Author, consultant, and acknowledged thought leader focused on social media and the Internet, technology and technoculture, sustainability and "bright green" environmental action.
In an essay publsihed by the New York Times, Dennis Overbye wonders whether free will is an illusion. [Link]
“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”
Once again, I'm leading a "state of the world" discussion with Bruce Sterling. Feel free to chime in - if you're not a member of the WELL, where we're holding forth, you can send questions and comments to inkwell /at/ well.com. [Link]
We made it to Austin's second annual First Night on New Year's Eve. I didn't attend the first, ran into friends who had been there and who said this one was far better because it was less spread out; most of the activity was focused around Cesar Chavez from Congress Ave. to City Hall. The event started with a terrific parade, probably the best parade I've seen. I think it's because the politicians and corporate marketing folks turned it over to artists and independents. I shot a photo set and took time to clean up the photos, which were already pretty good. Looking over the list, I see that there's a lot we missed... next year we'll do better!
A couple of British guys leased the Fijian island of Vorovoro and are building its tribe over the web. How real is it? Check it out – their blog has lots of photos. [Link]
Since April 2006, when recruitment started, more than 1,000 of a projected 5,000 people have joined. Last fall, the first band of 100 members – including Ben Keene and Mark James, the earnest twentysomething Brits behind the effort – arrived on Vorovoro to establish basic infrastructure, like a garden and the Great Bure (the community’s main sleeping quarters). Meanwhile, members from more than 25 countries elected their first leader and, in their first referendum, voted by a landslide to install a block of composting-style toilets.
As someone getting into serious dieting, I appreciated wiseGEEK's What Does 200 Calories Look Like? – a real education. I should hang it on the wall or, better yet, have the image tattooed on my wrist. If you work mostly in your head, it's somehow easy to be unconscious about the stuff you're putting in your body.
Jeff Bezos' private space company, Blue Origin, has revised its web site with pictures and videos from a test launch of its New Shepard Program's Goddard spacecraft, "a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space." The home page of the site also has a call for "hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced" aerospace engineers. There's a backgrounder about Blue Origin at MSNBC's Cosmic Log:
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, with the aim of developing a new type of vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rocket ship capable of taking passengers to the edge of space. At altitudes in excess of 62 miles (100 kilometers), customers should be able to scan Earth's curving expanse beneath a black sky, experience a few minutes of weightlessness and justifiably brag afterward that they've been to outer space. Blue Origin's current development schedule calls for commercial trips to start in 2010.
In response to Worldchanging's question, "What's Next," I wrote
What I'd like to see is a clear plan that explains how 6 billion people coexist on earth with a very high-quality standard of living. I want that plan to explain how to overcome the resource issues, and how to work through the political and distribution issues, to make that world possible. I want this to be more than a hopeful idea that fuels a lot of blog posts or a book like ours, which does include fragments of this kind of thinking. I think the biggest challenge here is coming up with, and describing effectively, a global political model that will support this kind of evolution.
I was riffing off a question about the earth's lack of resources to support the American version of "a high standard of living" for everybody. Bruce Sterling points to resonant comments from Cory Doctorow:
SFRevu: I've heard varying numbers on how many planet Earth's it would take to provide everyone with an "American" standard of living, ranging from 10 to 20 or so. That's always seemed bogus to me since a) Americans suffer from over-abundance and b) information doesn't consume resources to be replicated. Mostly. What's your take?
Cory: Well, America has lots of weird consumption inefficiencies, especially away from the coastal cities where we're encouraged to own a lot more house, car and material goods than we need. I'd be more interested in how much it would take to provide every person in the world the kind of life they enjoy in one of the moderate-priced European "B" cities like Florence. Walkable places with incredible food, design, manufacturing, schools, racial diversity, etc. Places with great public transit AND a high level of private vehicle ownership, as well as universal health-care, cheap or free universities, and refreshing absence of paranoid security theater aimed at eliminating abstract nouns like "terror."
The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (just listened to a Stanford lecture about the American Couple that cited a study that determined that the single biggest predictor of long-term marital happiness is whether both partners have health care), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that's straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don't think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.
America has lots going for it -- innovation, the Bill of Rights, a willingness to let its language mutate in exciting and interesting ways, but the standard of living is not America's signal virtue.
Sandy Stone told me that I should hear Barlow at 23c3... I didn't get a reference url from her, but ran across it on boing boing. I'm just noting it here so I can come back and listen when I have time. Isn't that what blogs are for? [Link]
I'm often inspired in my own thinking and practice by Peter Merholz and his colleagues at Adaptive Path. Earlier this week he posted about the importance of defining, explaining, anjd adhering to an experience strategy, which "defines a product requirement from the perspective of the user, and what they want to accomplish, achieve, do." [Link]
Perhaps the ur-experience strategy comes from George Eastman, who was guided by the phrase “You press the button, we do the rest,” in the development of his original Kodak camera and the processing and printing services he provided.
He posts a call for other good examples of experience strategies, to be posted in comments. One respondent posted a quote from Pandora: "At Pandora Media™ (formerly Savage Beast Technologies™), we have a single mission: To help you discover new music you'll love." (And they do ... go to the main Pandora page and give it a try. Pandora's design is simple and usable; I have a radio station based on characteristics of Cansei de Ser Sexy's music, created in seconds.)
Molly Ivins evidently took some time off for cancer treatment, but she's posted a new column that says that she's had it with the war in Iraq, we need to get out now. (Thanks to Marv Plettner for posting a pointer to this column on the WELL.) I've avoided posting more about screwy neocons and the possibly sociopathic, clearly incompetent President we hopefully didn't elect, figuring others were doing a decent job – and it's great to have Molly back on the case. [Link]
This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it's doubly wrong for him to send 20,0000 more soldiers into this hellhole, as he reportedly will announce next week.
