Odds and Sods

I was invited to a new event run by the Guardian yesterday, Activate09 (see the program here). It was probably the best conference I've been to in the UK to date* - TED quality with a bit more of a British "not being quite so serious about it all" air. I have made notes, but to be honest others have done a great job of covering it live (check the Twitterstream) and have already blogged copious notes, so I'm going to talk about my highlights, and specifically 9 Key Activations - things that I intend to look into in more detail:

1. Kate Lockhart - How can ICT help Failed States?

Kate was part of team sent to establish order from chaos after the Taliban was ousted from Afghanistan. It was interesting from a Collapsonomics point of view in that they found the UN, World Bank etc had no models with which to start building a state from nothing. Not only that, it seems these organisations are a bit corrupted internally - for examples with mobile phone access the UN tried to sell Ericcson, their "partner". They also found many circular problems eg security needs taxes, which needs security. Sadly, in the end warlords/criminals took over as foreign aid donors wouldn't pay for commercial infrastructure, security, and higher education to prime many of these circular pumps.

She noted that there are about 40 - 100 failed states globally, depending on your definition of "failed" and they have written a book on fixing failed states.

Can technology be used? Most failed states are offline and off-grid - what do you use ICT for? The highest impact is in:

- Market pricing
- telemedicine
- education

And how do we ensure they don't make our mistakes - she hypothesized a blend of design & market forces, and transparent accountabilty. Put budgets online!

2. Arianna Huffington - Digital Media is the only way to expose vested interests.

Arianna (of the Huffington Post) wondered how to clean up vested interests across globe and how does Tech help? Shinig light in dark places is the answer. The Sunlight Foundation was mentioned, putting government data online - but noted that data is not enough, you need to get the User Interface s right to get great data dusplay and get viral analysis tools up (she mentioned an example where a video pans around a room at a hearing and identifies each lobbyist and how much they have paid)

She feel that New Media has major role in fixing society, - eg the banks still in control despite the bailout owing to lobbying. Also she noted that "under the radar" smear campaigns get blanked on the net - Obama would not be president without the Internet for this reason, she argued. She felt new media was better able to deal with fixing the corruption of the b=vested interests as mainstream media suffer from ADD, whereas online media suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder and will carry on picking at the sores long after the mainstream have moved on. (I'm not sure - the mainstream blogosphere seems very similar to mainstream media to me).

3. Nick Bostrom - Existential risks, or how many ways Homo Sapiens can top itself.

Lest we forget, the Dinosaurs had one! Also, 75000 years ago the Toba eruption left c500 reproducing women from whom we all descend, and other homo.x's became extinct. When he looks at great human calamities (wars, massacres etc) - none are very big in scheme of things. We need a cocktail of stuff to finish us off, or a bloody great meteorite.

He then looked at the "what you have to believe" in 3 scenarios of the future Human Condition:

- Only way is up- a posthuman condition, and The Singularity?
- Disaster - we collapse and die or go back to earlier phase
- Cyclical pattern of ups and downs - but its hard to get this right without one downcycle knocking us off

No real conclusions except that you have to believe some hard stuff for the negative conditions to kill us - after all, we only need 500 wombs with a view to survival. Good news, I think....

4. Steve Papa (Endeca) - the Internet as a means of production in the hands of many and its impact of civilisation.

But he noted it could go to the fewer as vested interests will try and nudge it this way. Some points:

- Attention is scarce, (typically consumed by trivia) in abundant information worlds
- Economies of scale are different in Info Age – scale only really helps marketing and selling
- Absolute Power corrupts (Great men are nearly always bad men) - Unscrupulous pursuit of wealth eg TARP lobbying using taxpayer money to screw taxpayers, Google requires you to pay not to show competitors.

As he noted, in the First Industrial Revolution actually power/wealth got sucked up to top, US had to bust them all up in the early 1900’s. The Question for today is: Where is the Adam Smith & Teddy Roosevelt for the 21st century?


5. Matt Locke - Ch4 - - Coping with "Peak Attention"

Quoted Matt Webb saying in 2008 that we’ve hit “peak attention” – now need coping strategies. The Web is experienced as streams of content managed through a few key portals (Google, Facebook etc) – key is increasingly to get attention, which is the limited resource.

