What happens when you promote fear and encourage citizens to report "suspicious activity"? [Link]

Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to -- a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant -- now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it's a false alarm, it's not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he's wrong, it'll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we're done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.

This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.

Former Netscape and current Ning entrepreneur Andreesen has pubished his "top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far." This caught my eye - I used to be a science fiction fan and attempted to write some of my own. I was cofounder twenty years ago of a sci fi writer's workshop in Austin, called Slugtribe. In recent weeks I've been thinking about diving in again, partly because there's a whole new slate of great sci fi writers I've been hearing about, such as Charlie Stross. David Armistead just gave me a copy of Charlie's new novel Glass House; I'm eager to get into it... and look into other writers on Andreesen's list.

I introduced Bruce Sterling, who spoke to a crowd of Solar Austin adherents at Artz Rib House in Austin Tuesday night. He talked at length about solar, design, bright green thinking, etc. He said we would know that solar had arrived when it's really boring. "Nobody gets excited about a light bulb!" A few nights before that, Halloween, to be exact, I discovered a James Lovelock interview in the latest Rolling Stone. Lovelock isn't bored.

Until recently, Lovelock thought that global warming would be just like his half-assed forest -- something the planet would correct for. Then, in 2004, Lovelock's friend Richard Betts, a researcher at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change -- England's top climate institute -- invited him to stop by and talk with the scientists there. Lovelock went from meeting to meeting, hearing the latest data about melting ice at the poles, shrinking rain forests, the carbon cycle in the oceans. "It was terrifying," he recalls. "We were shown five separate scenes of positive feedback in regional climates -- polar, glacial, boreal forest, tropical forest and oceans -- but no one seemed to be working on whole-planet consequences." Equally chilling, he says, was the tone in which the scientists talked about the changes they were witnessing, "as if they were discussing some distant planet or a model universe, instead of the place where we all live."

As Lovelock was driving home that evening, it hit him. The resiliency of the system was gone. The forgiveness had been used up. "The whole system," he decided, "is in failure mode."

I found it interesting that Lovelock is arguing that "nuclear power is the only green solution." What do you think?

Photo: Bruce Sterling at Artz Rib House, where you could cut the smell of barbecue with a knife.

As November sets in and the weatherman promises a temperature drop below the 80s (we're living i n the New Tropics here), I find myself thinking about time, which is always Running Out – and later in life, time runs faster and faster. Last night I resigned as president of EFF-Austin. a significant step considering that I've been president since 2001, when Steve Jackson and I revived the organization, then a decade old and fallen dormant. It had become a habit, not particularly effective; hopefully the remaining board members can make something of it.

People say that they don't understand how I can do as much as I do, and it's true that I'm pretty good at handling many tasks and responsibilities at once, though in heavy overcommitment phases some projects inherently suffer, and I'm learning to be more careful about commitments and drop stuff that's lower priority. This is just good time management.

The down side of well-managed overcommitment can be that you drop things that are fun, and things that you care about, because as your calendar fills to the brim, they become the low priority items. Over the last few months I've been in startup phase with a new company, and I've also been building structure for an existing company after a reorganization; now I have two companies. I started writing a weekly column for Worldchanging, and I'm active with Bootstrap and the Digital Convergence Initiative, and working on other economic development projects. I also started intense daily workouts that take over an hour.

Some things I care about aren't happening, though, especially this blog. I've heard people say that blogging is passé, blogs are dying, everybody's on Facebook now, or Twitter, instead. I occasionally tweet on Twitter, and I spend time on Facebook, and I really get it... that's where the action is. Or Second Life/World of Warcraft, if you prefer virtual worlds. Many places to go online, much to do, new stuff popping up every day.

I thought about creating a bumpersticker that says "I'd rather be blogging." Blogging really works for me, I'm not going to stop, even if a team of social scientists produce clear proof that this was just a fad... I ain't buying it.

Blogging is just one of those things I care about that I shoved onto the back burner. My early new year's resolution: I'll make time for it again, and write more and better stuff.

In just a minute....

