conflux
The Economist
Mayhem in May"For all their entertainment value, the anti-globalists’ demonstrations cannot be dismissed as a recurring juvenile joke. How to reduce poverty in the third world—and whether globalisation is a help or a hindrance—is one of the most pressing moral, political and economic issues of our times. Undeniably, anti-globalism demonstrations have moved these questions higher up the public agenda. Whether they are pushing governments towards more enlightened answers is quite another matter."
redux [04.16.01]
"Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.
The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people."
redux [04.10.01]
"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."
redux [03.08.01]
"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"
redux [08.07.00]
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."
redux [04.23.00]
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).
It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."
redux [02.18.01]
"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."
According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."
redux [02.14.00]
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [03.24.00]
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
10:25 PM
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The New York Times
Does an Anti-Piracy Plan Quash the First Amendment?[requires 'free' registration]
"There's a long-accepted notion in the publishing world that between the right of an author to control the uses of his book and the right of a reader to engage in free speech is the safety valve known as "fair use." "
"But there's a related question that has never been settled by the courts: Does fair use, which has its roots in the First Amendment, entitle the scholar, reporter or others to gain access to the copyrighted work in the first place -- -- especially when the material is guarded by a technological device designed to prevent digital piracy?"
"In a move that shows just how wary of free speech the recording industry has become, a Princeton computer science professor announced Thursday that he would not be presenting a paper that revealed how he and his colleagues cracked SDMI -- the recording industry's chosen method of cryptographically protecting digital music. Edward Felten, who was scheduled to present his findings before the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop in Pennsylvania, explained that threats of legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America had persuaded him to stay silent.
Free-speech advocates should be cheering his decision."
9:28 PM
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The Economist
Out in the open"Open-source is extremely good at optimising existing programs, says Ray Ozzie, chief executive of Groove Networks and creator of the popular Lotus Notes. But he cannot imagine his firm’s software, which allows small groups of people to collaborate online, being developed in a decentralised way. He and four colleagues operated “like one brain” for three years to solve all the engineering problems, he says.
Still, nobody can predict what kind of “mob software” may turn up. Richard Gabriel, a distinguished engineer at Sun, describes this as “a kind of semi-chaotic, self-organising behaviour in which numerous small acts of repair can lead to quickly built, complex and massive creations”. Open-source is certainly a mass phenomenon, with tens of thousands of volunteer programmers across the world already taking part, and more joining in all the time, particularly in countries such as China and India."
redux [04.01.01]
"Metiu and Kogut see the open source movement as a tremendous driver of innovation. "The open development model opens up the ability to contribute to innovation," they say. "It recognizes that the distribution of natural intelligence does not correspond to the monopolization of innovation by the richest firms or richest countries. It is this gap between the distribution of ability and the distribution of opportunity that the web will force companies to recognize and to realign their development strategies." In other words, engineers in China, Israel or India who are unable or unwilling to move to Silicon Valley or the Research Triangle need not be locked out of innovative product development: They can play a vital role in the creation of new products and services."redux [04.20.00]
"It is a bracingly cool wind that rushes through the streets of Helsinki in mid-March. And not only does it chill you to the bone, it blows through your mind too.
Imagine a society where the computer hacker isn't a figure of fear or derision, but something of a national hero (Linus Torvalds). Imagine a country where the leading thinkers and policy-makers are comfortable with the idea of "open source" - not just as software, but as a model for education, social services, even democracy itself. As a technoculture, Finland is much more than the might of Nokia and its latest stockmarket valuations. The higher values of the net - participation, sharing of resources, love of knowledge - seem deeply hard-wired into this culture."
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.
Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."
"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.
Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"redux [01.08.01]
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"
"This paper describes the evolution of the Linux operating system, and studies dynamics of socio-technical change using Linux as a case example. Theoretical models of community-based practice and learning are combined with actor-network theory, and the characteristics of the open source development model are described using the introduced theoretical concepts. The paper analyses the growth and development of Linux and its development community, and shows how the development community evolves into an ecology of community-centered practices."
"A marketplace of ideas is not inherently in conflict with a community of ideas. Then again, those tensions and conflicts that do exist can and will lead to further innovations.
What all of these books do well is capture the grand themes and the subtle nuances that explain why it makes more sense to have an untraditional community drive innovation than to have a traditional marketplace do so. The point of these books is that communities of people can come up with codes of conduct — rules of engagement — about how ideas can and should be shared.
The software that really matters is not what is programmed in computer code but rather the shared assumptions and ideals that let people exchange ideas. That ultimately is what will shape the global ecology of innovation."
10:11 PM
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The New York Times Magazine
Inescapably Connected: Life in the Wireless Age[requires 'free' registration]
"Information everywhere, at light speed, immersing us -- is this what we want? We seem unsure. We are the species that defines itself in terms of information: homo sapiens sapiens. We are knowledge connoisseurs. We are being promised some approximation of All Previous Text (and music and pictures) in our pockets. Then again, we didn't evolve in a world with so much data and buzz. Our sense organs tuned into one slow channel at a time. Now we tune in and out. The dream of perfect ceaseless information flow can slip so easily into a nightmare of perfect perpetual distraction.
Our technologies don't just empower us: they also harass us, and they change us -- for better and for worse."
[requires 'free' registration]
"Questions such as: What does it mean to be online all the time? How will that change the way we live? What are the benefits and the drawbacks to being constantly connected?"
""It's easy to say we would just have more of the same: more speed, more multitasking, more frequent messages," Mr. Powell says. "But maybe we will see something more qualitative than quantitative - watch kids doing homework with four or five instant-chat windows open. Is this just more, or is it something very different from, say, sitting quietly with a book? Whatever that difference is, that's what is coming.""
redux [08.10.00]
"This paper began from the premise that every new medium changes our definitions of, approaches to and views of knowledge. It claimed that networked computers (as enabled by the Internet), cannot be understood as simply yet another medium in a long evolution that began with speech and evolved via cuneiform, parchment, manuscripts to printed books and more recently to radio, film, and video. Computers offer a new method of translating information from one medium to another, wherein lies the deeper meaning of the overworked term multimedia. Hence computers will never create paperless offices, they will eventually create offices where any form of communication can be transformed into any other form. "
"A half century ago pioneers such as Havelock, Innis and McLuhan recognized that new media inevitably affect our concepts of what constitutes knowledge. The mass media epitomized this with McLuhan’s pithy phrase: "The medium is the message." Reduced and taken in isolation, it is easy to see, in retrospect, that this obscured almost as much as it revealed. The new media are changing the way we know. They are doing so in fundamental ways and they are inspiring, creating, producing, distorting and even obscuring many messages. New machines make many new things possible. Only humans can ensure that what began as data streams and quests for information highways become paths towards knowledge and wisdom."