What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?
It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people with what they are charged if they're arrested. This administration has done away with rights first enshrined in the Magna Carta nearly 800 years ago, and we've let them do it.
This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I'll write about this war until we find some way to end it. STOP IT NOW. BAM! Every day, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.
Brett Hurt at Bazaarblog has just published an interview with Giff Constable of The Electric Sheep Company, which "offers solutions for virtual world commerce, creativity, and community." [Link] The conversation reminds me that the Second Life is not some new separate thing, but a natural evolution as the Internet and the web begin to have the bandwidth and the cycles to compelling visual/virtual spaces. Second Life really is well named - it affords a sense of place imagined collaboratively by residents and companies within the environment.
(Brett asks) eMarketer predicts that advertising on social networking sites will grow from $280 million this year to $1.8 billion by 2010. What do you think about their prediction, and how do you think it applies to marketing in Second Life?
(Giff answers) I think that number is almost meaningless because social networking is starting to touch everything we do online, so the definition becomes increasingly blurred. On e-commerce sites, social networking will become an important component of establishing reputation/trust around a product, especially once you can overlay collaborative filtering and reviewing technologies with social network information. I think that the web and a Second Life-like technology will become increasingly interconnected and complementary. We will use both, depending on whether we want a 2D or 3D experience for a particular purpose (they have different strengths and weaknesses), and depending on whether we want a live social interaction. There is no question that people feel more “together” in a 3D immersive environment.
He goes on to articulate a set of rules for companies in Second Life that are not too different from the guidelines social Internet consultants have been espousing for years:
stay honest with yourself about your brand and how it is perceived
stay authentic and honest with consumers [I tned to shy away from the c-word – they're active participants, not passive consumers - jon]
decide whether your product really translates into a virtual world or whether you need to focus on brand
don’t think you can control everything about your brand in a virtual world (or put another way: do not be afraid of your consumer)
create an opt-in experience and let people take your brand with them somehow
keep your standards high – you are representing your brand and company
like a blog, keep things fresh, new and interesting if you want people to come back again and again
be prepared for technology bumps, because this space is new and evolving extremely rapidly, and rapid evolution in software means bugs
John Shirley, main instigator of the cyberpunk literary genre, says Cuaron's Children of Men "is truly masterful film making." [Link]
One of the great things about this cyberpunkesque dystopian film about a near-future where people can no longer reproduce and society has imploded, is that it’s an action movie without action movie cliches–the hero, Clive Owens (he’s very good), never kills anyone (well he bashes a guy in the head with a car battery once), never shoots anyone, never hangs from the runners of helicopters or runs from a fireball. But it’s paced like an action movie and there’s achingly realistic jeopardy in it. Cuaron has a climactic scene, with a lot of police-versus-terrorist mayhem going on, that is all one long shot and he does it magnificently, it’s incredibly well choreographed. Clive Owens’ barefoot, animal-loving Theo seems to be a St Francis of Assisi figure, rather than an action hero. The girl who plays the world’s only pregnant woman is wonderful but especially fine is Michael Caine as an aging hipster, a stony idealist…
There’s a concentration camp for immigrants in the film and don’t imagine for a moment it’s far fetched, they’re building them right now…and some already exist. The film’s use of Homeland Security and other Bush-flavored protofascist references bring it right on home…
Astronomers, still struggling to understand the origin and structure of the universe, have managed to create a three-dimensional map of "dark matter" using data from the Hubble and various ground-based telescopes. [Link]
The map stretches half way back to the beginning of the universe and shows that dark matter has formed into "clumps" as it collapsed under gravity. Other matter then grouped around these clumps to form the visible stars, galaxies and planets....Scientists said the new images were equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Major arteries and intersections become evident and a variety of neighbourhoods are revealed.
Now that we know where it is, the scientists say, the next step is to figure out what it is.
The Los Angeles Times reports "that hundreds of Gates Foundation investments – totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities – have been in companies that countered the foundation's charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy." For example, in Nigeria, where the foundation provides immunizations against polio and measles, children's health is threatened by "fumes and soot ... over a nearby oil plant" owned by the Italian petroleum company Eni, which is one of the foundation's investments. Foundations make investments to sustain their ability to do good work, but they don't necessarily relate the investments they make to their mission. They also invest purely for profit, avoiding the potential opportunity to improve a company's operations. [Link]
Many philanthropic organizations are beginning to address the contradiction between their mission and their investments, according to the Times.
....According to recent surveys, many foundations, including some of the nation's largest, have adopted at least basic policies to invest in ways that support their missions.
Major foundations that make social justice, corporate governance and environmental stewardship key considerations in their investment strategies include the Ford Foundation, worth $11.6 billion, the nation's second-largest private philanthropy; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation; and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Moreover, nearly one-third of foundations participate directly in shareholder initiatives, voting their proxies to influence corporate behavior. A few have become shareholder activists. In recent years, for instance, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, with an endowment of $481 million, has sponsored proxies to force corporations to address environmental sustainability and political transparency.
Wagner James Au comments on Linden Labs' decision to Open Source the code that runs the Second Life viewer. [Link]
The official announcement begins by comparing Linden’s move to what Netscape did (motivated by “acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation”), when they opened the source to their browser, which led to a fruition of Web development.
For the very young who are reading this, some history: Netscape, you see, was a company that once dominated the browser market. Why sonny, did you know its IPO in 1995 launched the dot com boom? Yes they did. Now, however, its share of the browser market is less than 1%. So while it’s true the source code was a marvelous gift to the web’s growth, in retrospect it seems like a heroic sacrifice— great for the Internet, but not so great for the company that did it.