Global Voices has created a map of countries where there's state censorship of Web 2.0 sites and technologies.
[Link]

despite the potential of web 2.0, in regions ridden with censorship and where the state holds the monopoly on information dissemination, open access to the Internet is often a tough goal to achieve considering the “authoritarian reflex” that is activated each time the repressive regimes feel threatened. Governments who already excel at muzzling the traditional media have been turning their efforts lately to the Internet, doing all they can to tighten their grip on this last refuge of communication. The rise of user-generated content is perceived as a threat by a growing number of countries who are seeking to block and control its dissemination by legal and technical means. Rarely does a week pass by without news about yet another major website being blocked by repressive states. Multimedia-sharing websites, social networking communities, mapping tools and popular web 2.0 websites are becoming a primary target of state censorship in more and more countries.

"Swarming" is behavior worth studying - it might be a fundamental pattern (like scale-free networks). I use the metaphor in talking about politics - the ida of swarming legislators as a description of effective mass grassroots activism. There's a good snipped about The Rules of the Swarm at Slashdot, pointing to an article in the NY TImes. From the Times article:

By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.

The use of abstract personas that represent users/actors is common in the field of user experience design. (Before the "persona" label was used, we talked about having actors with use cases). Andrea Wiggins at "Boxes and Arrows" suggests explains how to build a data-backed persona. Is this more effective? I really like Andrew Otwell's comment below:

One of the key things about personas, I think, is that personas aren’t primarly a research technique, but a communication tool. So if you’re “only” able to synthesize assumptions, folklore, myths, and a little data about your users into a format that anyone can read and get something out of, you’re still making communication happen better.

A surfer named Garrett Lisi has come up with a unified theory of everything that appears to some to be viable. [Link]

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

I wrote this in 1995 for FringeWare Review. Just found it on an old diskette...

Robotics has two sides -- real-world practical application and development, and scifi mythopoetic phantasy construction -- and like most real/surreal dichotomies of the Information Age, these two sides are blurred and indistinct within human consciousness, whatever that might be....

A good question in this context: What is consciousness? This is hard to answer because of the obvious blind spot inherent in self-definition (conscious process defining consciousness), you can’t see the forest for the trees or the neurons for the nerves, as the case may be. Because the “conscious” part of me is as deep as I usually go, or as I need to go in order to play the various survival games, I tend to confuse consciousness, an interface between the internal me and the external “thou,” as the totality of my being, as a real thing rather than a conveniently real-seeming process. (Then again, if consciousness defines reality, what’s real is what consciousness says is real, but that’s a digression....)

The sages tell me I’m delusional (attached to the delusion of samsara, of the world, in the Buddhist view), but I can’t quite figure out what this means. That’s because “I” am as much the noun, delusion, as the adjective, delusional. So much of what I am is filtered ouot, inaccessible to the ego-interface.

But wait. The delusional “I am” is a convenience that facilitates individual survival-stuff, so I’m not dissin’ it. The purpose of this rant is to make a point, not about ego or delusion (I’ll let the sages stew in those juices), but about robotics and AI research and the belief, often expressed in both scifi and real-world contexts, that you, or more precisely “your consciousness,” can be stored digitally. In most scifi depicitons of “consciousness in a box,” the object is immortality: you store what’s essentially you, and it “lives” forever, or until the plug’s pulled, whichever comes first (I know where I’m putting my money). In scifi, this is just another device for exploring the question of immortality, which has fascinated scifi authors and the mythmakers that preceded them as a way to come to terms with the death thing. Trying to rationalize the inescapable. But you find other optimistic folks (Hans Moravec, the Extropians) who are quite serious about the potential for immortality and who consider the consciousness-in-a-box scenario a viable means to that end.

I have a couple of problems with the scenario, myself, the first being that, even if you digitized your consciousness and stored it in a psychoelectronic device of some kind, it would not be you. Your awareness would still fold when you discorporate; the thing that’s stored might emulate your thinking or even your behavior, but it would be a simulacrum, like you but not you.