"Our dialog with technology is a dialog with ourselves. Technology can indeed have a powerful effect upon the subsequent development of culture, but it is the kind of effect that powerful meanings have. This must be distinguished from any mechanical sort of cause and effect.
I draw on the work of Owen Barfield to indicate how the development of both printing press and perspective art, as companion movements toward abstraction, fit into the broad evolution of western consciousness. My conclusion is that, once we take this evolution into account -- and reckon especially with our own place in it -- we cannot say, in quite the way it is often said, that technology "causes" a radical transformation in the conditions of intellectual life."
"Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of cons ciousness to one dominated by writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in that he discusses the change in the Wes t from being oral-based to chirographic which began with the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current emergence in Western society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some time."
8:47 PM
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BusinessWeek
A Penny-Ante Business Worth Billions" In 1998, tech visionary extraordinaire Nicholas Negroponte, then head of MIT's Media Lab, predicted that "you're going to see, within the next year, an extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayments." The technology, he said, will move up to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars annually through the Web.
Negroponte was right. There was a big movement toward micropayments. But it was an almost unmitigated disaster. E-payments companies are failing this year almost as fast as they were launched after Negroponte made his forecast."
redux [12.20.00]
"Micropayment proponents have long suggested that micropayments will work because it would be great if they did. A functioning micropayment system would solve several thorny financial problems all at once. Unfortunately, the barriers to micropayments are not problems of technology and interface, but user approval. The advantage of micropayment systems to people receiving micropayments is clear, but the value to users whose money and time is involved isn't.
Because of transactional inefficiencies, user resistance, and the increasing flexibility of the existing financial framework, micropayments will never become a general class of network application. Anyone setting out to build systems that reward resource providers will have to create payment systems that provides users the kind of financial experience they demand - simple, predictable and easily valued. Only solutions that play by these rules will succeed."redux [01.05.01]
"PayPal's use of plain old dollars and its ability to send money to anyone with an e-mail address set it apart from the earlier payment systems. To that point people had to get together and agree on what system they would use for payment, then both had to be registered for anything much to happen. PayPal took more of the Western Union approach -- that if you were told that some money was waiting for you down at the Western Union office, you'd find a way to hike down there and get it. For PayPal recipients, hiking down means registering as users. It's free. It's actually better than free since full registration scores you a five-dollar bonus, as well as another five-dollar bonus to whomever refers you or is the first to pay you using the system. And that's how PayPal actually began operations last October -- with 24 employees sending small gifts of money to their friends."
"The Web is going through its own Great Depression as big sites continue to go belly-up. Meanwhile, revenue from banner ads drops because many of the banners are linked to...other dot-coms.These ominous signs do not foretell the death of the Web. But sooner or later the free lunch has to end. Information wants to be free, but information providers want to be paid."
"The Web is not one of those magical plants that can grow in midair. It needs cash to live."
"hi, this is bryan, the guy who runs big panda. i've started to ask for dimes on my home page."
"this is not a scheme to make crazy internet money. nobody's going to make a bazillion pennies. this is about readers and writers gaining control of the web.
this already exists in the real world: you can pay a dollar or two for a fanzine. on the internet, it can be much cheaper. it can even be a penny.
"how do you pay a penny on the internet? paypal is a popular way for sending tiny bits of money through email. ebay people use it a lot. there are other systems, but paypal is the most popular. i set up my paypal to accept dimes. i could have asked for pennies.
so i hope you now understand why i'm asking for dimes. i don't expect to make any serious money, but i do hope to educate people about the value of paying just a penny for the web sites you love."
"hi, this is bryan, the panda guy. i'm writing in astonishment at the response to my call for dimes. i've already received more dimes than i ever expected. maybe i was right. maybe people would rather pay a penny than see another ad for CASINO MONKEY CREDIT CARD INTERNET PERSONALS.
frankly, i'm not sure how to respond."
"Back when I did direct marketing, we were well-aware that people were irrational about pricing. The only way to really find out the right price for a product -- especially an information-based product, for which prices can be so arbitrarily set -- was to test a few, by sending different offers to random samplings, and see which resulted in more profit. Actually, it would be unusual if more than one (or any) of the prices produced any profit at all. And the results were all over the map. A higher price could sometimes bring in not just more money, but more orders, because of the increased perceived value. Then again, a price 20% lower could increase sales by 100%. You could guess but never know, and you were often surprised.”
8:18 PM
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Kyoto Journal
Digital Dream or Digital Dystopia?"How are we Asians, in this new global realm of the phosphor and the pixel, going to deal with the reality that 95 percent of the Asian populace has never used a computer and 98 percent has never been on the Internet? A populace for whom 1) family and wealth, or class and caste, define almost all relationships; 2) magic and myths born in the fears of the Stone Age are the roots of almost all the laws; 3) legend, not fact, is the wellspring of the public imagination; and 4) the future is something most people go to an astrologer for.
What have we to offer to 2 billion people who can't read? How will we reconcile the Asia around us with the fact that we represent a medium that is an imported sociology founded on the assumption that efficient commerce is the pinnacle of human achievement? How do we propose to guide the abyssal undercurrent of Asian tradition into a media-shaped future without losing what to most people is a precious mythical identity? How will the underclasses of Asia respond to a medium that does not reinforce the courtyard culture of old Asia but appears all too ready to cast it aside for something defined almost entirely in terms of a marketplace culture? And how, with an unclear new identity facing them, can Asians avoid the two calamities that have historically gone into defining who they are: reactionary nostalgia and the bloodshed of change?"
redux [05.14.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
""The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."
Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."
redux [03.31.01]
"Why Japan?' I've been asked for the past 20 years or so. Meaning: why has Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction? When I started writing about Japan, I'd answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a very central, very important place in terms of the global economy. And it did. (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn't noticed yet.) A little later, asked the same question, I'd say that it was Japan's turn to be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was where the money was and the deal was done. Today, with the glory years of the bubble long gone, I'm still asked the same question, in exactly the same quizzical tone: 'Why Japan?'
Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future."
12:40 AM
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The Standard
There Must Be a Better Way ..." "There's this sinking feeling that buried in the communications is a time bomb," says Jeff Wishnie, product management director at Snapfish, a San Francisco photo-services firm. Wishnie recently returned from a two-day business trip to find more than 300 e-mail messages waiting. The feeling, Wishnie says, was like "slamming right into a brick wall."
Gelernter, among others, is hoping to knock down that wall. "Our goals are tremendously ambitious," he says. "There is no doubt the desktop is dead.""
" Computing will be transformed. It's not just that our problems are big, they are big and obvious. It's not just that the solutions are simple, they are simple and right under our noses. It's not just that hardware is more advanced than software; the last big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen years ago, and today's hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976. Users react to the hard truth that commerical software applications tend to be badly-designed, badly-made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves ("Computers for Morons," "Operating Systems for Livestock"), and meanwhile, money surges through our communal imagination like beer from burst barrels. Billions. Naturally the atmosphere is a little strange; change is coming, soon."
10:59 PM
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The Economist
The human touch"DESPITE the best efforts of programmers, there are still many things that computers just cannot do. Examples include distinguishing between suspicious and legitimate behaviour on a corporate network, or sorting junk e-mail from genuinely important messages, or providing detailed answers to particular questions. For these tasks, which require judgment, expertise and experience that cannot be easily captured in software, some firms have adopted the unusual tactic of using people as part of their network infrastructure. Such “cyborg” companies use computers as levers for the mind, to make the most of precious human expertise."
redux [03.19.01]
"The Web is big. A billion pages big, according to a recent study by Inktomi and the NEC Research Institute. It's the ultimate testing ground for information retrieval technologies."
"If your search engine can automatically bring order to this overwhelming global mess of stuff, just think what it can do for a single web site or intranet. No more agonizing over the design of topical hierarchies. No more worrying about how you'll afford your growing staff of information architects. Just sit back and let the software work its magic.
"Perhaps the biggest problem with these automated approaches to classification is the fact that they're completely content-centric. They focus solely on organizing the stuff inside the folders, ignoring the broader information ecology.
"The key to success in designing information architecture solutions for really large web sites and intranets is to intelligently combine manual AND automated approaches."
redux [06.29.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Five ears ago, search engines seemed like the Web's salvation. Today, they need some saviors of their own."
"It is not just the vastness of the Web that is causing problems. Consider the way people search: Typical users enter single keywords, cross their fingers and hit the search buttons. And when they are faced with lists of 1,000 results, they usually click on the first few options instead of refining their searches by adding keywords or trying new terms.
The confluence of technological limitations and simple searching methods means that only two kinds of online searchers are well served: those looking for very popular terms and those who are using uncommon words to hunt for specific things. But the majority of searchers, whose requests fall somewhere between, are finding searching as frustrating as ever.
To cope, many search engines have concluded that simply indexing more pages is not the answer. Instead, they have decided to rely on the one resource that was once considered a cop-out: human judgment. Search engines have become more like cyborgs, part human, part machine."redux [06.15.00]
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.
This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."
"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."
9:40 PM
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Fast Company
Jazzed About Work
"That was a big moment in my life, because I was communicating mind-to-mind with this guy, and the technology was acting like power steering: It was augmenting our interpersonal, human communication in a way that I could not have imagined. Soon after I left college and moved east, I realized that the rest of the computing world just didn't get it. But I was lucky, because I had seen the endgame. And the endgame was the user experience on PLATO. In a sense, I've spent the rest of my life trying to reinvent it."
"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day.
Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."
"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."
redux [03.19.01]
"Email is the gateway drug of the internet, because once email is in place, people begin to expect full interoperability."
"In fact, in a news flash that seems to have caught the entire telecommunications industry by surprise, people who buy mobile phones often like to communicate with one another. Had this not been such an absolutely unpredictable occurrence, maybe somebody at the WAP consortium could have predicted that when you add text to the phone, users might like to communicate with one another via text.
Access to email is the #1 feature customers want in a wireless text device (duh), and all those wireless auctions where the telcos spent 22 gajillion Zlotys to own the customer now look like a giant shell game, because the users don't want to get headline news. They want to talk to one another, and they will switch carriers until they are allowed to. Email is the thin end of the interoperability wedge, and this will be true of interactive TV as well."
redux [02.18.01]
"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."
The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.
For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."
redux [01.15.01]
"Nicole Thompson's third-graders can tell you all about the penguins and killer whales that populate Antarctica. They know about the months of darkness that grip Iceland each year and the fine tea that grows in Darjeeling, India. The Greenbriar Academy children have learned those facts - and countless more about countries large and small - thanks to a simple e-mail message from Thompson that has raced around the globe and brought more than 20,000 responses in six weeks.
It's crazy, just crazy," Thompson said. "At most, I thought we'd get about 2,000 replies.""redux [02.04.00]
"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."
"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."
redux [10.18.00]
"I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it's a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.
Haven't you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you've never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren't in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your ... faith?
Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?
Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place."
9:12 PM
0 comments
Salon
Follow The Money"Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.
The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people."
redux [04.10.01]
"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."
redux [03.08.01]
"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"
redux [08.07.00]
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."
redux [04.23.00]
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).
It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."
redux [02.18.01]
"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."
According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."
redux [02.14.00]
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [03.24.00]
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
8:44 PM
0 comments
The Street
Can You Kiss 3G Goodbye -- and Still Make a Buck?"Permit me to throw a stick of dynamite in the room: Third generation, or 3G , wireless is dead before it was even born. And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs.
A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop."
redux [12.10.00]
"With its meticulously preserved rows of army barracks and offices, San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood gives off the illusion that it's still the 1800s, when it was a bustling spit-and-shine military base.
The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations."
""I use it in bed, at the cafe, in the car, on the grassy fields," says Brewster Kahle, a 40-year-old high-tech entrepreneur who lives and works in the area. "I'm living a wireless existence."
"Matt Westervelt and three of his friends had tinkering on their minds when they started building their own high-speed wireless network in June. Climbing on the roofs of their Seattle homes, building antennas and trying to make them work with Ethernet protocols sounded like fun. Plus, if the whole shebang actually worked, they figured they'd be able to access their home computer files from the local cafe, play Net-based games while sitting on each other's couches and stream video onto their personal data assistants -- all at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second, far faster than what cellphone operators or other wireless providers offered."
