distribution potential of the medium. The idea of a limitless archive of globally available information, a sort of library of Alexandria to the nth degree, would be more relevant to our use of the web, and browsing the web for “information” would be simultaneously more serious, more entertaining, and more educational.

Publishers need to consider that high-quality, full-length online content not only has a real commercial potential for the future, given the evolution of e-reading technologies, but that paper and publishing are also evolving to integrate such new functions, so that publishing as a whole will benefit broadly from embracing such advances. That embrace needs to happen in such a way that quality of content, democratization of production, free flow of imformation and author’s rights, are all central to the way these new publishing formats develop.

In the meantime, the web is now mature enough that it is in fact the primary source of information about the world for millions of end-users. If we can take seriously the idea that this is not a fluke and that human beings are not from this point forward condemned to gravely limited attention spans, then we can work on finding ways to make essay-length, contemplative writing more of a fixture in online publishing.

“We’ve gone from a lunar world, where we measured everything in terms of days, weeks and months, to a transactional world, where every single transaction has to be part of your decision-making process.” — Colin Powell, 14 December 2008

TheHotSpring.com :: Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.

The information age gives us a vast wealth of knowledge, or of a kind of knowledge, what we take to be knowledge, about the world, hints which are also indicators, though not predictors, indicators because they play a role in expressing current interest, embedded in human activity, and so in framing future expressions of human interest.

A transactional cosmology sees an interplay of resources, overlapping vectors of sometimes disparate knowledge-sets and creed-assertions, a vital climate of investment, of beings into beings, of cultures into cultures, of histories into histories, of methods into methods, willpower into willpower, communicty into community, potential into potential, outcome into outcome.

Such a cosmology allows us to see occurrence, progression, insistence, persistence, even entropy and erosion, as non-linear, making possible a fuller, more precise understanding of how things come to be and what we can do to urge better results into being. The resilience of vital life-supporting webs of persistent transaction, for instance, can be seen to underpin all transactions across the web of incident, recombination and dissolution, we claim as our own, as the human world.

“Transaction” is not merely a reference to commercial exchange, to the monetary fabric of traditional economics, to guesses about what people intend or demand from an interactive world of community and human moral regulation and creative expresssion: it is, more deeply, more comprehensively, a way of approaching the dynamics of ecological interchange, of web-dynamics, of the immensity of competing and overlapping social fabrics that promote or diminish the strengths of the individual in her environment.

Time —as we have measured it traditionally— is dictatorial, linear, categorized and categorizing in the extreme. Yesterday cannot be today. The 19th century cannot be the 21st. It is impossible for 31 December 1999 to fall on a Thursday, because it fell on a Friday. Saturday was the year 2000.

The idea of time, our preconceptions about how it feels, how it moves, what it intends, what it is helpless to do to be different, our customary way of talking about time, could have caused global calamity, if certain precautions were not taken to avoid the glitches that should have accompanied the inevitable arrival of Y2K. Some potential remedies explored included infecting computers on a massive scale with “virus” codes that would turn back their clocks, possibly doing it while presenting to the end-user a proper date.

Time is, ultimately, illusion. It is real, but it is about perspective, not about plunging along a straight line down, down, down into the dark, unknowable future. It is an impression, it is a representation of our senses, and their combined experience of the process of receiving one impression after another, in sequence, which in our awareness says time is passing.

A better way to look at the question of time is by way of synthesis and entropy, or entropy and what R. Buckminster fuller called anti-entropy. There are ways of applying knowledge to the reality surrounding us, so that we prevent, or put off a given instance of entropy, and conserve or remake something of the order of things that gives us our experience.

Entropy is the breakdown of systems. Organs are systems made up of cells, which are made up of molecular and chemical phenomena working together to create a more or less harmonious whole. At the organic scale, those systems collaborate to provide for the metabolic integrity of an organism, a being whose combined functions are provided for by the component organs, at an unconscious level, beyond our will or control.

But we know enough about the systems of the body to push back the onset of catastrophic entropy. We can prevent the heart from breaking down permanently. Within a narrow window of opportunity, a few minutes usually. We can “restore” brain function, if we do the right thing, quickly enough, to prevent its structure from being disassembled by lack of inter-organic activity and chemical impulse.

The body is a transactional phenomenon. The mind is transactional, its speed and health rooted, we think, in the efficiency with which its neural structure can produce “connections” across synapses, making patterns that appear to us as conscious awareness of specific realities. The metabolic functions of the body, processing energy inputs and expending energy, are transactional, infusing the body’s tissues with shares of energy corresponding to factors too numerous and variable to count.

So, there is a direct impact on our way of contemplating human health and related issues, from adopting a transactional cosmology. But beyond human health, human interaction, obviously, and our interactions with the natural environment, which includes —as a massive assemblage of those interactions— the built environment as medium, the expansion of our economic examinations to an ecological level, must be a major component of our work to fashion a world more balanced, more resilient in the face of the pressures we exert.

