Power Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy

Many people grew up learning about bell curves as the shape of normal distribution of most problems were faced. Certainly, in a high middle class society such as the United States, the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society: starting low with the few rich, rising up to reflect a large middle class, and tapering off with a sizeable but still diminishing poverty class.As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer. This has led some to wonder if America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people. Recent research indicates thatmid-level jobs, the kind that helped create economic stability in the 1950s and 1960s, are becoming rarer. For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations. If these statistics are an accurate measure of how people are doing, then this is an alarming trend. What is the role of technology in these developments? How will future generations fare in a world defined less by broad distributions of wealth and more defined by power-curves? Will a small number of "winners," accumulate the larger share of wealth through an increasingly automated and globalized economy? If this is our trajectory, how can we brace ourselves for it? To answer these and similar questions the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program assembled a knowledgeable group of thinkers, leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs seasoned in the digital economy for a three-day dialogue in Aspen, Colorado in August of 2012. The event focused on the broader economic and social implications of an economy being redefined by new networks, behaviors and rules. A significant portion of the discussion also explored personal data as a possible untapped source of economic empowerment. This report covers the relationship between innovation and productivity, the "new economy of personal information", the workings of the "power-curve society", the future of jobs, and the social, policy and leadership implications of these changes

Chapter 18 Re-imagining Politics through the Lens of the Commons

In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholars, activists, journalists, and public figures deliberate about the creative and critical potential of public imagination in an era paradoxically marked by intensifying globalization and resurgent nationalism. Divided into five sections, these essays explore the social, political, and cultural role of imagination and civic engagement, offering cogent, ingenious reflections that stand in stark contrast to the often grim rhetoric of our era. Short and succinct, the essays engage with an interconnected ensemble of themes and issues while also providing insights into the specific geographical and social dynamics of each author’s national or regional context

The Promise and Peril of Big Data

The Promise and Peril of Big Data explores the implications of inferential technologies used to analyze massive amounts of data and the ways in which these techniques can positively affect business, medicine, and government. The report is the result of the Eighteenth Annual Roundtable on Information Technology

Chapter 18 Re-imagining Politics through the Lens of the Commons

In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholars, activists, journalists, and public figures deliberate about the creative and critical potential of public imagination in an era paradoxically marked by intensifying globalization and resurgent nationalism. Divided into five sections, these essays explore the social, political, and cultural role of imagination and civic engagement, offering cogent, ingenious reflections that stand in stark contrast to the often grim rhetoric of our era. Short and succinct, the essays engage with an interconnected ensemble of themes and issues while also providing insights into the specific geographical and social dynamics of each author’s national or regional context

Insidious dangers of benevolent sexism: Consequences for women's performance

Four experiments found benevolent sexism to be worse than hostile sexism for women's cognitive performance. Experiments 1-2 showed effects of paternalist benevolent sexism and ruled out explanations of perceived sexism, context pleasantness, and performance motivation. Experiment 3 showed effects of both paternalist and complementary gender differentiation components of benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism per se (rather than the provision of unsolicited help involved in paternalism) worsened performance. Experiment 4 showed that impaired performance due to benevolent sexism was fully mediated by the mental intrusions women experienced about their sense of competence. Additionally, Experiment 4 showed that gender identification protected against hostile but not benevolent sexism. Despite the apparently positive and inoffensive tone of benevolent sexism, our research emphasizes its insidious dangers

Artificial Intelligence Comes of Age: The Promise and Challenge of Integrating AI into Cars, Healthcare and Journalism

Artificial Intelligence Comes of Age," written by David Bollier, is the report resulting from the 2016 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Institutional Innovation. The report examines the transformative nature of artificially intelligent technologies on our society, our economies, our governments and our well-being. It concentrates on three artificial intelligence sectors: self-driving cars, AI and medicine, and AI and the media

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Efficient simultaneous mutagenesis of multiple genes in specific plant tissues by multiplex CRISPR

CRISPR technology is an established tool for the generation of knockout plants (Zhang et al., 2019), yet limitations remain. First, the manipulation of individual genes may fail to produce phenotypes for groups of genes with redundant or synergistic functions. While this has been partially addressed by multiplexing guide RNAs (gRNAs), there is concern that as the number of targets increases, the chances of obtaining higher-order knockouts diminish (Zhang et al., 2016). Second, knocking out fundamentally important genes can cause severe pleiotropic phenotypes or lethality. Tissue-specific knockout of genes in somatic tissues can overcome this limitation (Decaestecker et al., 2019 ; Wang et al., 2020 ; Liang et al., 2019). However, the efficiency of simultaneously targeting more than three genes in a tissue-specific context is unexplored. Here, by multiplexing gRNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana plants expressing Cas9 either ubiquitously (pPcUBI) or root cap-specifically (pSMB), we show that six genes can be simultaneously mutated with high efficiency, generating higher-order mutant phenotypes already in the first transgenic generation (T1). The mutation frequencies for all target genes were positively correlated and unaffected by the order of the gRNAs in the vector, showing that efficient higher-order mutagenesis in specific plant tissues can be readily achieved