"Call it "the free-network movement" -- a bubbled-up-from-the-underground effort to spread high-bandwidth wireless connectivity everywhere."
"Julian Priest is walking east down Clink Street away from his office. He's holding his laptop in both hands and surfing the Web as he goes through an enviable five-megabits-per-second link to his desktop computer. A BBC correspondent appears in a small box on the screen, delivering a report on the U.S. elections, just like you would see on television. "It's pretty cool," Mr. Priest says with a laugh."
"The 31-year-old technical director of a Web agency is one of a growing number of tech-adept individuals who are taking inexpensive wireless-networking technology designed for inside homes and offices and putting it to work outdoors. What they've found is that they can get Internet access as far as a kilometer away from their transmitters -- and at more than twice the speed that the much-touted next-generation cellular systems will offer."
9:36 AM
0 comments
Feed
The Three Stooges Play Zunil"Can Mayan culture stand up to the global culture? Sure, says Audelino Sac. "First, we have to strengthen our own culture. Then, once we have established our own identity, we can receive from, but also give to, the process of globalization. Mayan culture shouldn't be against technology. We have always adopted new technologies." The example he uses is the corn mill. I guess you could add rayon and artificially dyed threads.
Then this Mayan priest -- dressed in green jeans, thick-soled black shoes, and an open-necked striped shirt -- says something that, in my view, cuts to the heart of the issue here: "All cultures," he states, "are dynamic and able to take positive things from other cultures."
Dynamic, yes -- a thousand times yes. If there's one thing I've learned on my trip so far, it's that cultures are not, and never were, inert."
redux [08.07.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Overlooked in last month's Group of 8 discussions about the challenge of a growing "digital divide" between the information rich and the data deprived was the work of Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former journalist who is trying to bring the Internet to one of the poorest regions in Asia."
"Though the effort is on a small scale, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who is also engaged in the effort to aid Cambodian villages, said the project demonstrated that the global impact of the Internet could ultimately serve to reverse the disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty.
"The Net will reverse urbanization," said Mr. Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The past 150 years of development have been one of urbanization. To be rural has meant to be poor. The Net could bring some of the same opportunities to the rural world and maybe even turn being rural into being rich.""redux [04.23.00]
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.
Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "
"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.
"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."
redux [07.09.00]
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.
Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.
It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""
""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."
Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.
"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""
redux [05.14.00]
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.
Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."
9:23 PM
0 comments
Wired News
Is U.S. History Becoming History?"The workings of government in the first decades of the information era have been poorly recorded, archiving experts say. Years of valuable public records may have already been lost, creating a gap in the country's historical record."
""We know less about information in the information age," said Patrice McDermott, a records management analyst with government watchdog agency OMB Watch. "It's not just government, corporations have to deal with this too."
Records management experts say the problem started around 1985, when U.S. government agencies began using e-mail and word-processing programs as they changed the way they conducted business. But they did it without a system for preserving electronic files."
redux [07.08.00]
"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.
"We have a shadow of the world that we're able to capture and make available to the future," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.
"Why save the entire Internet, when some would argue that most of it is junk?
Referring to newspapers of the past, Kahle said, "If we had been selective, we probably would have kept all the articles and thrown away those ads, but it's the ads that the historians really like. That's what of what life was like."redux [12.17.00]
"Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world."
"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to permanently preserve a record of public material.
Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.
The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars to ensure that they have free and permanent access to public materials. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization."
"It is important to realise that the Internet is not just the Web. Many people are unaware that the Internet in fact provides a rich array of services beyond those beginning with WWW. I'm a geographer so I like to think of these as different information spaces, with differing virtual 'geographies'. A good way to get a information spaces of the Internet, their shape, size, landmarks and interconnections, is to map them. One of my favourite conceptual maps of net spaces was drawn back in 1994 by John December."
"The map was drawn at the end of 1994 and the nature of the Internet has changed markedly since then, with certain information spaces dying off as they fall out of favour with users, particularly WAIS and Gopher. Undoubtedly, the biggest change has been the inexorable and exponential growth of Web space which would now be a huge blue blob on the map, squeezing and submerging many other information spaces. For many end-users the Web, seen through the browser interface, is the only information space, although e-mail is still the most widely used. But even here, the Web is coming to dominate with the growing popularity of Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail.
Other important information spaces within the global Internet have evolved and grown to prominence since December drew his map. Notable examples include, instant messaging (e.g. ICQ), chat environments (e.g. IRC), multi-user game spaces (e.g. Quake) and streaming media (e.g. RealNetworks, MP3s). Also, large intranets have proliferated, creating important private information spaces, which are largely unseen from the outside and are therefore difficult to quantify and map. While at the scale of the networks of the Matrix, John December commented to me, via e-mail, that since 1994 there has been "the swallowing up of all alternate networks into the Internet…everyone thinks of only the Internet as the online world.""
"There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, affecting such things as government records, environmental and scientific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions."
"New ways of storing information in a way that can be understood thousands of years from now have been discussed at a conference in the United States.
Scientists, librarians, technologists, anthropologists and others, with the backing of the Long Now Foundation, are considering the best way to ensure that the culture and heritage of the 21st Century are not forgotten.
The foundation has developed a small metal disk which can store hundreds of thousands of words.
Called the Rosetta disk, experts hope it will provide our descendants with details of how we live today."
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."
"At the Internet Archive, a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco, a small group of engineers backed by a philanthropist are trying to create a new paradigm for access to archival material, in this case historical film from my own archives. By doing this, we're making a concrete move toward building an IP preserve."
7:09 PM
0 comments
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Introducing Emotions into the Computational Study of Social Norms: A First Evaluation"It is now generally recognised that emotions play an important functional role within both individuals and societies, thereby forming an important bond between these two levels of analysis. In particular, there is a bi-directional interrelationship between social norms and emotions, with emotions playing an instrumental role for the sustenance of social norms and social norms being an essential element of regulation in the individual emotional system. This paper lays the foundations for a computational study of this interrelationship, drawing upon the functional appraisal theory of emotions. We describe a first implementation of a situated agent architecture, TABASCOJAM, that incorporates a simple appraisal mechanism and report on its evaluation in a well-known scenario for the study of aggression control as a function of a norm, that was suitably extended.