• For more on the Hyper-convergence media paradigm
• For more on Generative economics

It may be that “a few bad apples” got the ball rolling on what has turned into a massive international financial disaster. Or, it may be that a few bad apples got their names in lights, while the entire system conspired unwittingly in a spectacular collapse. Either way, the best expression of the problem might be to say that markets have stopped working, in part, because they have been comprehensively modified to stop working like markets.

With capital vanishing, nearly $7 trillion in stock losses in just a few months, and banks refusing to lend even the tens of billions they were given precisely to lubricate the lending process, we are facing a crisis of confidence and an inability to conceptualize shared interest. The idea that self-interest motivates markets somehow developed, irresponsibly, into the idea that self-interest is more important than the functionality of market dynamics.

With ever-larger banking interests concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands, they also began to rely on mystical assumptions about the wealth-generating power of certain financial risks. The obscurity of those financial gambles, the need to believe in their power of wealth-expansion, allowed financial institutions to use questionable deals, with even more questionable projected rates of return, to paper-over already measurable under-performance, both in their own businesses and in the markets generally.

The underlying problem in the system —which allowed banking institutions to hide bad debt in bundled assets, and resell it to trading partners who may not have been given full disclosure on the unsustainable nature of much of the underlying debt— is transparency. A fierce individualist ideology led to a convenient clouding over of the reporting mechanisms intended to make financial institutions more ethical, more stable, and more useful to those outside their walls.

One of the major innovations that could take place —either by collaborative effort now in a time of crisis, or over time, as everyday operators within markets work to adopt the most intelligent organizational tools— would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution.

This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts. Part of the goal would be to facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases, and to allow competing points of view on the most complex investment-backup schemes to have an open hearing, as based on credible information.

One of the side-effects of this sort of banking transparency network would be to reduce the motivation for wrongdoing, be it small manipulations or distortions on a grand scale, because by its nature, the system would privilege the more reliable sources of information. Banks with better reporting would be considered superior institutions, in terms of viability and therefore smart investment choices. Grandiose claims would be far less relevant, because they would be measured by their truthfulness, not their dimension.

For many reasons, this may seem like pie in the sky; for one: we don’t know what sort of computing technology could do the work necessary to parse such large volumes of information in a timely fashion. But computer speeds are accelerating rapidly, with the Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos achieving petaflop speeds —one thousand trillion calculations per second— and nano-chemical computing on the horizon, potentially magnifying the processing power of traditional microprocessors by thousands or even millions of times.

And, that’s still without touching on the controversial topic of quantum computing, in which everyday substances —like 12 ounces of coffee— can be turned into massive computational neural nets capable of working out problems that require trillions of calculations instantly. The complications there are too many to go into at present, and there is no reliable quantum computer that can be applied to something with so many legal implications as a banking system, at the moment, but the work is ongoing.

Cloud computing may be the first major speed-related improvement that can allow the beginnings of a true banking transparency network. This is a major undertaking, and will require a daunting philosophical shift for many in the financial industry, but armed with computers working at thousands of times today’s computers’ top speeds, spread out over a dispersed cloud-computing network, it would be possible to optimize processing speed, memory allocation, memory recall, informational back-up, time-keeping and matrix cross-referencing.

Bringing all those functions into a central reporting scheme, to make the transparency network a staple of financial regulation, that requires little aggressive intervention but provides significant meat for economists and analysts to chew on, and incentivizes the truth-telling component of in-house reports, could yield a major revolution in financial services and in the stability of banking institutions.

A secondary benefit from this system would be the ability of journalists to judge what sort of projects are getting traction at what institutions — for instance, is hypothetical Bank Q investing heavily in renewable resources, while volatility in the oil sector is hurting some of its competitors? The openness of the information would be a way of allowing the private sector to actually police private banks, without that “voluntary due diligence” being a joke compared to blood-and-guts regulation.

Stability, innovation, long-term thinking, would all be elevated by such a process, as markets begin to organize themselves around more reliable information and more complex, but verifiable, calculations of actual worth, investment strategy and wealth-creation. No longer would major banks complain that they cannot get behind needed investments —like green infrastructure— because key analysts or their rivals won’t understand it and will portray them as dubious actors.

Their financial credentials will be on display and verifiable, and they will not be tempted to or required by circumstance to concoct grossly irresponsible fictions to substantiate their claims about messianic speculation schemes. Such frauds will not only be hard to hide, they will be obviously counter-productive from the outset. Hard work on projects worth completing will be a better measure of financial wisdom, and the mystique of markets might again be found in their functionality, not in their metaphysics.