I found a dispassionate review of Extreme Democracy by an associate professor of rhetoric at UT-Austin. It appears he's reviewing one of the screwy copies from the first run (based on his reference to formatting errors), and he accurately notes that the book "varies in quality even more than a normal collection does." Actually, I wouldn't say "varies in quality," but "varies in intent." He castigates Jim Moore for his "naivete," calling the Second Superpower piece "awful," apparently missing the point that was supposed to be a manifesto, not an essay. That's our fault - we should have made it clearer why we were including some of the pieces, especially since the editor we were originally working with had raised this point. [Link]
It does appear that he liked my Deanspace piece: "... others present interesting case studies of community-based technologies, especially Drupal, which was used to power many of Dean's community sites." I should probably repost that here at some point.
I actually think a lot about white space. I spent several years working for a typographer, and I took that gig in order to learn more about publishing, especially design of the printed page, but I've never done a direct study of visual design... so I had a passing understanding of the value and use of white space, but until now I'd never seen a good article explaining how it works. A List Apart has just such an article, written by Mark Boulton, who notes that whitespace is subjective, its use a matter of practice. He points to a good reference, Typography: A Manual of Design (which I'd love to read but can't afford).
I've avoided posting about the political circus lately, if only because it's been sounding like a hallelujah chorus of "I told you so's" in the progressive blogosphere lately... and because the world needs fewer partisan messages, not more. However I can't resist posting Keith Olbermann's summary of Bush's credibility, relative to his (and unfortunately, our) adventure in Iraq. Found this at "Crooks and Liars":
Olbermann: President Bush makes no secret of his distaste for looking backward, for assessing past results.
But in our third story on the Countdown tonight… too bad.
Any meaningful assessment of the president's next step in Iraq must consider his steps and missteps so far.
So, let's look at the record:
Before Mr. Bush was elected, he said he was no nation-builder; nation-building was wrong for America.
Now, he says it is vital for America.
He said he would never put U.S. troops under foreign control. Today, U.S. troops observe Iraqi restrictions.
He told us about WMDs. Mobile labs. Secret sources. Aluminum tubing. Yellow-cake.
He has told us the war is necessary…Because Saddam was a threat; Because of 9/11; Osama bin Laden; al Qaeda; Because of terrorism in general; To liberate Iraq; To spread freedom; To spread democracy; To keep the oil out of the hands of terrorist-controlled states; Because this was a guy who tried to kill his dad.
In pushing for and prosecuting this war, he passed on chances to get Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, Osama bin Laden.
He sent in fewer troops than recommended. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, and "de-Baathified" the government. He short-changed Iraqi training.
He did not plan for widespread looting, nor the explosion of sectarian violence.
He sent in troops without life-saving equipment.
Gave jobs to foreign contractors, not the Iraqis.
Staffed U-S positions there, based on partisanship, not professionalism.
We learned that "America had prevailed", "Mission Accomplished", the resistance was in its "last throes".
He has said more troops were not necessary, and more troops are necessary, and that it's up to the generals, and removed some of the generals who said more troops would be necessary.
He told us of turning points: The fall of Baghdad, the death of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, a provisional government,the trial of Saddam, a charter, a constitution, an Iraqi government, ¤elections, purple fingers, a new government, the death of Saddam.
We would be greeted as liberators, with flowers.
As they stood up–we would stand down, we would stay the course, we were never 'stay the course',
The enemy was al Qaeda, was foreigners, terrorists, Baathists.
The war would pay for itself, it would cost 1-point-7 billion dollars, 100 billion, 400 billion, half a trillion dollars.
And after all of that, today it is his credibility versus that of generals, diplomats, allies, Republicans, Democrats, the Iraq Study Group, past presidents, voters last November, and the majority of the American people.
I used to read "Fate Magazine" when I was a kid. I really dug the illustrations on the covers through the fifties, before they changed to a bland text cover with no images. I accidentally discovered a web site for "Fate." It has a bunch of the old covers where they're selling back issues, and they have posters and trading cards. It looks like they're still publishing, and they've gone back to the cool illustrated covers. The magazine itself is a collection of stories about ghosts, UFOs, and other paranormal phenomena and Forteana. (I wasn't very skeptical or cynical when I was a preteen... and I did go on to become a fan of "The X-Files.") [Link]
The folks who run the bittorrent catalog Pirate Bay have decided to buy Sealand, a man-made offshore installation, and build a new nation. They're taking donations online. [Link] Hopefully they're familiar with The Mouse that Roared.
Gavin Clarke at The Register reports that the popularity of Myspace and Facebook is overestimated, based on a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life project. From Pew:
"There is a widespread notion that every American teenager is using social networks, and that they’re plastering personal information over their profiles for anyone and everyone to read," says Amanda Lenhart. "These findings add nuance to that story – not every teenager is using a social networking website, and of those that do, more than half of them have in some way restricted access to their profile."
The article in The Register is a little muddy in its attempt to emphasize the negative – that social network sites have been overhyped and their value overestimated – but to me the problem is less that statistics are misrepresented about those specific sites, and more that we lack good statistics and good background research to tell us what the numbers really mean.
Alice Coltrane died Friday; Xeni Jardin wrote a good obituary with several links. She was still performing 'til the end. Though she came to prominence through her marriage to John Coltrane, she was herself an accomplished performer and profoundly spiritual. From an interview by Susan L. Taylor for Essence:
John knew that music fundamentally is a spiritual language that speaks to the heart and soul. Unfortunately, everyone cannot go to the mountain, or to isolation. But through music, people can go within their own heart and let their spirit soar, and maybe say, “Lord, at least through spiritual sound, I could possibly reach that open door that leads to your sacred domain.” I felt that through John’s compositions, and the sound of his instrument, this could pave the way to the righteous path, giving us a time for spiritual reflection, concentration, upliftment and revitalization. In India, there is a Name of God known as Nadabrahma. It means God as sound. God is sound.