The simulation results reported in the original aggression control study were successfully reproduced, and consistent performances were achieved for extended scenarios with conditional norm obeyance. In conclusion, it is argued that the present effort indicates a promising lane towards the necessary abandonment of logical models for the explanation and simulation of human social behaviour."
redux [11.05.00]
"This article outlines a social psychology of the basic emotions in social relationships. In our theory, shame and pride are the emotional building blocks of interpersonal relations. But because there is so little empirical evidence about pride, we focus mainly on shame. First we review Mead, Cooley and Goffman’s concepts of the self, showing how they imply the centrality of shame and pride. We define shame as a class name for a large family of emotions which includes not only embarrassment and humiliation, but also "discretionary" shame, such as modesty, shyness, and conscience. The common thread in these variants is seeing self negatively in the eyes of the other(s), and therefore perceiving a threat to the bond. To illustrate this idea, we apply it to a single episode, a phone call between two friends. We present this episode in the form of a dialogue with the reader, to help overcome the counter-intuitive nature of our framework. We ask the reader to employ not only analysis, but also introspection. Finally, we propose that shame is the central affect in social relationships, a way of making them visible."
"Since time immemorial humans have complained that life is becoming more complex, but it is only now that we have a hope to analyze formally and verify this lament. This article analyzes the human social environment using the "complexity profile," a mathematical tool for characterizing the collective behavior of a system. The analysis is used to justify the qualitative observation that complexity of existence has increased and is increasing. The increase in complexity is directly related to sweeping changes in the structure and dynamics of human civilizationthe increasing interdependence of the global economic and social system and the instabilities of dictatorships, communism and corporate hierarchies. Our complex social environment is consistent with identifying global human civilization as an organism capable of complex behavior that protects its components (us) and which should be capable of responding effectively to complex environmental demands."
"Industry in the past two decades has gotten better at applying research results in natural sciences and engineering. The gains to society (in better and cheaper products and services and more competitive companies) have been immense.
The social and behavioral sciences may offer benefits at least as great, in product and process design, marketing, forecasting, and planning. But business has found it harder to integrate the results and methods of these fields systematically in day-to-day operations. As a result, many of our technical systems and business practices fail to take advantage of knowledge of individual and social behavior and capacities. But business is increasingly demanding a more sophisticated approach to questions of demographics, human performance and learning, and the interactions of humans and machines, which can be addressed only through these disciplines.
The rewards of better utilizing such knowledge would be great and pervasive."
10:02 PM
0 comments
The New York Times Magazine
How to Invent a Brand Name[requires 'free' registration]
"As of December, Bill Nguyen had nearly everything he needed to start a successful business. He had a grand vision for the post-PC world: the current technobabble of cell phones, PDA's, pagers and other wireless gadgets could be woven into a unified global data-information network by a single company offering the right software. He had a proven record; at age 29, he had already been a key player in five start-ups, three of which had gone public. He had $34 million in venture capital and 60 eager employees. What he still didn't have, with his company's March inaugural date just two months away, was a name."
redux [06.03.00]
"New York City-based branding consultancy Interbrand Corp. calls this approach to naming destination branding, a strategy that relies on advertising and marketing to build a brand's identity rather than the literal meaning of the name itself. "The most successful brands do more than present a product or service," says Julie Cottineau, director of naming for Interbrand. "They create an emotional experience.""
"In the Internet space, Cottineau argues that corporate names have to be edgier and hipper than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Settling for a mediocre or plain name may actually have a negative effect because it suggests that a company doesn't have enough attitude or pizzazz to be a forceful online presence. And in today's jittery stock market, startups don't need anymore strikes against them."
redux [04.24.00]
"It's a little-known fact: A poorly chosen name is why most dot-coms fail! Ever heard of the Bahoo Web directory? No? Think: If a single letter can transform the no-name "Bahoo" into an internationally recognized, billion-dollar brand, what a difference carefully selecting all the letters in your name could make!"
"Take a word that describes your venture – "scam," for instance – and append any of the following: -as, -ia, -ic, -ion, -isis, -ium, -on. Using our example, we get "Scamisis," which you've got to admit sounds like one high-class Web site. Unlike your naming consultancies, this process may or may not rely on "Indo-European roots," "morphemes" or other book learnin', but you've gotten this far without resorting to smarts, so why start now?"
"...the choice of Agilent was immediately greeted with snorts of derision. "The most namby-pamby, phonetically weak, light-in-its-shoes name in the entire history of naming," declared Rick Bragdon, president of the naming firm Idiom. "It's like a parody of a Landor name. It's insipid. It's ineptly rendered ... It ought to be taken out back and shot."
Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys, a San Francisco naming firm, was also appalled. "What a crummy name," he says. "It sounds like a committee name. 'Who's your competition?' 'Lucent.' 'Well, we want to play off Lucent -- only we're agile. I mean, if you wanted a name like that, I could come up with that kind of name in about four seconds."
"Welcome to big-league corporate naming, a Pynchonesque netherworld of dueling morphemes, identity buckets and full-scale linguistic sabotage. What was once a diverting sideline for mild-mannered grad students has become an increasingly lucrative and increasingly cutthroat profession, as blue-chip consulting firms schedule raids on college English departments and linguistics nerds scramble to shift their focus from the syntax of negation in the Anatolian languages to the murkier precincts of corporate identity."
"Have you ever said to yourself, "I wish our company had a more dynamic name"? Or, "If only our logo was more expressive"? Or, "Is our tagline catchy enough?"
If so, eNormicom's patented Image Bucket Program™ is the answer. With the dramatic paradigm violence occurring in today’s internet space, it is crucial that your brand have a scalable, balanced, people-focused e-dentity.
ENormicom’s robust Image Bucket Program™ can give you the real-time channel reconfiguration that your brand needs. All it takes is a little e-magination. Step inside our office and let us show you… "
10:43 PM
0 comments
Salon
I hate TV"Now "The Simpsons" and "The Sopranos" are hailed as masterpieces, and while moralists still get worked up over specific programs ("Jackass" comes to mind), almost everyone agrees that television can be just as good as theater or film. As a TV critic, I've been hammering that point for the past eight years.
But now that it's respectable, television seems less pleasurable. When I hear the resistance-is-futile theme to "The West Wing," I wonder if it might be more fun to clean my bathroom, and goofball shows like "The Iron Chef" merely heighten my embarrassment at being home alone on a Friday night. Television, I have discovered, is a lot like being gay: It's fun only if people are outraged about it."