The other problem I have is best expressed in the form of a question: What are we storing? There seems to be a confusion between process and object. If consiousness is indeed only a shallow process handling the various negotiations between what we call subconscious and external reality, what is the character of the data you’re uploading and defining as you. Rules, implementations, stored memories -- consciousness is really a hash consisting of no single, store-able entity. It’s like trying to package a tornado -- what do you put in the package? Do you include all the chaotic elements of weather formation and all the applied physical rules that are manifest in the tornado’s brief life span as a process event?

The bottom line here is that you can’t really isolate a single entity “consciousness” and divorce it from its generative context.

Can you even simulate consciousness? Or intelligence, which probably has a clearer rule base than the vaguer concept of consciousness, but is still elusive. An “artificial” intelligence with sufficient density and complexity to mimic human consciousness is the very real goal of a particular thread of applied research, but so far no digital simulacrum has been constructed that “thinks” as we know thinking. The problem here resonates with the earlier argument about stored consciousness: we don’t have clarity about the definition and composition of human consciousness, so how can we copy it? It’s hard enough to copy something we know.

The mythic representations of scifi robots like Robbie or Gort or Hal9000 are like consciousness in a black box, deus-ex-machina stuff that might serve to carry a plot forward but, to those who punch code into dumb processors day after day, doesn’t ring any more true than a fairy tale or myth, which is to say that it’s more about wishes and fears than about any current or projected reality. It’s one thing to load a few rules, even with algorithms to simulate heuristic process, into the CPUs of this world, but it’s a real stretch to conceptualize silicon-based thinking or awareness.

Human and animal consciousness are products of code generations and modifications that reach ‘way back, perhaps to the inception of the universe, and are driven by an unfathomable creative force compared to which our efforts to construct artificial minds seem comparatively short-sighted and pitiful. Then again, I suppose in our efforts to mimic “the gods” we’re channeling that creative force, whatever its true origins, because it must be inherent in the coce structure of the human genome. And if that’s so, perhaps we’re destined to coevolve with our own creations, which have themselves evolved from basic practical and conceptual tools to today’s ubiquitous computing systems. This coevolution may produce cyborganic life forms which, though not created entirely by our hands, may be seen as products of an obsessive desire to be as we imagine gods to be, creatively self-perpetuating and therefore, as a race if not individually, immortal.

So far, the House hasn't done anything to grant immunity to telecoms for allowing illegal wiretaps, as requested (okay, they saw it as a mandate) by the Bush Administration. I like what Pat Leahy said: "While I appreciate the problems facing the telecommunications companies, the retroactive immunity issue to me is not about fixing blame on the companies but about holding government accountable," Leahy said in a statement. "Passing a law to whitewash the Administration’s undermining of another law would be a disservice to the American people and to the rule of law." [Link]

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published its fourth report, a synthesis of data from three previous reports.

While the United States, Saudi Arabia and China tried to change the text in order to play down the consequences of global warming, developing nations — which will bear the initial brunt of climate change — were much more forceful than at previous meetings in opposing these efforts, one scientist who was in the negotiating room said.

"I suspect that will continue,” he said. “As they feel more and more threatened by the sea and the storms they will insist that, as one of them put it, ‘We do not want this report to be warm and fuzzy when the reality is cold and risky,’ or something like that,” he said.

Link to the full Fourth Assessment Report]

At Buzz Machine, Jeff Jarvis has a good post about Beatblogging, which is a collaboration between thirteen news orgs and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net. Jay says how the reporter has a new role, more facilitation than reporting, and this is "turning reporting inside-out: Before, the reporter put himself at the center, because it was through him that reporting flowed to the press and public. Now there can be a network of people who report and advise and the reporter should be asking himself what he can do to help them do that better; the reporter stands not at the center but at the edge, which reporters must learn is where the action really is." [Link] Another good quote:

