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Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction: clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencing. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But the approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

The forum will is owned by the people who use it, who are working towards a common goal, Better Extrusion and Better Die Casting.

The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. When individuals work together towards a common goal, it produces results that emerge at a group level. Organizes collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation.

The aim of a collective is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants.

Rather than viewing this type of technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a “cultural operating system” that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The goal of communitarian technology is to maximize both the individual autonomy and the power of people working together.

A recent survey asked open source developers what their motivation was to participate. The most common was “to learn and develop new skills”.

The power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness and transparency is more practical and bigger than anyone thought possible, and it is growing.

The share of new Harvard graduates entering finance, which in 2007 reached 47%, has plunged to 20%, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Whether these graduates are about to launch the next technological revolution matters. Innovation drives productivity, and productivity drives real incomes. Bigger pay checks reduce debt and increase spending.

Innovation and productivity are very hard to predict. They depend not just on inventors and entrepreneurs stumbling on the next game-changing product, but on how quickly and widely firms incorporate  that product into their operations.

Between 1996 and 2009 productivity grew by a robust 2.7% a year in the US from personal computers, fibre optics, etc..

What’s next, and will your company be among the first to incorporate it into your operations?

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but that is not how most brands see it!

Thanks to the rise of the internet and extended international supply chains, and more recently  to the global economic downturn counterfeit goods are everywhere. Fake Porches and Ferraris zoom along the streets of Bangkok.

Counterfeiting used to be a luxury goods problem. Now people are trying to traffic counterfeit items that have a wider effect on the economy, such as pharmaceuticals and computer parts.

Counterfeit goods are estimated to make up 5-7% of world trade and close to $600 billion.

Nobody knows exactly why the stock market has an uncanny tendency to deliver lousy returns from May through October, but post stellar gains from November through April.

The difference is staggering. According to Stock Trader’s Almanac,  $10,000 invetsed in the Dow Jones industrial average from November 1 to April 30 every year from 1950 to 2008 would have grown to $474,305, assuming the money was switched to fixed income investments from May 1 to Oct 31.

But if the $10,000 was invested in stocks from May 1 to Oct. 31 and parked in fixed income for the other 6 months, it would have shrunk to $8,012.

Several theories attempt to explain the market’s seasonal trends. During the summer, fund managers are lounging at the cottage instead of buying stocks? Markets often rebound in December when investors are in a cheerful mood? In Canada, the registered retirement savings plan season gives stocks another boost.

Skeptics say the seasonal trends may be nothing more than a product of “data ming”. If you examine enough data, patterns will emerge, even if they are just a product of chance.

Attempting to time market cycles is not something that’s conducive to sleeping at night!

People can say it’s a coincidence, but it’s been a coincidence for a very long time.

There is plenty of uncertainty that argues for action against climate change, not against it.

If it were known that global warming would  be limited to 2 C, the world might decide to live with that. But the range of possible outcomes is huge, with catastrophe one possibility, and the costs of averting climate change are comparatively small. Just as a householder pays a small premium to protect himself against disaster, the world should do the same.

We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what data mean. If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on-and you can’t tell when you are being lied to.

The inability to grasp statistics or probability makes us believe stupid things. Gamblers who believe their number is more likely to come up this time because it didn’t come up last time.

Intellectually serious skeptics of climate change argue that the statistics case is weak-that dubious techniques are used to sample and grab global temperatures.

Thinking statistically is tricky. We often say that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can’t write, you can’t think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar.

Mr Dennis formally launched McLaren Automotive as a fully fledged carmaker with the debut of the $250,000 MP4-12C supercar. It is said to outperform the latest Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

McClaren’s existing site can cope with about 1,000 cars a year, but a new factory is going up to help. Mr Dennis is is currently raising $500,000,000 in exchange for 48% of McClaren Automotive in case anyone is interested.

To achieve greatness, a goal has to be bigger than ourselves. We have to identify whose lives will be enriched by our goals, and make sure that the goals are aligned with our organization’s top priorities.

The typical goal setting processes that companies have been using for decades are not helping employees achieve great things. And in fact, the type of goal setting we should be doing is the opposite of what organizations have been doing for the past few decades. If your people do not have to learn new skills and do not have to leave their comfort zone, those goals will probably not drive greatness.

Goals have to capture the imagination. They must leap off the paper, so vividly that people can feel how great it will be to achieve them.

Goals must be:

1) Heartfelt, in that somebody’s life must be enriched, besides the originator.

2) Animated, in that  how great it will feel when they are achieved can be pictured.

3) Required, in that they are absolutely necessary to help the company.

4) Difficult, in that they must require that you leave your comfort zone and acquire new skills.