11:05 PM
0 comments
Mappa Mundi
What Does the Internet Look Like, Jellyfish Perhaps?"The Internet is often likened to an organic entity and this analogy seems particularly appropriate in the light of some striking new visualizations of the complex mesh of Internet pathways. The images are results of a new graph visualization tool, code-named Walrus, being developed by researcher, Young Hyun, at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) [1]. Although Walrus is still in early days of development, I think these preliminary results are some of the most intriguing and evocative images of the Internet's structure that we have seen in last year or two."
"Of course this is not real shape of the Internet. One must always be wary when viewing and interpreting any particular graph visualization as much of the final “look and feel” results from subjective decisions of the analyst, rather than inherent in the underlying phenomena."
redux [12.24.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"As the Internet continues to proliferate, it has become natural to think of it biologically — as a flourishing ecosystem of computers or a sprawling brain of Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix and match metaphors, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting scientists with something new to prod and understand.
The result has been an eruption of papers scrutinizing this artificial network and concluding, to many people's surprise, that it may be designed according to the same rules that nature uses to spin webs of its own. The networks of molecules in a cell, of species in an ecosystem, and of people in a social group may be woven on the same mathematical loom as the Internet and the World Wide Web."
redux [07.27.00]
"The Internet’s organic structure explains why it’s so resistant to random failures, but researchers now say those same features make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. The findings could help security experts strengthen weak links in the Net’s chain.
"They found that samples of the World Wide Web didn’t have a random structure: Instead, the connections exhibited a hierarchy similar to that found in naturally occurring networks such as trees and living cells, with a small proportion of highly connected nodes branching off to a large number of less connected nodes. The structure was the same at different scales, meaning that the results could be extended to the Web as a whole, they said."
"Although the structure is particularly well-suited to tolerate random errors, it’s also particularly vulnerable to deliberate attack, they said. If just 1 percent of the most highly connected Internet routers or Web sites are incapacitated, the network’s average performance would be cut in half, said Yuhai Tu of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.
“With only 4 percent of its most important nodes destroyed, the Internet loses its integrity, becoming fragmented into small disconnected domains,” he wrote in a commentary published in Nature."redux [03.22.00]
"In an exponential network, there is a well defined ‘average connectivity’ for the nodes: most are connected by a certain number of links, and only a very few differ substantially from this average.
Barabási’s team says that there is another common kind of network that has hitherto been neglected: the ‘scale-free’ network, in which there is no meaningful average number of links - no ‘scale’ to it, in other words. In a scale-free network the number of nodes with a given number of connections simply declines as that number of nodes increases. Many nodes are linked to the network via just one connection; fewer have two, even fewer have three, and so forth. Unlike an exponential network, there remain small but significant numbers of nodes with many connections."
"...a cyber-terrorist armed with a map of a scale-free network could deliberately focus their attack on the few most highly connected nodes. Knocking just a few of these out would disable just about all flow of or access to information for other users, breaking up the webs rapidly into isolated fragments. This is the Achilles’ heel of the net, say the researchers, and defences against e-terrorism need to concentrate on making key nodes invulnerable."
"A study by researchers from Compaq Computer, Web portal AltaVista and IBM concluded that the Web has distinct regions, including some that are inaccessible to one another. The layout, researchers said, resembles a bow tie with four sections: a "strongly connected core," "origination" pages, "termination" pages and "disconnected" pages.
Within the core, the knot of the bow tie, Web surfers can travel smoothly between sites through hyperlinks. One side of the bow contains origination pages that allow surfers to reach the central knot. The other side of consists of termination pages that can be accessed from the core but are not linked back to it.
The final region consists of disconnected pages, which are cut off from the core but are connected to other areas peripherally.
"Webmasters and people doing e-commerce need to understand how to position their sites," said Andrei Broder, vice president of research for AltaVista. "If you want to have more international traffic, you need to be in a better connectivity position. It's always better to be in the center of the town than far out.""redux [04.21.00]
"The study of the web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into web algorithms for crawling, searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and global properties of the web graph using two Altavista crawls each with over 200M pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the macroscopic structure of the web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale. "
"In a sense the web is much like a complicated organism, in which the local structure in a microscopic scale looks very regular like a biological cell, but the global structure exhibits interesting morphological structure (body and limbs) that are not obviously evident in the local structure. Therefore, while it might be tempting to draw conclusions about the structure of the web graph from a local picture of it, such conclusions may be misleading."
" In the beginning, maps were fiction. We perceived our world as myths defined by belief not geography. Maps of these imagined worlds came in many shapes and sizes, but they all mixed the unreal with snippets of the real world. The process of mapping the real world was one of going from geographies of ideas to maps of real geography. On the Internet, we will pursue a reverse path: maps of the Internet will progress from our current maps of network topologies to maps of virtual worlds that we build, maps of ideas and thoughts."
"Maps help us navigate. On the Internet, finding things has become the big challenge. Death by a thousand clicks is the bane of any net user. The reason? We are attempting to shoe-horn the metaphor of maps–tools for navigating complex spaces–into existing metaphors, such as the infinite book that is the World Wide Web.
The Internet is a network of many metaphors. The core infrastructure supports many protocols, and each protocol adopts a metaphor. Electronic mail uses analogies taken from a postal service. Streaming media started with a radio metaphor before evolving into a unique medium. The World Wide Web is also a metaphor–pages in an infinite book.
What is missing today is a metaphor that helps us tackle the problem of meta-information: information about information. As we look at a page on the Web, the logical next step is to find other pages that are conceptually near. Near, of course, varies on your point of view. Meta-information is what helps the Internet become smarter about organizing itself. As we develop the tools to describe Internet resources, to manage meta-information, maps will happen. Until then, we are stuck in a world of many facts: all content, no context."
"I'm going to talk today about metaphors. Everybody here has heard and used the word metaphor plenty in the course of your educational experience (and the amount of educational experience in this room is pretty staggering, so that makes lots of uses of the word). To quote a famous sage, "It's a common word, something you use everyday." It generally gets stored in memory with all the other stuff you learn in literature classes, like simile, plot, characters, rhyme, meter, and so on. And then it gets forgotten, or at least not looked at often, until and unless you do something literary. I'm here today to suggest that in fact there is a human phenomenon (which I will call metaphor, though what name you give it doesn't really matter much) that is much more important to everybody than all this would imply."