... here’s the dangerous question: What if the reporter does such a good job organizing such a good network that it runs on its own, gathering and sharing news and information and answering questions that need to be answered, so that the reporter isn’t needed anymore? Could happen, no? But I don’t think it will — if reporters learn to redefine themselves. Indeed, I think that reporters can make themselves even more valuable to wider publics and networks. The key verb in this paragraph is “organize.” In the old definition, at the bottom of that funnel, the verb was “control:” the reporter controlled access to the public and to news judgment and to news events and to the experts. But the internet removes those choke points. And though there are self-organizing systems on the internet, most of them are less self-organized than they look; that was one of Jay’s first lessons when he researched Assignment Zero: open-source projects have wranglers, organizers. The network may not find each other without the organizer; it may not identify the people who really know what they’re talking about; it may not make connections between questions and answers; it may not have someone devoted and paid to getting access and finding facts as a reporter should. The more independently these networks can operate, though, the more efficiently they can run, and the more of them we can have gathering more news and information. But they need organizers. And that means the key skill of the journalist shifts to organization.

I return to the wisdom of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when he advised media moguls at Davos not to think that they could create communities but to instead realize that these communities already exist and so they should be asking what they can contribute to help them do what they already do better. Mark’s prescription: give them elegant organization. When you think about it, that has always been the mission of journalism: organizing information so communities can organize their activities. Now we have new and better means to do that. So I think beatblogging can get journalism back to its essential mission, discarding the distractions brought on by the means of production and distribution to which the journalists once had exclusive access. The role of the journalist becomes clearer, even purer: They organize information for communities and communities of information.

Ocean pollution is creating an acid stew that could "distrupt the entire web of life," according to an article in the Independent.

Scientists have found that the seas have already absorbed about half of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity since the start of the industrial revolution, a staggering 500 billion tons of it. This has so far helped slow global warming – which would have accelerated even faster if all this pollution had stayed in the atmosphere, already causing catastrophe – but at an increasingly severe cost.

The gas dissolves in the oceans to make dilute carbonic acid, which is increasingly souring the naturally alkali seawater. This, in turn, mops up calcium carbonate, a substance normally plentiful in the seas, which corals use to build their reefs, and marine creatures use to make the protective shells they need to survive. These include many of the plankton that form the base of the food chain on which all fish and other marine animals depend.

As the waters are growing more acid this process is decreasing, with incalculable consequences for the life of the seas, and for the fisheries on which a billion of the world's people depend for protein. Every single species that uses calcium in this way, that has so far been studied, has been found to be affected. And the seas are most acid near the surface, where most of their life is concentrated.

While the rest of us were watching banging out our lives online, watching mediocre television, hanging out in bars, going to political rallies, listening to trance pop, working to put ramen on the table, watching our money and our rights leak away, etc., former insurance broker Oberto Airaudi (aka Falco), along with friends and followers, was digging into a hill near Turin, Italy, bulding the Temples of Damanhur. [Link]

A house was built on the hillside and Falco moved in with several friends who shared his vision. Using hammers and picks, they began their dig to create the temples of Damanhur - named after the ancient subterranean Egyptian temple meaning City of Light - in August 1978.

As no planning permission had been granted, they decided to share their scheme only with like-minded people.

Volunteers, who flocked from around the world, worked in four-hour shifts for the next 16 years with no formal plans other than Falco's sketches and visions, funding their scheme by setting up small businesses to serve the local community.

By 1991, several of the nine chambers were almost complete with stunning murals, mosaics, statues, secret doors and stained glass windows. But time was running out on the secret.

My pal Steve Farrer just sent me a rundown on the Austin Independent Game Conference at the end of the week (November 29-30). Here's the info:

The video game industry is an $11 billion market and this conference will give you an insight into how it works and who is doing what….

There are some great speakers lined up this year:
Keynotes

Richard Garriott, NCSoft

Research & Game Design - Spending the Time to Get It Right

Mike Wilson & Harry Miller, Gamecock Media

All the Reasons You Will Fail or Don't Even Think About It

PLUS – Game Demo night – bring your latest game and demo it to an audience of your peers…

Some of the Session Topics:

• 3D Engine Comparisons
• Best Practices in Quality Assurance
• How the State and Community Can Help You (Make Your Game)
• Pitching to Publishers
• Ads in Games
• Game Audio 101

We also have 2 new additions to the program that are very exciting:

• Project Horseshoe, the premier think-tank for the game industry will be presenting their 2007 findings for the first time at IGC! This is a rare opportunity to hear about the latest findings and recommendations from some of the best minds in the industry.
• Protecting Your IP will be presented by Epic Games' outside counsel for licensing the Unreal Engine, Zachary Bishop. Zach has negotiated license rights to this engine across the world, including within China. His experience and Insight are a terrific addition to the program.

