[ED: We take no position on the politics of the Brexit debate, just the Knowledge Economy.]
Such a nation should take responsibility for its own future and become a role model for the rest of the world. Already two of our universities are the best in the world. We have a high tech sector and are the site of the world’s premier financial centre. We must build on this comparative advantage in the knowledge economy. Surely we must become an innovative hub, a centre and driver of the world’s technological advance. …
This does not mean a nation of computer scientists. Innovation and creativity can be applied to the leading edges of any industry and it is these leading edges that Britain is in a position to capture. In a truly competitive, enterprise environment no one can know precisely what those industries are. Our success will depend on our ability to capture the most valuable parts of increasingly complex supply chains.
An example of this is the iPhone. iPhones are manufactured in China but the value is added by the research and marketing being done in the US which reaps the bigger advantage. Consequently, China sees only 6% of the value created.
As I said, we do not know precisely where these areas will be but it will always be important. Interestingly, New Zealand, which produces only 3% of the world’s milk, controls 30% of the value of the global dairy market. It is not just high tech areas that will be dependent upon this knowledge economy. It is even in traditional areas such as agriculture.
Taiwan has developed a system of growing vegetables in a water solution rather than soil using a patent formula of antagonist micro-organisms which boost production with low nitrate levels. It wants to develop this in York and should be encouraged to do so. Rest
Dubai 10X Initiative outlines Human Genome Map for Dubai residents
Humaid Mohammed Al Qatami, DHA’s [Dubai Health Authority] Chairman of the Board and Director General, said: “Forming genome laboratories in Dubai signals a new phase, where our forecasts for the future of the health and medical services sector begin to materialize. The labs will establish the first national genetic database for future research, lending support to decision-makers as they set plans and strategies for the future of the healthcare sector. This, in turn, ensures Dubai’s global competitiveness and strengthens the knowledge economy.”
“When His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, launched the Dubai 10X initiative and directed Dubai Government agencies to apply today what other cities will implement 10 years from now, he effectively reinvented government operations, steering them away from repetitive everyday tasks, and towards future successes and sustainable development,” Al Qatami added. Rest
The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.
What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…
… like this one, which is right aligned.
Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.
If your theme supports it, you’ll see the “wide” button on the image toolbar. Give it a try.
Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.
The Inserter Tool
Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.
Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:
Text & Headings
Images & Videos
Galleries
Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
And Lists like this one of course 🙂
Visual Editing
A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:
The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
Matt Mullenweg, 2017
The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.
Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.
You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.
Media Rich
If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:
Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.
The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.
Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:
You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:
Code is Poetry
The WordPress community
If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.
Hathaway’s data suggests something of a mixed bag. Startup financing is still massively concentrated, but some smaller places, mainly college towns and cities like Pittsburgh, are seeing some growth. A decade and a half ago, I called Pittsburgh my “base case,” suggesting that it was the one city in the Rust Belt region with the university and place-based assets that could potentially navigate the transition to the tech-based knowledge economy. Hathaway’s data bear this out.
Pittsburgh appears to be the one older industrial center that is maybe growing into a startup hub, along with the post-industrial cities of Columbus and Indianapolis and, of course, college towns. Hathaway stresses that it takes a long time for new startup hubs to develop, and city leaders and policy-makers need to be realistic about the scope, pace, and inevitability of the rise of the rest.
Michael T. Nietzel: I am a former university president who writes about higher education.
The University of Louisville and IBM inked an agreement last month to establish the IBM Skills Academy, scheduled to open this fall at UL’s Center for Digital Transformation. The partnership is one more example of the accelerating trend of universities and corporations teaming up to provide skills-training for undergraduates considering possible employment in the technology sector. Rest of Forbes article
High-tech, creative, ‘knowledge’ businesses drive growth, but most people and places are cut off from the knowledge economy. How can we open it up?
If economic eras are defined by their most advanced form of production, then we live in a knowledge economy – one where knowledge plays a decisive role in the organisation of production, distribution and consumption.
The era of Fordist mass production that preceded it transformed almost every part of the economy. But the knowledge economy hasn’t spread in the same way. Only some people and places are reaping the benefits.
This is a big problem: it contributes to inequality, stagnation and political alienation. And traditional policy solutions are not sufficient to tackle it. We can’t expect benefits simply to trickle down to the rest of the population, and redistribution alone will not solve the inequalities we are facing.
What’s the alternative? Nesta has been working with Roberto Mangabeira Unger to convene discussions with politicians, researchers, and activists from member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, to explore policy options for an inclusive knowledge economy. This report presents the results of that collaboration.
We argue that an inclusive knowledge economy requires action to democratise the economy – widening access to capital and productive opportunity, transforming models of ownership, addressing new concentrations of power, and democratising the direction of innovation.
It demands that we establish a social inheritance by reforming education and social security.
And it requires us to create a high-energy democracy, promoting experimental government, and independent and empowered civil society. REST
I’m looking forward to attending the 5th Knowledge Summit being organized by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation (MBRF). I’ll be a little better dressed than in this recent picture my wife took at Yosemite National Park, and I hope to meet as many fellow attendees as possible. We are all interested in “Youth and the Future of the Knowledge Economy” and we need to find new ways to work together “to help build the knowledge economy” [a long-term goal set by Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 around the time Facebook grew to over a billion users. Long-term was described as 5 to 12 years or what would be 2018 to 2025].
The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation, MBRF, has unveiled the theme for its upcoming Knowledge Summit 2018, the prominent annual event bringing together decision makers, academics and experts from around the world to discuss the production and dissemination of knowledge.
The fifth edition of the annual Summit is set to take place on 5th and 6th December 2018, bearing the theme ‘Youth and the Future of the Knowledge Economy’. The event is held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, and H.H. Sheikh Ahmed bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairman of MBRF.
The 2018 Summit is in line with the objectives of the UAE Vision 2021 to build a competitive economy that promotes investments in knowledge, supports creativity and innovation, and embraces advanced technologies to improve people’s wellbeing and empower a generation of entrepreneurs.
… The Knowledge Summit 2018 will host various discussions covering the knowledge economy rooted in human capital; the digital economy; and the Islamic economy and its role within the knowledge economy. Topics will also include the youth’s role in building these knowledge economies, as well as human capital and its function as a cornerstone for holistic and sustainable development.
The application of knowledge is now recognized to be one of the key sources of growth in the global economy. The term Knowledge Economy (KE) has been coined to reflect this increased importance of knowledge. A knowledge economy is one where organizations and people acquire, create, disseminate, and use knowledge more effectively for greater economic and social development. – World Bank Knowledge for Development (K4D)