• Originally published as part of The Hot Spring’s Quipu Economic Forum

TheHotSpring.com :: We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics. The obvious problem is that some of our most vital human interests come into conflict more readily with those of others, when massive numbers of people mix and intermingle, individuals and cultures competing with one another for the spoils of a new global system.

But there is no reason this has to be a source of friction, suspicion or violence. It is also true that a more open system is more dynamic, more able to adapt to otherwise ‘trivial’ personal interests, and better able to establish truly just rules for negotiating tense competitive situations where decisions need to be made about whose interests are best served by what result. What is needed is devotion to that open system, and real pragmatic tools for helping that system recognize and address genuine situations of friction or crisis.

There are some 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, and more than half are expected to die off within the next 100 years, possibly much sooner, and possibly well over one-half. This rapid evacuation of global language culture —though some will say it brings the benefits of increased uniformity— robs us all of potential bridges across cultures where understanding can take place. As words disappear, so do ideas, comparisons, metaphors, symbols and the human element of perception.

And the degradation of the global culture, in this fashion, while it may be part of a process of integration which will deliver some much needed benefits for long-term peace and human wellbeing, is a stress on the sense of security or identity of those cultures which survive. A key focus at all times, in the new globalized civilization, must be to ensure that identities are not threatened by the mass expansion of media, rights, capital and movement.

The conflict of the Tower of Babel —a place where we presume too many distinct cultures and interests combined, and an empire collapsed— is a conflict of (abstract/thought-pattern) border tensions provoking animosity and rivalry. Actual border conflicts derive fuel and momentum from abstract border conflicts —visions of the world, racial prejudice, linguistic rivalry, competition for resources—, a tendency 21st century technologies, politics and societal developments must counteract.

Openness is part of the new era of information and communication, which has helped to make the world “smaller” or “flatter” or “come together”, if we think more optimistically. As interests and opportunities coincide across nations and cultures, limiting the degree to which geography determines the life choices of a given individual, we face the need to embrace or to fear and oppose the increased openness that offers the resources and the opportunities to meet our interests.

Similar to the way in which cloudscape-computing allows for much more resilient, secure, and super-fast computation, so a broad, integrated global society, if informed by and served by norms that protect the human individual as a creative and information-gathering entity, can achieve new dynamism and vastly more potent and timely means of problem solving, where needed. The new integrated web, the dawn of hyper-convergence, and the global hunger for digital technologies means human society itself is becoming a sort of universal library or information-store.

Technology can help us not only to communicate, but to share the work of solving basic human problems, and to transcend the nature of oppositional conflict. Productive adversarial systems can be woven into a broad social fabric that helps us to debate, confront and work through the challenges of our times without resort to armed confrontation: the ugliest and ultimately least productive of human talents.

The 21st century need not be the new fall of the Tower of Babel, but could be the agile and well-thought construction of an abstract ziggurat —a fortress, a temple, an storehouse of ideas and guidance— shared by the broad continuum of human societies and attuned to our need to communicate and co-create. If we understand the problem of our times is one of forging cooperative bonds that serve the individual and protect human rights, we will be best armed to persevere in the face of challenges to cultural and individual identity, and reap the rewards —as a species— of the information age.

• Originally published 17 May 2008 for The Hot Spring’s Crisis Policy Forum
• Republished 25 May 2008 for Café Sentido’s project The Written Wor(l)d

. . . INTRODUCTION

Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, The Hot Spring proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.

It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.

To emerge from the fog of flawed, incomplete and opportunistically limited economic and financial analysis, means we need to come to grips with the fact that all resources, all functions or ‘services’, be they natural or the product of human ingenuity, figure somehow in economic values at all levels. There may be no clear way to quantify their contribution or mercantilize them, but they are there, and nothing can be fully understood in economic terms without seeing this.

We could calculate, for instance, that to do by artificial means what nature does of its own accord in a handful of basic environmental ‘services’ (such as climate stabilization or the global fresh water supply—avoiding discussions of such complex processes such as new species evolution, deep-sea current patterning or ultraviolet light blockage and refraction), we would have to spend well in excess of 10 times the entire global economic output (using GDP in sum as a base).

This helps us to take note of the immense ecological influence we have erased from economic calculations, seeing it as inconvenient or in realistic terms unquantifiable. But it does not help us to place a useful economic value on such influence over the economic infrastructure of civilization, globally or locally.

It may be enough to say, though this shades all following calculations of any kind in a significant and problematic way, that they are indispensable and dynamic values. They exceed all calculable value of our own activities, which without their contribution would simply not make sense or could not take place at all.

Metaphorically, their incalculable immensity could be compared to the way the tides at the edge of a great sea shape and define the shoreline and the kind of activities that can be conducted at that point of contact. It is necessary to think of how such information could then be integrated into a more complete and less untruthful (it’s worth noting) matrix of economic calculations.

