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MinciuSodas
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesMinciuSodas is a laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers http://www.ms.lt founded by AndriusKulikauskas in 1998.
Our most significant academic participant was JosephGoguen?, but sadly he passed away. Currently, ChristineAx? leads our new working group on NewCraft? and physicist-mathematician-urbanist NikosSalingaros is financing us to promote his new book ATheoryOfArchitecture. SarunasRaudys? is a great supporter of our laboratory and was recognized as Lithuania's scientist of the year for his outstanding work on artificial neural networks and a hierarchy of statistical classifiers. We have some long time participants from Lithuania's computer science professors. BernardLietaer?, who helped design the euro conversion mechanism, has written us a few letters and now inquired about our free services. We have contacts with some deep philosophical thinkers such as PeterGärdenfors? and MarkJohnson? and I hope to pursue more in this direction. I have written a few academic papers and am finishing a third for the OpenContent workshops http://www.openculture.org led by PaoloPumilia?, whose group we have assembled at our LearningFromEachOther? working group. I think one major reason is that I avoid academic conferences because they are an enormous amount of work with little economic opportunity and the participants tend to be either low in initiative or secretive and protective (as in the case of the MITMediaLab) or oriented towards artificial academic criteria. Our work is grounded in values and it's interesting that our working groups' topics tend not to have analogues in academia, whether it's "loving God" or "absolute grounds" or "global villages" or "alternative economics" or "self-learning" or "fighting peacefully" or "ethical design" and so on. The academics who we have engaged as independent thinkers seem to thrive despite academia rather than because of it. In an important sense, our MinciuSodas laboratory is developing an alternative to university, both in terms of our research, which is based on subjectively grounded investigations, and in terms of self-education through a program of traveling self-learning which might become an alternative to college but especially for the poor in developing countries. Thanks to FranzNahrada, I'm flying to Cyprus to participate in the MIRLearningPartnership? for linking adult education and local development. --AndriusKulikauskas