He also looked at teens organising campaigns for good eg vs knife/gun culture – “Swords into ploughshares” – “Knife into key”. Claimed that get more value outside what you control, and that "data becomes stories" (cf back to Huffington's Viral Data" - but how do you measure all this?

6. Umair Haque - Zombienomics and what ICT 2.0 can do

Umair talked about why this crash is different and why what comes next will be different too. Whats different? Everything is hyper-connected, new economics apply. (The historians among you may know that the pre-WW1 world was more connected trade-wise than at anytime until the 1980's again, so it may be deja vu......)

We are currently seeing the end of the Zombieconomy – can’t innovate or create value – its flatlined – dominated by the focus of its resources on producing cr*p (eg 6 bladed razor rather than 5). His view is that “(Linear) Strategy is Obsolete” – 20th century capitalism is not fit for 21st century world. On verge of shifting to new form of capitalism.

What wasn't clear to me (and I spoke to Umair afterwards) is how this all gets shifted given the compelling evidence that the vested interests keep their hands on the levers without fairly robust effort (Roosevelt or Lenin)

7. Tom Steinberg, “this new media revolution is not the revolution you’re looking for”

Practical thoughts - noted the difference between real and digital protestors:

"do you know the difference between the fall of the berlin wall and the twitter revolution in iran? The wall fell."

Very pertinent after the whole "turn your avatar green" thing on Twitter. Weak tell or what.

Also made a call for action, Amazon didn’t change the publishing industry by wringing its hands and filling acres of newsprint about industry travails - It just starting doing things better.

So, what actions could nudge politics and society the right way?

- the next generation of public servants could refuse to comply with current norms and conventions.
- change in computing usage which makes it harder to keep secrets (somewaqg noted the best way to do that was to give all state servants USB sticks to leave on trains ).
- some sort of law that introduces new ways of distributing and allocating power under the radar - radical social media?

8. Sugata Mitra - things to do with a hole in the wall

Amazing talk - essentially put a hole in the wall, stick a computer in it, and let kids rip with it. Amazing results:

- kids don’t need to be taught how to use computers, or even the language: “you gave us a machine that worked in English, so we taught ourselves English”
- sharing a computer was more effective for learning than having one each, as it forced discussion and learning
- This was amazing - put DNA theory on a computer in English in Indian rural village - 2 onths later, Indian kids had gone a huge wat to understanding subject and language. Came about as kids competed for status of knowing the most.

If thats what you can do with one hole in the wall......

9. Bradley Horowitz and the Darwinian Internet

Two key points:

- There is no master plan for the internet. It’s made up of billions of contributions, evolves more like an ant colony than anything else (Is Eugene Marais' "The Soul of the White Ant thus the best Internet book?)
* Ideas (or ‘memes’) are being selected for in natural selection, and great number of web 2.0 startups have not survived. Darwin did not say the fittest survived, he said the most adaptable survive.

We need to keep this in mind - start-ups are a primordial soup from which successful companies evolve. How do we enrich the soup?

Well done the Guardian team......looking forward to Activate10

*Update - MediaFutures, which I attended 2 days later, was pretty damn good too - and I spoke at that one so it must've been good too

Piece in the WSJ points to research that claims insight comes from having time off to contemplate ones navel, and other non work related pursuits:

These sudden insights, they found, are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically. "Your brain is really working quite hard before this moment of insight," says psychologist Mark Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh. "There is a lot going on behind the scenes."

At the University of London's Goldsmith College, researchers reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that brain waves heralding an insight can be detected 8 seconds before we become conscious of it.

In fact, our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we've actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests. "Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically," Dr. Kounios says. "There really are different brain mechanisms involved."

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As measured by brain activity, however, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

Liked the bits that implied that insight is not the same as analytical thought, so "structured innovation" may be a bad idea - as the article noted, insight has come about in baths, showers, orchards, while staring at insects etc etc. This leads us to wonder whether there is a market for a program on paid "unstructured" innovation, involving "structured unstructured" activities, and "innovation via water" etc.