What parameters determine downward and upward trends, and what do such trends mean for our ‘traditional’ economic footing, financial activities, international treaty obligations on issues like trade, water, farm subsidies, and transportation? These questions only begin to gain relevance when we see that the ‘macro’ view is in fact far broader than the segmented vignette-style of economics we are accustomed to pursuing, for the level of mathematical and sociological comfort it affords.

So, everything is very big, all numbers are astronomical, nature is everything and more, we cannot make it all fit into a nice little frame… yes, yes, yes, this is true and it’s a problem. But what can we do to apply this observation to our economic outlook in general or to programming the calculations for this quixotic pursuit of an intregrated economics?

. . . 1. CORRECT THE ERRORS

We first need to correct the errors that are already built into our economic calculations, and which are part of the traditional economic outlook: for example, nuclear energy. Why do we not count the costs of long-term maintenance, security, protecting national technological secrets, pollution clean-up and, above all, the long-term hermetically-sealed containment of nuclear waste?

Primarily, because that last figure requires examining the huge costs of sealing radioactive materials in a hermitically-sealed, non-conductive container, for between 1 million and 10 million years, which may take us only to the half-life of the radioactivity of the spent fuel.

Depleted uranium, for example, which is used as a heavy metal for armor and bomb-casings in US military machinery, has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. 1 to 10 million years to abide by public health and safety laws and prevent widespread radioactive contamination of the natural environment or of human habitat.

We can calculate these costs, but they remain unimaginably vast. Imagine telling a businessman —it is irrelevant whether he is serious or not, talented or not— we would like you to build a nuclear plant for electricity generation, move toward taking a profit after a few decades, maybe make a few billion dollars over another few decades, then pay for decomissioning the plant, clean-up of all dangerous substances or contaminated panels or constructions, then pay all the expenses for containment and security, for 1 to 10 million years, during which you will not be able to take any profit from your activities.

The offer would not be convincing. So, in our calculation of the usefulness of such technologies, we need to take very seriously the reality that those costs will be paid or those operations will not be successfully carried out. Though we may see the economic value now, and tell ourselves as a society, it’s worth it to get the gain we get from “cheap” energy now, we need to see clearly what those costs look like, and what they will take away from us in the future.

The calculations need to be wholecloth and transparent. The healthy functioning of any market depends on there not being unreliable pockets of secrecy and deceit where the eye is fooled and the ‘magic’ of economic value just a trick.

. . . 2. INTEGRATE AND COMPREHEND

The founding principle, the goal and the challenge of this undertaking is to integrate and comprehend in an integrated manner the economic, ecological, financial and spending data that account for real long-term viability and prosperity at the human level. It begins in the theoretical realm, and through analysis and discussion, could reach the moment of practical application, likely with much new information technology put into the process. The model will be the physical metaphor of the Inca quipu, a tool for measuring taxation in an empire that combined urban centers, agriculture and nomadic hunter-gatherer bands.

The quipu was a system of strings, knots, colors and patterns, created in each case by the individual agent whose job was to oversee the history of taxation and tributes offered to the Inca by his subjects in a given region. It provides an evaluation of geography, social composition, currency and chronicle.

The quipu was used to evaluate the state of affairs through a dynamic system of spontaneous coding, a system open to the introduction of new elements, categories and coding patterns, at nearly any time. The quipu’s creator might have been the only living soul able to fully decode its meaning, which was, in itself, a way of establishing enhanced economic value in the work of formatting and maintaining the document itself.

The problem will be, evidently, how do we program into a matrix for moment-by-moment calculation of an international economic outlook, values we cannot quantify? and, how do we allow for a dynamic, bottom-up intregration of new code, new parameters, and new paradigms into what should be, in theory, a consistent model for evaluating global economic trends, beyond the bounds of the traditionally ‘economic’?

. . . 3. MOMENT VS. METHOD

These are questions that need answers, and will form the basis of Project Quipu. Allow for discussion, criticism, analysis and the contest of ideas, to guide us toward a series of solutions that help make such a matrix possible.

Project Quipu proposes as a rule not shying away from seemingly impossible calculations, because they likely contain vital economic data which may come to us in forms not quantifiable but in fact relevant and comprehensible, when seen through the adequate lens.

One key feature will be timing: as with any economic reality, the moment brings context that cannot be discarded, and two moments which may appear numerically similar may in fact have amply divergent significance. It is therefore vital to understand that any data with real impact will emerge either more slowly or more rapidly than our ability to perceive it, just out of reach of our attempts to ‘capture the moment’.

We cannot take a ‘snapshot’ and live the captured moment at the same time, so we must manage that lapse in time appropriately and understand that it carves out a hollow in the information available to us. This nature of the moment helps to shape the method, so to top off the aggravating complexity of this challenge: we cannot assume at any time that we have rendered the definitive picture of a global economy. It escapes our grip like water…