Earlybird pricing is just $125 for the full conference program…students can register for $75!

Get all the details and register now at www.independentgameconference.com

My pal RU Sirius is actually, well, serious about politics. He's run a couple of presidential campaigns that seemed less than, but he's politically astute and clear-headed, which is probably why he didn't have a chance of winning. Knowing my interest in in open politics and my thoughts about meeting the challenge of broader, informed participation (and skepticism about "democracy"), RU asked me to work with him on the development of an Open Source Political Party. Given my frustration with the politics du jour, I had a weak moment and agreed to help (though I hardly have time to think, breathe, or blog these days). There's nothing like being overcommitted – builds character.

We must be onto something – we're getting signups from the left and the right, and conversations are breaking out at the Ning-based MondoGlobo site.

RU wrote a pretty good first-cut proposal; we'll be building from there. C'mon over and join the Party.

I just thought of a good analogy or metaphor for my thinking about the Open Source Party mentioned in my last post, as I was posting a response at MondoGlobo. Here's what I posted:

In the USA, we already have a system of representative democracy (or at republic) that was created to be a source of consensus and balance. If it seems broken at the moment, that's not because the system's any more flawed than any system we might create to replace it. Rather, it's a case of "operator error" - we the people need to be better users, and that's what I really want from an "Open Source" or tech-focused political movement - better tools, better participation.

At Mondo Globo, I just blogged some thoughts about the character of an Open Source Political Party. Here's what I said:

Openness
Many of us who are tech-focused have come to understand the power of open approaches and open architectures. Even technologies that are't strictly "Open Source" benefit from Open APIs and exposure of operating code (kind of inherent with scripting languages like Perl and PHP). When we know how something works, we know how to work with it. And we know how to tansofrm it to meet our needs.

Government should be as open and transparent as possible. There may be some rationales for closed doors, but few - for the most part, citizens should be able to see clearly how decisons are made. That's a key component of our political platform: we want to see the actual "source code" for the decisoins that affect our lives.

Collaboration
Open Source projects are often highly collaborative and can involve many stakeholders, not just manager and coders. The Open Source Party sees this as a great way to do government. (I"m partial to charrette methodology, personally.)

Emergent Leadership
In many Open Source projects, leaders can - or must - emerge. We need to acknowledge that this is true in politics, as well. Leadrs may be appointed, assigned, or elected, but there is also room for leaders to emerge socially rather than through formal selection process. Emergent leaders aren't handed authority - they earn it. They deserve respect and acknowledgement.

Extensible and Adaptable
Open Source projects and structures are agile and malleable - they can be adapted and extended as requirements changed. Governance should have this kind of flexibility, and our system of governance in the U.S. was actually built that way. We should ensure that bureaucracies and obsolete rule sets don't undermine that flexibility.

Excellent profile of Jacques Barzun at the New Yorker's web site. Interesting that Barzun, almost 100 years old, chooses to live in the sprawling multicultural Texas city, San Antonio.

Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader “carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life,” not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind. The more one learns about the course of civilization, he believed, the more one can appreciate its achievements. After a while, if you learn enough, you can argue that, say, Shaw’s mind more closely resembles Rousseau’s than Voltaire’s—and you may actually enjoy doing it. Consequently, there’s nothing Hegelian, Heideggerian, or hermeneutic about his work; no nihilistic or existential angst livens things up. Nor does he proffer any grand theory or unifying design that would explain the past in the categorical manner of Spengler’s organic cycle of regional growth and decay, or Braudel’s emphasis on broad socioeconomic “structures.” For Barzun, these systematic models of cause and effect run counter to the temper of history, which is intuitive, concrete, beholden to time and evidence:

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction

.