Anyway, gotta go - "Natural Creativity" starts in the apple orchard in 10 minutes....

Claims of the Collapse of the Internet owing to Michael Jackson's death were wildly exaggerated (see clamp-on fest here). Unlike his death, unfortunately. RIP, MJ. (Great Obit piece from Steve Lawson over here)

Yes, there were traffic peaks, but it got ridiculous....

I recall Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson at SXSW and asking how come a book extolling the virtues of selling things Free was not itself going to be free (see here for some squirming moments). Now it appears that the book has also used that other great foundation of the Free movement, Copying - ie grabbing other people's stuff without necessarily paying for it (or in this case, it would appear, acknowledging Wikipedia CC). The Virginia Quarterly Review:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.

The article goes on to show a whole lot of sectons of text. There is nothing new here of course - for your enjoyment I have put up the Tom Lehrer song "Lobachevsky" which tells you the secret of success in (academic) mathematics:

"Plagiarise, Plagiarise, Plagiarise - only always to call it please Research"

There is an apology of sorts from Mr Anderson of the "publishing software ate my links" variety at the end of the article. The comments to the post make interesting reading by the way.

Do as I say, not as I do - by their deeds shall ye know them. I wonder who will be first to digitise the book and put it online for free*, in this best of all possible worlds

* Young @badgergravling tells me 'tis Chris Anderson himself who will do this, see here. Guy extracted a promise from him to do somesuch at SXSW, and to Chris's credit he has.

Gracious me - no sooner do I read an article in the WSJ today that Google is having to change its processes to ensure promising new ideas are not strangled by the GoogleOcracy (or go elsewhere), and to stem the talent heading for the door as the share price kicker ebbs (many were underwater till their options were repriced), than I read that Kevin Marks, the best known Google Open Social Media blogger is also off to pastures anew. Where to next?

I'll still be working on web standards through the groups above, the Open Web Foundation, the Open Rights Group, and more. Professionally, I'll be coding, writing and speaking on the social web via several new projects.

Best of Luck, Kevin.....its unclear exactly what the to-ing and fro-ings in this situation are, but it highlights the issues the WSJ mentioned. What do you do when you are no longer fast growth, high stock appreciation, or even cool, and you are in the middle of an entire ecosystem that essentially funds new companies to make their employees very rich if they succeed. Why would anyone stay at a corporate?

I recall years ago researching what pre dotcom geeks did - they worked at R&D labs - and in New England / New York / New Jersey there was rampant competition for people. Cable Labs set up in Denver, and essentially replaced competitive options with lifestyle benefits. I understand Microsoft apparently benefits from being in Redmond.

Google to Denver?

"Banksy has pulled off his most daring stunt yet by staging his biggest-ever British exhibition in complete secrecy", at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. (ht Mail Online)

There was this fantastic article on the Green Economics of SUVs in the New York Times of all places:

The argument is that the saving in fuel from 14 to 24 MPG (from a big SUV to a smaller one) is a better saving than from 24 to 46 MPG (from small SUV to Prius), and thus one should exchange one's Hummer for a new Toyota RAV4, not a Toyota Pious.

Actually, no. In fact, upgrading the inefficient S.U.V. to a more efficient one would save a lot more fuel — 372 gallons per year — than the 250 gallons saved from the switch from an efficient S.U.V. to the most fuel-efficient car on the market.

Why does 10 m.p.g. matter more than 22? The reason is that the relationship between m.p.g and fuel savings is not linear but curvilinear. Ten m.p.g. at the bottom of the range matters a lot more than 22 m.p.g. higher up.

And apparently:

This is a hard concept for us to get our brains around. Richard B. Larrick and Jack B. Soll, reporting in Science (gated) found that only 1 percent of college students studied correctly perceived that an improvement from 14 to 24 m.p.g. saves considerably more fuel than an improvement from 24 to 46.

That only 1% of college students got it right tells me more about the sort of kids they let into college these days, and is in my view indicative of the underlying problem in that (i) only 1% are capable of doing high school maths and (ii) less than 1% are studying Maths, Science or Engineering. (If its the M,S,E lot that got it wrong lord help us.....). But hey, if everyone is studying New Age subjects, Finance or Economics who wants numbers that add up, the taxpayer bails you all out anyway, right?