John was deeply affected by the need for peace in the world; and he wanted to utilize his music as his elders had done in the church. Not necessarily from the pulpit, but from a platform that could serve as an outreach to many more souls that those who followed his music. He respected the faiths of others, and I don’t believe people knew how deep his thoughts were on the subject of salvation, liberation and God realization, and that he believed in love toward all mankind with and the effort to relieve pain and suffering.
A new life form, a kind of marine microalgae, popped up in seawater samples. The "represent a new evolutionary lineage," according to Fabrice Not, a marine biologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar and one of the team that discovered what they're calling "picobiliphytes ." [Link]
Shades of Quatermass and the Pit (a British sci-fi serial from the 50s, later produced as a film), wherein we learn that the human race has Martian ancestry... a team of scientists speculate that life on earth began as microbes on Mars, blasted into space by a meteorite impact. [Link]
Loren Coleman blogs about "a mystery millionaire who will pay a high bounty on the capture of giant owls." Evidently there's a rumor that a large owl can turn its owner into a millionaire (but if you're already a millionaire, do you really need the owl?) The story's more convoluted: is the CIA using the owl hunt as a ruse to find Osama? Is a giant owl terrorising the UK? Are the owls actually intellligence operatives? Was James Bond a birder? Loren Coleman rocks. [Link]
ABC has a good article, "Getting Beyond 'Gotcha,'" on the impact of new media (e.g. YouTube) on politics.
... many presidential candidates have tried to get beyond the "gotcha" with their own versions of behind-the-scenes videos. John Edwards paid a team of bloggers to travel with him and document his presidential announcement tour and has also produced a series of "webisodes" that explore his campaign from behind the scenes. Edwards says the webisodes, which are uploaded to YouTube, are "based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll …"
Chuck Olsen, a Minneapolis-based video blogger for Rocketboom.com, was one of those whom Edwards paid to come along on the tour. Olsen got to hang out on the campaign plane, chat with Edwards, and even drink wine with the campaign staff after a town hall meeting in Iowa. He kept his camera rolling, and posted a dispatch on his Web site, MinnesotaStories.com
"I know I'm being used," says Olson, who openly questions whether he could have provided an unbiased perspective of the campaign. But he realizes the power of online video to hold candidates like Edwards accountable. "Candidates have to always be 'on,'" Olson says. "If they screw up, suddenly a lot of people will see it."
(I've met Chuck, and Olsen with an 'e' is the correct spelling, incidentally. Not meaning to criticize the editors at ABC News. After all, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.")
Snow in Central Texas is rare as hen's teeth, but flakes are falling today, even as I type. Everybody's staying home — it doesn't take much snow to make a snow day here. Our driving's questionable most of the time anyhow, but a thin layer of ice on the road is absolutely lethal... so any hint of icy conditions, and schools and businesses start shutting down. [Link]
On the Internet, or at least in many places online, nobody knows you've replicated (or how many times). I could create an unruly mob of respondents supporting (or even disagreeing with) my blog posts, for instance, by altering my identity from post to post. I could do that on your blog, too.
Doug Rushkoff calls this a "sock mob" phemenon, derived from "sock puppet," which Jamais Cascio defines as "a faux personage used in online debates to back up the arguments of the real person (thereby demonstrating the position to be popular)." The mob is the plural of the puppet, and I suspect they're popping up in quite a few places, especially where the subject is politics. Jamais posts that we can expect to see much more of this sort of thing. [Link]
As the scripting and construction tools for these virtual worlds get more powerful, we're likely to see virtual protesters run by real people augmented by mobs of in-game simulations and "bots," made with enough detail in both image and behavior to convincingly appear as a swarm of real players. They may have scripted replies to questions, and would be coded to appear and disappear in the same way that human-operated denizens of the virtual worlds do. It wouldn't be hard to figure out that they were bots if you pay enough attention, but as a mob -- especially if human-operated figures were dispersed throughout -- they'd be rather impressive.
Ultimately, just as rampant sock mob activities can devalue conversation and comments, sock bots will no doubt in time make it harder to engage in political activity in virtual worlds. If a political figure knew that her very appearance in a virtual world setting would trigger the appearance of dozens or even hundreds of marching, chanting protesters -- who look at least as "real" as the human-operated purple monkeys, giant phalluses with hands, flying unicorns and the like that inhabit the virtual environments -- said political figure would likely find little to gain by making that appearance.
This is why we need a netwide standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication. We won't necessarily get it, but people are working on it.)
Gary Kamiya at Salon asks "Where's the outrage?" about the war in Iraq, then answers his own question. Americans are dying in Iraq, but not enough of them, and they're all volunteers, there's no danger that some senator's or judge's kid will be drafted and forced to fight and die. The death toll is still only something like 5% of Vietnam, and some of the natural opponents (Democrats) don't want to appear "soft on security." So what's left to do? Poetry.
What does poetry have to do with politics? Nothing -- and everything. It is too late to stop the fatal endgame of Bush's war. But at least we can honor those who have died in that war, Iraqis and Americans alike, by refusing to look away from their deaths. Poetry, as the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote, is a witness. And if we the living highly resolve, as we must, that these dead shall not have died in vain, the only way to do so is by ensuring that we never again launch an unjustified war.
... that we won't see the kind of opposition that would end the war, in a quote from Stephen Hadley explaining White House strategy. [Link]
Mr. Bush's National Security Adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said in an interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC that the White House has sufficient money under its control to deploy the troops as planned, and he suggested that once the troops are in place, Congress would be reluctant to cut off funding.
"I think once they get in harm's way, Congress's tradition is to support those troops," Mr. Hadley said.
