The latest (Spring 2008) issue of Strategy+Business magazine is on the newsstand and on the web — and in it, my piece whacking cost-benefit analysis, the bane of innovation and sane regulatory policy. I’m already getting letters …
(Free) registration is required to read the article online.

Earlier this week, Olivia Judson posted a much-commented-upon essay on the biology of clouds at the New York Times site.
I am happy to report that in April 2002, Oliver Morton, Hybrid Vigor Fellow and the news and features editor for Nature (as well as the author of two books), wrote a terrific monograph for Hybrid […]

Just wanted to let you know that I’ll be on WBAI-NY (99.5 FM) tonight, with a brief commentary (that I mentioned earlier this week) on the life of Josh Lederberg. It will close the evening news, which runs from 6 to 6:30 Eastern.
The station streams live at http://www.wbai.org and I’m told the broadcast also will […]

A friend just sent me a story from Monday’s Guardian U.K., on control of the net by corporations, a.k.a. “net neutrality.” I’ve been writing about this issue since the early ’90s, back when I was writing Inside Technology at the San Francisco Examiner. And then again at Digital Media. And again at Technology & Media. […]

While researching a radio commentary I’m writing on Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Laureate who died last week, I found a interview he did with Computerworld Magazine in November 1986 for its Computers & Society issue. Called “Tying Minds Together to Advance Science and Social Intelligence,” Lederberg offered some fascinating and prescient perspectives on the […]

The U.K.’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) functions something like the late lamented U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, killed off by Newt Gingrich back in the ’90s. They regularly publish brief but fairly comprehensive, interdisciplinary reports with cross-sector relevance on trends in science and technology.
POST recently published three POSTnotes entitled “Ecological Networks“, “Smart […]

One of Hybrid Vigor’s long-standing goals has been to build a global network of collaborative thinkers. We’ve made a good head start over the years through our project work in various areas, but now we’re ratcheting up the visibility of the effort by assembling a team of blog authors for Hybridvigor.net.
The first author to join […]

Today’s ‘Inside Higher Ed’ blog posted an interesting analysis of tenure versus interdisciplinary research. Nice to see these issues getting aired on a broader stage, although the argument sounded familiar to our ears.
In 2001, Diana Rhoten and I wrote Hybrid Vigor’s first white paper on roadblocks to interdisciplinary practice, that included tenure as well as […]

Yesterday, my New York Times “Re:framing” column was about the lack of working capital available to nonprofits for their most basic operating needs, and its tragic effects.
It was called, “Can Foundations Take the Long View Again?,” and you should read it just to see the brilliant illustration that ran with it, if nothing else. (You […]

My Re:framing column in this Sunday’s New York Times explored a new teacher credentialing program that’s just been accredited and is underway in a network of charter schools in Northern California, called the Reach Institute.
Public K-12 education not being my “beat,” so to speak, I was fascinated to discover just how much impact a good […]