So one is somewaht resigned to it when he says:

The trick is one that even fourth-graders can master: invert the fraction. Let’s consider not miles per gallon but gallons per mile (or, to make the numbers prettier, gallons per hundred miles). By this metric, we get an unclouded picture: the Prius uses 2.17 gallons per hundred miles, the RAV4 uses 4.17, and the Range Rover uses 7.14.

Good heavens - that means to go 100 miles there is a 2 gallon difference between Pious and RAV4, but a 3 gallon difference between RAV4 and monster SUV. Who woulda thunk it.

Anyway, his thesis is that one should therefore substitute one's Hummer for a RAV4, not one's RAV 4 for a Pious to be having the biggest impact. Can you see the problem in his argument?

Aha, I hear you say - why not just substitute your Hummer straight for a Pious and then get all that fuel saving benefit and be truly Green and Pious.

Buzzzzz. Wrong!!!!!

Wrong?

Yup, wrong - because the BIG EQUATION here is Total Lifetime Energy Usage, and the Hummer is already built - its called a Sunk Cost, I've already raped the planet for it. However, if I buy a new RAV4 or a Pious I have to rape the planet again for all the materials, labour, energy etc to build the new car.

And guess what - the energy absorbed in building that new car will far outweigh the energy absorbed in the difference in fuel consumption for the 100,000 miles or so I will drive.

Allow me to calculate this - thats roughly 5,000 gallons of fuel - $ 12,500 at $1.50 a gallon - difference between Hummer and Pious over a lifetime.

Now, the cost of a car can pretty much be thought of as the sum of its energy inputs, so a Pious at c $24,000 (margins on smaller cars are wafer thin, that's mostly real costs) is about double the $12,500 figure.

So, by buying that new Pious rather than keeping the existing Hummer you have just burnt nearly double the amount of energy as you would in driving Ol' Gas Guzzler another 100,000 miles.

Now if you were to buy a Second Hand Pious, then that would be fine. But hey, you may as well buy a second hand car you actually like driving, as the marginal difference is far lower than buying a new car

Anyway, for your enjoyment I have put up the YouTube vid of Tom Lehrer's "New Maths" as done by RonfarZ3

Here endeth the lesson.

I was listening to the radio this morning when I heard one Member of Parliament, Nadine Dorries, saying that the atmosphere in Parliament was so bad that a suicide was feared. (A later article in the same program pointed out that the public at large would be fairly happy with all the MPs heads' on poles, by the way).

Anyway, they mentioned that Ms Dorries had said this in her "Internet blog" - and that seemed interesting, to see what a Blogging MP may say. So off I trotted to her blog.....

Well!

I think she may have uncovered a dastardly plot as bad as Guy Fawkes attempt to blow up Parliament. Yes, the Torygraph newspaper is deliberately setting out to destabilise Her Majesty's Government! And this has all been deliberately timed to coincide with the European Election, and by casting aspersions on our Honourable Members, a Swing to the Right can be engineered. Sez Ms Dorries:

Parliament is in chaos. The public are angry. The Telegraph has upped its circulation.
There are 650 members of Parliament. In any walk of life, in whatever profession, you will find people who are dishonest. It will always be thus as long as we are all human!

The Telegraph are uncovering a few cases of fraud, but not enough, so they are more than slightly embellishing some of the stories. I write as a case in point.

Enter the Barclay brothers, the billionaire owners of The Daily Telegraph.
Rumour is that they are fiercely Euro sceptic and do not feel that either of the main parties are Euro sceptic enough. They have set upon a deliberate course to destabilise Parliament, with the hope that the winners will be UKIP and BNP.

A quick online check of the Barclay brothers and their antics on the Island of Sark is enough to give this part of the rumour credence.

Another rumour is that the disc was never acquired and sold by an amateur, but it was in fact a long term undercover operation run by the Telegraph for some considerable time, carefully planned and executed; and that the stories of the naive disc nabber ringing the news desk in an attempt to sell the stolen information are entirely the work of gossip and fiction.