Here's how Welshman at Daily Kos interprets the quote:
Hadley is saying that the opposition of the recently elected majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate to the escalation of troop numbers in Iraq can be circumvented by using existing money, unallocated and unapproved for the purpose, to put young American women and men under fire, in "harms way", to force the continuation of such funding.
European scientists are developoing an electronic security system that identifies people "by the unique pattern of electrical activity within their brain." [Link]
The authentication system requires a user to have EEG measurements taken beforehand with further measurements for each authentication test. This is done via a removable cap, which communicates wirelessly with a computer that analyses the data gathered. The cap has fewer electrodes than are normally used for EEG measurements, but can still provide enough information for authentication....
I think the form that we suggested to the publisher was one of a compendium. The one that would allow you to read it at various levels, that you could sneak in here or there or read it in one go if you so desire. The book from the very beginning that was always conceived on uncoated paper. It would have the weight of a novel, so that you can still actually read it in bed.
Also, from the very beginning what was important to me was that it was cheap enough to print that it would be possible for a mass book. It wouldn't be much more expensive than a novel would be. By its design conceit it would actually be able to talk to the masses. That's what I was utterly interested in. We will see a year from now if this will all work out or not, if we can do another book that preaches to the converted. You know, that talks to Ralph Nader voters. I had no interest in that whatsoever. I think these people have enough information out there. The challenge is really to get this information to a lot of people.
McChris at infobong.com responds to my "sock mob" post, where I suggest "a standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication" as a solution to sock mobbery and other pollution of the commons by astroturfers and worse, who take advantage of the ability to create rootless and inauthentic multiple identities for all kinds of mischief – gaming and spamming the rest of us. [Link] Says he:
In order for a standardized identity system to be effective against a problem like sock mobs it would first need to be mandatory (either at the blog level or across the Internet) and, secondly, it would need to be verified through some kind of governmental identification system like driver’s licenses or social-security numbers. (I imagine that you could use credit-reporting agencies, but that would be even worse.) A universal identity system would introduce privacy problems that would exceed the value of eliminating sock mobs. There are privacy problems on a high level, where social institutions could store, share, and retrieve comments and content posted by an individual, but the lower-level privacy problems would be worse. Do we want prospective employers or dates to be able access and verify everything we post online? Most users post different information about themselves on a site like MySpace than they would on LinkedIn, would we want these tied together? Do you want a troll to be able to see each comment you leave to a blog? I don’t think so. Identity systems would allow society to police mass actions like sock mobs, but they would also police users at an individual level.
My responses...
In order for a standardized identity system to be effective against a problem like sock mobs it would first need to be mandatory: My understanding of standards is that they aren't mandated, but adopted cooperatively because they offer (per Wikipedia) "mutual gains in a coordinated action." I've never heard anyone in the group working toward a standard identity framework use that word "mandatory."
secondly, it would need to be verified through some kind of governmental identification system like driver’s licenses or social-security numbers: This isn't necessary, and I don't think anyone's proposed it. The way to do it would be to have a system of brokers who provide registration services, have some means of verification (probably built into the payment process, e.g. verification via credit card), and have a validation service. Such brokers already exist, such as 2idi, where I'm registered as =jonl.
there are privacy problems on a high level, where social institutions could store, share, and retrieve comments and content posted by an individual, but the lower-level privacy problems would be worse. Do we want prospective employers or dates to be able access and verify everything we post online? Isn't this already the case? If you wanted to overcome this "problem," you'd have to remove that other clear threat to privacy, the search engine, no?
Most users post different information about themselves on a site like MySpace than they would on LinkedIn, would we want these tied together? This is actually a non sequitir... if a value of myspace is an ability to create a separate, more casual persona, that's a service they could offer. Myspace would know who you ware, would be able to connect your identity to an authentic person via a login that would be validated by the framework - but this doesn't have to be public-facing in such a way that the two personas would be visibly connected via search etc.
Identity systems would allow society to police mass actions like sock mobs, but they would also police users at an individual level. "Police" is an interesting term to use here. The act of "policing" is often a good thing - enforcing rules and providing protection, but it can also be a bad thing in the context of a "police state," were police power is exercised arbitrarily or abused.
It's probably worthwhile to think about this - how police (or police functionalities) can protect, or can persecute – and sometimes do both. (How often do we see police portrayed as thugs hired to protect the rich and persecute the poor?)
Our experiences and our media biases may favor one perception or the other, but the reality is complex. And despite evident abuses by police, we generally accept that police should exist, and we depend on the integrity of various institutions – e.g. government offices and the courts – to ensure the fairness and integrity of the police function. On the Internet, we traditionally depended on system and user integrity, but (tragedy of the commons) that's beginning to fail us; spam and abuse are epidemic. It's not surprising that we think about policing-as-protection, but it also follows that we worry about policing-as-persecution. As you can gather from what I've said so far, I'm not paranoid about an identity framework that's built as a standard, because I think the folks who are working on it are aware of privacy issues and including them as a factor in developing the technology and systems the standard requires. But I think it's worthwhile to keep the privacy question prominent in the discussion.
From Daily Kos: an interesting exchange between Arlen Specter and Alberto Gonzales:
Specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you can't take it away except in the case of invasion or rebellion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus?
Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.
Okay, legal eagles, here's a question... is Gonzales actually correct? I ask because I checked the language of the constitution, and it says
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
It says privilege, not right.I want it to be a considered perceived as a right, obviously; I'm just concerned about the semantics here.
"I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today" dept.
Jamais has done a great service by pointing out the ecological footprint associated with fast food consumption, though I was questioning an assumption behind it – that Americans eat an average of three burgers per day. On the other hand, if you were to say that Americans eat some form of fast food at least three times a week, I'm pretty sure you'd be correct, and pizza probably has a pretty significant footprint, maybe greater than the cheeseburger's.