9:08 PM
0 comments
The New York Times
M.I.T. Course Materials Free Over Web[requires 'free' registration]
"At a time when online knowledge can be a valuable commodity, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to offer nearly all its course materials on the Internet for free."
"The plan counters a trend toward the ``privatization of knowledge,'' where ideas are owned by companies or institutions, said professor Steven Lerman, chairman of the MIT faculty.
The school is still considering ways to use the Internet to generate revenue, such as selling research updates to alumni, said MIT President Charles Vest. But this venture is essentially altruistic, he said."
"Linda Wertheimer talks with Charles Vest, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the school's offer to create a Web site for most of its classes and to post materials from each course. (4:30)"
redux [02.16.01]
"Belief in e-learning, as it is often called, has so far weathered the downturn in the wider dotcom world. John Chambers, the influential CEO of Cisco, which supplies much of the Internet’s hardware, asserts that the scale of network traffic generated by e-learning will make today’s exchange of e-mail messages look like a rounding error. But his firm’s business depends on an ever-rising flood of electronic data passing over the connections which it makes for electronic networks. More disinterested voices caution against confusing the obvious need to learn computer-literacy skills with the less obvious need to learn everything else via a computer."
redux [12.04.00]
"NPR's Ina Jaffe reports that more and more students are turning to computers rather than campuses to earn their college degree. This may make a college education possible for a wider range of students, but some in academia are concerned that internet degree programs only in it for the money will influence course curriculum for everyone. (7:30)"redux [11.22.00]
"Growing demand among learners for improved accessibility and convenience, lower costs, and direct application of content to work settings is radically changing the environment for higher education in the United States and globally. In this rapidly changing environment, which is increasingly based within the context of a global, knowledge-based economy, traditional universities are attempting to adapt purposes, structures, and programs, and new organizations are emerging in response. Organizational changes and new developments are being fueled by accelerating advances in digital communications and learning technologies that are sweeping the world. Growing demand for learning combined with these technical advances is in fact a critical pressure point for challenging the dominant assumptions and characteristics of existing traditionally organized universities in the 21st century. This combination of demand, costs, application of content and new technologies is opening the door to emerging competitors and new organizations that will compete directly with traditional universities and with each other for students and learners.
This paper describes and analyzes seven models of higher education organization that are challenging the future preeminence of the traditional model of residential higher education. These models are emerging to meet the new conditions and to take advantage of the new environment that has created both opportunity and risk for all organizations, and which demands experimentation of structure, form, and process."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The internet will have a very different effect on the most prestigious institutions from the one it will have on those in the middle and lower echelons. The Harvards and the Williamses are in no danger of virtualization, because both their communal life and their intellectual life are integral to their natures. They will be the brand names coveted by students at the less grand institutions, not to mention by lifelong learners. And they will, if they wish, earn lots and lots of money, which in turn could permit them, as Herb Allen and Mark Taylor suggest, to lower tuition and thus reach out to a wider, or at least different, audience. Or perhaps all that money will encourage them to behave like the market actors they will have become. Once a university permits itself to be subsumed into its brand name, it becomes, as Charles Nesson puts it, "a production house for making knowledge products.""redux [09.20.00]
"Columbia is not alone in its Internet ambitions. The nation's elite universities, long secure in their centuries-old reputations, face a rapidly changing world in which any school, from the University of South Alabama to UC Berkeley, can put its courses online and court a global market for continuing education. Fearing that they will be left behind, Ivy League administrators are becoming dealmakers, and buzz phrases like "leveraging brands" and "tapping intellectual capital" echo from the Stanford Quad to Harvard Square.:
"Thanks in part to the Net's ability to distribute courses to students anywhere at any time, learning is becoming another commodity, part of the $740 billion "education industry" that has attracted keen interest on Wall Street."
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Fredric D. Price, the president of a nutritional-supplements company, sought a partner to create an online information company, NutritionU.com, he approached a Columbia University professor, Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum.
He hit pay dirt.
Some academics might have run the other way, concerned about the motives and standards in the emerging commercial market for cyber education. But Dr. Deckelbaum, director of Columbia's Institute of Human Nutrition, viewed the Internet as a way to reach a wider population.
Columbia was interested, too. The venture fit neatly into its strategy to turn more of its intellectual capital -- the knowledge, research and teaching of its professors -- into financial capital."
redux [05.09.00]
"For decades, Stanford University has served as an intellectual incubator to students and faculty who have gone on to found such Silicon Valley icons as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) , Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Yahoo. Now Stanford has hatched a startup of its own."
"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."
""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."redux [07.06.00]
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."
"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.
In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.
"Technology in all forms, young and old or simple and complex, can be potent tools that engage learners in meta-cognitive reflection. These tools engage learners to rethink their old beliefs, knowledge, and understandings. These tools might allow learners to compare new ideas with other individuals to assess whether new concepts and ideas are plausible and fruitful. Technologies can be educators' tools in finding creative ways that encourage students to self-test, self-question, and self-regulate learning in helping them to create solutions to complex problems. Educators need to help students realize that understanding about knowledge and beliefs are essential to human growth and development. Technologies should not estrange us from our humanity or the noble profession of educating competent citizens. We should not become "high-tech, self-driven slaves to technology.
"Protecting the embodiment of quality education encompasses learning to think, learning to teach, and learning to lead creatively, not only within the classroom (virtual and traditional) but also throughout all institutions of higher education."
11:44 PM
0 comments
ComputerWorld
Police Policed With Data Mining Engines" After decades of mounting complaints about the use of excessive force, false arrests and racial profiling, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is being forced to implement a computerized risk-management system to track officers' conduct and performance."
"The system tracks officers' use of force, search and seizure, and citizen complaints, as well as criminal charges or civil lawsuits filed against officers. Pittsburgh's system, called the Performance Assessment and Review System, also tracks commendations and awards earned by officers. It alerts police officials, who check the system at least once each day, to any inappropriate behavior by an officer."
redux [03.17.01]
"Still, the relatively quiet response is hard to explain. Maybe it's boredom. We have a Holocaust Museum now (that displays a Hollerith machine prominently). Most of the survivors are dead or dying. Multinational corporations have long seemed to exist beyond the law. But we can't assume the moral dilemma is behind us. Imagine if Milosevic's regime were still in power and Serbia were in need of a Web interface for tracking its population. Imagine if some struggling dot.com decided to increase shareholder value by providing just such a system even as thousands of Muslims were killed and displaced. Would our somnolence persist then?"
redux [09.09.00]
""Technology has leveled the playing field between human rights organizations and intelligence services," says Ball. "Back in the '70s, intelligence services all over the world were getting pretty impressive computer hardware. This gave them the ability to track activities, peaceful civilian activists as well as violent [individuals], in pretty precise ways, to infer patterns and to use the data analysis as the basis for oppression."