These rumours do have some credibility given that this has all erupted during the European Election Campaign and turn out is expected to be high with protest votes, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, or should I say the Barclay brothers.

So there we are - of course, it would have helped her argument somewhat if our MP's had not been caught with their snouts in the trough (Swine Flue), and had not been trying hard to prevent the information about it all coming out. But let us assume there is honour among honourable members as well as thieves, and that even in venality there is some veritas:

Ms Dorries notes that not only is there this devilish plot, but the public are being played like puppets:

...the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.

His very poignant words to me were “if any of this conjecture is true, Parliament will become full of racists, fantasists, and has-been celebrities. We will be rendered impotent and may never again regain the authority to withstand the pressure, opinion and whims of the overtly wealthy.”

I must admit to sharing the same concern about a horde of has-been slebs now thinking of running as MPs, but its hard to argue that the present shower are any better. And the point about resisting the overtly wealthy is interestiung, but given the feathering of nests (and duckponds) the current process clearly hasn't worked either.

Still, next time the Big Media come out and attack bloggers about their lack of valuable journalism, we can point to this to show that a dire national plot to destabilise the Government was uncovered in the blogs first.

Fellow Londonblogger James Governor masochistically challenged me to shoot down this article (as I have a reputation of being grumpy with fuzzy Greenscams), and I have rather sadistically therefore decided to praise it instead

Sez James:

I was thinking about the term business to consumer (B2C) the other day. I am not a huge fan of the term “consumer” in the digital era- we’re all content creators after all. But I just realised that my notion that we are all producers is even more true in terms of carbon footprint. Whether individuals or businesses, free agents or organisations, we are all net producers of carbon dioxide.

Aha- I thought to myself, “neat insight”, and so to twitter, where I said:

“when it comes to carbon emissions none of us are consumers. we are all producers.”

Quick as a flash Digital Signals came back and said:

“The fern on our bathroom window sill would beg to differ!”

The real insight therefore is that Business To Consumer might have an entirely different meaning this century. Businesses need to create closed loops systems with plants, the only reliable carbon consumers. Of course such an idea might sound bonkers - but why shouldn’t a polluter directly pay to halt deforestation in, say, Brazil? Lets save the planet’s lungs while we still can, before the only carbon consumers we can use are ugly crop-based monocultures.

He then challenges us all:

So what might your Sustainable Business To Consumer strategy be?

My immediate thought was that we need a call to arms personally, viz:

"A POT PLANT FOR EVERY PC"

Yup, for every PC you own, you need to offset it with a pot plant. In fact, if you put it and the PC in a little greenhosue you could have a year-round tropical climate all of your own and grow tropical fruit year all year and not jet them in (in fact, if I put my work servers together I reckon I could grow those huge South African pawpaws - 18" long and counting - all year round).

Laptop owner need to offset it by leaving a potplant at home, or maybe carry one around as a hat or something. iPhone owners can just not wash more than once a week..... (oh - they don't )

And this made me think some more - imagine the Hanging Gardens of Google - if the Google datacentre got rid of its low grade heat by being in the middle of a monster Biome like a sort of Expanded Eden Project (see photo above) so that the datacentres grew tropical fruit in the Canadian or whatever tundra and thus covered not only direct CO2 emissions but reduced air transport of pawpaws, big net win.

And it gives them an alternative revenue stream to boot. Amazon too - Dr Werner Vogels could be bouncing around the world talking about biome microclimate clouds and pawpaws, as well as system clouds. He could even hand out some pawpaw at his lectures

Now excuse me while I go and calculate what size and type of tropical fruit my PC MicroBiome has to support.....

This video is on YouTube, and says eloquently what I moaned about a week ago, ie the totally unrelated epidemics of swine flu in the media vs on the ground.

During the last 13 days, up to May 6, WHO has confirmed that 25 countries are affected by the Swine flu and 31 persons have died from Swine flu. WHO data indicates that about 60 000 persons died from TB during the same period. By a rough comparison with the number of news reports found by Google news search, Hans Rosling calculates a News/Death ratio and issue an alert for a media hype on Swine flu and a neglect of tuberculosis.

It makes me sad to realise my diatribes against media hype of swine flu count as increasing its news to death ratio.