Jamais also found that he had substantially underestimated total burgers, if you make the three per week assumption.
Practice holistic assessment. (This is relevant to my post – socially responsible investing requires that we have tools that will help us see the consequences of investment, difficult given the complexity of the financiall ecosystem which is the context for investment.)
Seek transformative impact. (via long-term goals, good models, powerful visions)
Offer utter transparency
After the initial fuss about the Gates Foundation's contradictory investments, the foundation initially suggested it would consider a policy change, and reassess its investments. However Foundation CEO Patty Stonesifer followed with a letter to the LA Times saying
The stories you told of people who are suffering touched us all. But it is naive to suggest that an individual stockholder can stop that suffering. Changes in our investment practices would have little or no impact on these issues. While shareholder activism has worthwhile goals, we believe a much more direct way to help people is by making grants and working with other donors to improve health, reduce poverty and strengthen education.
Bill and Melinda oversee the investment of the foundation’s endowment. In giving guidance to the investment managers, they have chosen not to get involved in ranking companies based upon factors such as their lending policies or environmental record. There are dozens of factors that could be considered, almost all of which are outside the foundation’s areas of expertise. The issues involved are quite complex. Should a company get a failing score if 1 percent of its output is used in cigarette packaging, or if 1 percent of its stores’ sales are in tobacco? How far back in time do you evaluate behavior? If a company disagrees with your assessment, what appeals process is available? Which social and political issues should be on the list?
Many of the companies mentioned in the Los Angeles Times articles, such as Ford, Kraft, Fannie Mae, Nestle, and General Electric, do a lot of work that some people like, as well as work that some people do not like. Some activities might even be viewed positively by some people and negatively by others.
There are many important issues that the foundation does not focus on, such as lending laws and environmental regulation. The organizations that do work on those issues—together with governments and all of their legislative, executive, and judicial resources—play a critical role. We do not want to duplicate that role.
Bill and Melinda have prioritized our program work over ranking companies and issues because it allows us to have the greatest impact for the most people. They also believe there would be much room for error and confusion in such judgments, and that divesting from these companies would not have an effect commensurate with the resources we would divert to this activity. The foundation’s not owning a tiny percentage of a company or selling it to another investor would often go unnoticed, and Bill and Melinda would not be comfortable delegating this kind of judgment.
Greg Watson explains Buckminster Fuller's approach to his work. [Link]
He emphasized that [he] was not acting as an altruistic do-gooder; to him the Chronofile irrefutably demonstrated that working for all humankind leads to the most important discoveries and the most reliable support. He insisted that Universe is set up to supply its citizens with their basic needs. Animals are taken care of as long as they perform their various functions; humans need not "work for a living," as long as they work to make humans a success on Earth. This self-imposed mandate allowed Bucky to attend to problems not being addressed by those workers primarily interested in making money. Without a promise of early profit, few corporations, investors, or universities would undertake investigation of unfamiliar territory (still true). Without assurance of financial security, few workers could be induced to join a risky exploratory effort.
Confident of support, Bucky declared, "You can make money or you can make sense," and moved resolutely forward into the unknown, recruiting students (myself among them) who paid his expenses in the form of tuition in order to join him as fellow explorers and workers.This uncomfortably idealistic strategy advanced many of Bucky's ideas to proof-of-concept. Nobody got rich, but nobody starved. Some brilliant new concepts were researched and demonstrated as artifacts.
He goes on to explain how Bucky focused on residential home design and came up with the Dymaxion house, wherein "he recognized that to be optimally effective, design needed to be comprehensiveand considered in terms of whole systems rather than as objects in isolation."
digitalurban: "Frank Lloyd Wright Architectual Visualisation in Half Life"
digitalurban posts a rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House using game engine – specifically the Half Life Source Engine – for the visualization. [Link] Digital Urban is doing a whole series on Cities in Games.
Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert. Don't look for reasons not to talk to them. You've given up on unilateral disengagement. And that's good. But don't leave a vacuum. It will fill up immediately with violence and destruction. Talk to them. Make them an offer that their moderates can accept (there are far more of them than the media shows us). Make them an offer, so that they will have to decide whether to accept it or instead remain hostages to fanatical Islam. Go to them with the boldest, most serious plan that Israel is able to put forward. A plan that all Israelis and Palestinians with eyes in their heads will know is the limit of refusal and concession, ours and theirs. If you hesitate, we'll soon be longing for the days when Palestinian terrorism was an amateur affair. We will pound ourselves on our heads and shout, why did we not use all our flexibility, all our Israeli creativity, to extricate our enemy from the trap in which he ensnared himself?
Just as there is unavoidable war, there is also unavoidable peace. Because we no longer have any choice. We have no choice, and they have no choice. And we need to set out toward this unavoidable peace with the same determination and creativity with which we set out to an unavoidable war. Anyone who thinks there is an alternative, that time is on our side, does not grasp the profound, dangerous process that is now well underway.
Please, please, please don't talk about audiences when you are theoretically promoting social media. As Jay Rosen has suggested, we are the people formerly known as the audience. Blogging is not just another channel for corporate marketing types to push their messages to markets, eyballs, or audiences. Social media is based on the dynamic of a many-to-many dialogue between people. Yes, people: that's the word that should have been used. Not audience.
Also this:
I applaud any efforts, philosophically, that are an attempt to shake the corporate centroids into a real dialogue with us, the edglings. However, I don't believe in hedging, over-simplifying, or reusing outdated rhetoric in an attempt to make it easier for the poor, benighted corporate types to make the trip to the promised land without hard work. The core dynamics of webology can't be put aside for the sake of offering PR agencies' clients a baby step by baby step path into the new age of interaction. We are putting aside lying, so let's not even lie to the liers. Let's not perpetuate false and misleading metaphors, like "audiences" and "crafting messages for our markets".