Today the same tools can be used to build an irrefutable record that documents a history of oppression.
Ball's work is "incredibly important," says Harvey Weinstein, associate director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley. "Patrick has the capacity with this statistical knowledge to develop hard, incontrovertible statistical data to provide the kind of evidence that people need to get a good sense of the kind of human rights violations that occur in these difficult situations. He is one of the leaders in the field of trying to develop and use statistics to provide substantiation for human rights abuses.""
"Telling the truth in such a way that it cannot be denied is the first need of a truth commission established in the aftermath of gross human violations. The magnitude of violations is often so great that individual researchers cannot apprehend the complex nature and multiple patterns of such crimes, building an official history from a collective memory is essential to truth telling. This is our concern in these proceedings: building such a collective memory, and the analysis of the past through examination of that memory.
While the primary goal of truth telling is to provide massive and objective support for historical facts and patterns that cannot be denied, it also serves an "internal" role for those who analyze the past to make the official record. Without an accurate and precise collective memory that can be readily accessed, they will not be able to check their assumptions about the process of violations, or provide credible analyses.
The official record is derived from the collective memory, and the collective memory is based on information and data. The systematic arrangement of the information and data is the basis of the information management system.
These proceedings are about all aspects of how to build, manage, and generate analyses from such a system."
"This manual has been written for human rights advocates around the world who use the Internet to spread information about patterns of human rights violations. It is based on the development of one such innovation and experiment, the Human Rights Complaint Analyzer. The Analyzer was developed by the Fund for the City of New York for the Ombudsmen of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with principal funding provided by United States Institute for Peace. It is now located on the Web site of the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "
"The basic project methodology was simple, to compile existing information from the complaint database of the Federation Ombudsmen, purge that information of any data that might put anyone at risk of identification, and transfer the information to the project computer in New York. The purged data was then displayed in an interactive query system."
9:12 PM
0 comments
eCompany
Does Geography Matter Online?""All politics is local," the late Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill once quipped. It turns out that the old saw is also true of e-commerce.
Cruise by a Nordstrom in Seattle on a misty spring day and the beige mannequins might be wearing yellow raincoats and duck boots. Three thousand miles away in Boca Raton, the Nordstrom window might showcase dolls dressed in floral-pattern bikinis and sunglasses. But at Nordstrom.com you get the same sell whether you log on from soggy Seattle or sunny Boca.
That's because, in our rush to get online, we've forgotten that some of the rules of real-world selling still apply on the Web. Geography matters -- online and off."
[requires 'free' registration]
"But for auction sites, gambling sites and others, geography is becoming increasingly important, because they must treat people from different locations differently, as is the case with the French government's barring the sale of Nazi-related items to its citizens.
Online advertising companies, too, are increasingly desperate to use geographic targeting tools to reinforce their clients' faith in Internet marketing. In short, for a growing number of companies, this will be the year when the borderless Internet economy becomes an outmoded concept.
"Our customers told us over the past six months or so that it was an absolute requirement that we have geo-targeting," said Mark Joseph, chief technology officer for MediaPlex, an advertising company based in San Francisco."
"Caimis Geo's IPMapper service permits web sites the ability to accurately identify IP addresses to geographic locations.
Online marketers can know exactly where their customers are, says Daniel Westrick, director of Caimis Geo. "Right now people have crude web logging applications," he adds, which only identify obvious foreign codes on domain names.
IPMapper permits sites to discern a users location accurate to the city. "It gives you a pretty good idea of where your traffic is coming from," he says."
redux [10.07.00]
"This project arose in response to one of the great myths or the Internet age, i.e. the coming of cyberspace heralds the end physical constraints which will eventually lead to the death of cities. In fact, the exact opposite is occurring. The largest concentrations of Internet users and producers are located in urban areas and many of the most innovative firms in the Internet space are housed in downtowns. There should be nothing surprising about this since, cities have always been the primary source of innovation and will continue to play this role in the future.
Although the power of the Internet does opens up new possibilities for long-range collaboration and even new spaces of interaction within cyberspace it also exhibits much of the traditional unevenness that has characterized urban and economic development throughout history. The fact that information can be easily and widely distributed is often mistaken for an indication that the production of this information is also diffused. In fact, there is a much more complicated dynamic involving the connection of specific places to global networks resulting in a system of production that is both place-rooted and networked at the same time.
One of the greatest challenges facing any research project involving the Internet is finding reliable and practical indicators to support ones theories. In particular, assigning geographical locations to what takes place on the "spaceless" Internet is especially difficult. With this specific problem in mind, the Domain Name research project is an attempt to map the physical geography of one indicator of the Internet, i.e. domain names such as nokia.fi or nytimes.com."
9:30 PM
0 comments
Knowledge@Wharton
Why Global Software Development Unleashes Innovation"Metiu and Kogut see the open source movement as a tremendous driver of innovation. "The open development model opens up the ability to contribute to innovation," they say. "It recognizes that the distribution of natural intelligence does not correspond to the monopolization of innovation by the richest firms or richest countries. It is this gap between the distribution of ability and the distribution of opportunity that the web will force companies to recognize and to realign their development strategies." In other words, engineers in China, Israel or India who are unable or unwilling to move to Silicon Valley or the Research Triangle need not be locked out of innovative product development: They can play a vital role in the creation of new products and services."
"It is a bracingly cool wind that rushes through the streets of Helsinki in mid-March. And not only does it chill you to the bone, it blows through your mind too.
Imagine a society where the computer hacker isn't a figure of fear or derision, but something of a national hero (Linus Torvalds). Imagine a country where the leading thinkers and policy-makers are comfortable with the idea of "open source" - not just as software, but as a model for education, social services, even democracy itself. As a technoculture, Finland is much more than the might of Nokia and its latest stockmarket valuations. The higher values of the net - participation, sharing of resources, love of knowledge - seem deeply hard-wired into this culture."
redux [04.20.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.
Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."
"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.
Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"
7:34 PM
0 comments
[ rhetoric ]
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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