Let's get down to the real basics. We are people. We are already engaged in conversation among ourselves. If corporations want to jump in, fine, go ahead. The water's fine. But you have to drop the old line model in its entirety, or you will have zero success. PR people who really get this, like Brian Solis, Mike Manuel, and many others, can be a great help to companies making the transition. But it serves no one's interests in the long run to make the transition seem easy, or to let the corporates approach the effort with an "as little change as possible" mindset. And those that do so are harming themselves, their clients, and their discipline.
(I keep running into centroids who seem to get the edgling perspective, which is good.)
Speaking of the hRelease microformat (as Stowe Boyd does in the post I just referenced), Brian Oberkirch has a note about it, calling it a cow path:
The investigation of the need for hRelease is an entirely different thing. It cannot be confused with the social media press release. Microformats work by suggesting an incremental change to a widely established existing practice. People are lazy. Inertia is powerful. Want change? Let people add a bit more markup to the documents they already publish.
Microformats work by paving the cow paths. Now, anyone can suggest and formalize a set of semantic markup practices. The PRSA could do this; the business wires could do this. We’ll get much more traction by working within the microformats community and adhering to its process. To have agreement on a microformat (the brand is important) for press releases will help gain traction with tool developers, publishers and companies like Yahoo, AOL and MSFT which are already moving to support microformats. (The GOOG, a conspicuous absence.)
You simply can’t reinvent the press release and get a microformat for it at the same time.
hRelease will be a semantic encoding of a data set suggested by the Social Media Press Release – which in its flat form is more of a checklist. Here's a link to a pdf of the SMPR template.
"A VC" says he'd like to make every online merchant a blogger. [Link]
Everything that works for bloggers will work even better for e-commerce merchants.
That's why I would make anyone who is an e-merchant maintain a blog where they'd learn about search optimization, link tracking, social media optimization, word of mouth marketing, buzz tracking, feeds, flares, mybloglog, and a host of other important stuff that doesn't cost a dime to do and brings traffic.
The sad thing (but also a fact of life on the Internet) is that the spammers have all figured this stuff out and the services like Google, FeedBurner, Technorati, Delicious, Digg, MyBlogLog, and others now spend a good deal of time thinking about how to keep the spammers out (or at least minimize their impact).
At bOING bOING, Jasmina posts about the Serbian election, wherein "one third of the population still votes for the fascist Radical Party, whose leader Seselj is in jail in The Hague." [Link]
Yesterday, young voters in their early twenties were crying in front of the school where they were supposed to vote. I interviewed them. They told me they were desperate because they cannot vote for what they want in their lives, but only against what they fear.
Their youthful aspirations are overwhelmed by fascists, radicals, wars, global isolation... They have had enough of that treatment in their young lives, for practically all their days. "Never make decisions out of fear," I told them boldly. I wonder how they voted.....
Russell Davies wonders whether we can change our lifestyle focus from "stuff" to ideas. [Link]
Our fundamental issue, I guess, is that people are consuming too much. By which we mean too much stuff. Physical stuff. Stuff that requires energy to be made and un-made. So we wouldn't mind people consuming per se, if they consumed less actual stuff and consumed more that was made only of ideas. Which, of course, is what a lot of branding tries to do - and is often criticised for - we try and add value to a product by adding abstract, non-physical stuff; ideas, associations, images, memories. And the transmission of these things involves some energy, but less than creating a lot of physical stuff.
So I'm wondering whether we can persuade people to consume more branded ideas and less branded stuff, in the same way we might sometimes be able to substitute connected technology for cars.
Think about packaging as an example. At the moment we try and sell stuff by wrapping it in an expensive, wasteful but desirable bit of packaging. What if the packaging could be kept to a minimum but the sales imperative could be served through a desirable idea embedded in the product, with a minimum of physical stuff?
It was a busy week, and I didn't have time to stop and blog what I was doing, but I can summarize here, since it was mostly pretty interesting.
I met with Tom Brown, Kevin Koym, David Bluestein et al on Monday to talk about a web testbed environment that DCI is setting up. This is where we can start realizing the potential synergy between DCI and the Bootstrap organization. The idea is to build a web technology sandbox for local bootstrap web entrepreneurs.
Spent some time with Apogee Search, experts in the field of online marketing, especially search engine marketing. We've discussed how my consulting focus can extend their capabilities, and I'm learning quite a bit more about the marketing world from them.
Innovation blogger Renee Hopkins Callahan, a friend of mine who's moved to Austin recently, dropped by the Polycot offices to visit with Jeff and I. It's great to talk to Renee; she's always so focused on creativity and business innovation.
Doryan Rice, Silona Bonewald and I have been working on the plan for this year's big EFF/EFF-Austin party at SXSW Interactive. We met with Ryan Pitylak and Danielle Thomas of UnlockAustin.com. Danielle's also associated with White Ghost Shivers, the band that's playing at the steampunk-themed EFF party: "We revel in string band music from the 20's and 30's, mixing early jazz, hokum, vaudeville, ragtime, western swing, and hillbilly, while at the same time unleashing the gutterous underbelly of a pseudo-rock world gone wrong..."
I met with Bijoy Goswami and the guys at Small World Labs to talk about the Bootstrap Network - the online social network platform for Bootstrap. Small World Labs provides the technology, and I've just become their Bootstrap liaison. We talked about a road map for both social and technological development. (After the meeting, as often happens when Bijoy and I connect, we had more far-reaching conversations about the Bootstrap organization and the future of business in Austin and in the world.
After Bijoy, I met with Michael Strong, CEO of Flow, for great conversation about his work as well as the work I've been doing, especially for Worldchanging. We talked quite a bit about online and offline community, and he told me about Peter Barnes' new book, Capitalism 3.0, coincidentally just reviewed by Graham Webster for Worldchanging Washington DC. Barnes wants to "protect the commons by giving it property rights and strong institutional managers." Michael introduced me to Charlie Jackson, CEO of Acceleros and founder of Texans for Peace. Charlie's helping Iraqi entrepreneurs sustain (and, hopefully, rebuild) their businesses.
Finally, I met yesterday afternoon with Xikui Ding, a lawyer with the Mo Shaoping Law Firm from the Peoples Republic of China, in Austin via the international visitor leadership program. The visit was set up by the International Hospitality Council of Austin. He was "focused on criminal and constitutional law, including exposure to NGOs working on free expression, leading law schools and other sources so that he may see the importance of innovation and free expression in our information society." I was meeting him as President of EFF-Austin. "Mr. Ding handles many high profile cases for political prisoners. Most significantly, he has handled the defense of New York Times researcher Zhao Yan in a complicated case involving disclosure of state secrets, which has pushed at the limits of Chinese criminal procedure law. He also was the lead associate for the defense on the case of the Internet writer Shi Tao, which revealed that security officials obtained information from Mr. Shis private Yahoo account for his conviction."
At Boing Boing, Mark posts a link to a Ray Harryhausen tribute site listing all of his films and creatures, with links to some snippets of animation. Harryhausen was a stop-motion animation wizard who carefully built miniature models and animated them by shooting their movements one frame at a time. I was a big Harryhausen fan; it's been great over the last few years to see him getting the recognition he deserves. I first remember seeing his work in a preview of "It Came from Beneath the Sea," which featured a giant octopus menacing San Francisco, giving tentacle to the Golden Gate Bridge. The first of his films I actually saw is still one of my favorites – "20 Million Miles to Earth," which featured a creature brought back from Venus (by Hedda Hopper's son, William, who was also a regular on the Perry Mason series) as an egglet that hatched and grew bigger than a building. There's a great fight scene between the creature, called an ymir, and an elephant. His next film was the great "7th Voyage of Sinbad," that featured a cyclops that looked like the ymir's cousin, and a swordfight with a skeleton that was precursor to a more complex scene in "Jason and the Argonauts," a fight with an army of skeletons. These animations were real magic – perhaps not as realistic as the computer animations that are so much a part of today's films, but they had their own aesthetic of amazement.
MapIt is a bookmarklet that simplifies Google Maps searches - just highlight an address on a web page and map it with one click. [Link] Thanks to Tom for the pointer. (The bookmarklet is one small step for an Austin cyborg, but Tom and Andy are gonna make bigger steps for Austin cyborg-kind.) Incidentally, using the bookmarklet I did see some strange behavior, all on the Google end. E.g. the labels in the left-nav didn't conform to the labels for the virtual pushpins on the map.
One of the many great Davids in the universe saw my Harryhausen post, and sent me a Youtube link to a video catalog of Harryhausen's creatures, embedded below:
Joel Greenberg took a few memebers of Bootstrap Austin's Web Subgroup on a tour of Second Life last night. In his role
GSD&M's Senior Planner focused on emerging technologies, Joel's set up an "Idea City" island in SL. Several cool features, including a cannon that'll shoot your avatar into the air with a parachute. Joel showed us around several sites - one of the most interesting uses of the system was an installation that simulates the schizophrenic's experience of the world, with visual and aural virtual hallucinations based on actual descriptions of schizophrenic perception. Joel said that families of schizophrenics could go there to get a better sense of a phenomenon they deal with every day but can't see. I learned a lot more about Second Life navigation, which isn't always easy; now if I only had more hours to spend....
I've been managing the Viridian Design Movement's web site since Bruce launched the movement around the turn of the century; I should note his latest Viridian Note declaring Viridian Note 00487: We Are Winning">victory. This is note #487 after around seven years, and in those years the environmental movement has clearly grown, evolved, and incorporated elements of futurism and design. There's a whole new approach, epitomized by Amory Lovins, Worldchanging, et al, that focuses on solutions over the handwringing of late 20th century environmental fatalism.
In the Viridan Manifesto, Bruce said
"Number One. Perhaps most importantly, this movement has a built-in expiration date. The problem with previous art movements is this unexamined assumption that they have discovered some eternal cultural truth, and that they will therefore go on forever. In point of fact, no matter how much truth they discover, movements never do last very long.
"So, this is where our movement gets it built-in expiration date. The date is 2012, a date in the Kyoto accords, when people are supposed to be engaged in a serious decline in CO2 emissions."
In this latest Viridian note, he says
(((We Viridians have beaten that clock. There is no need to wait for distant 2012 to declare victory in our war to make green trendy and to create "irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade." Green will never get any trendier than it is this year. The atmosphere upgrade is on the way. That process won't be pretty, but it's going to happen.)))
(((The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))
((When the Davos Economic Forum steals your clothes, there's no reason left to wear them any more. We are winning. The Great and the Good agree with us. They're more scared than we ever were.)))
Early in this latest note, Bruce says "This is number 487. I doubt we will ever reach 500 of these." I suppose we'll maintain the Viridian Design site, at least for a while, as an historical archive.
She was really really sick, and we all knew this was coming, but it still hits like a ton of bricks fired out of a monster cannon... Molly Ivins has died, and I'm pissed off because it's just not fair. When we were in despair about the incredibly nasty state of things she made us laugh and made us hope. I guess we owe it to her to keep hoping and keep laughing, but it'll be tougher knowing she's gone. (If you want to do something in her memory, subscribe to the Texas Observer, where she was once editor, and make sure the the progressive spirit in Texas lives on despite the odds.) [Link]
(which I'd love to read but can't afford).
