"There a common theme to the greatest innovations in American history. And that is that these were the things that helped people or goods or ideas travel about more freely."
James Meigs
Editor-in-Chief
Popular Mechanics
5/28/11
Beckstrom's Law: Measuring your network's value
Last week Bill Gates told a business forum in New Delhi why he quit Facebook: He was overwhelmed by the number of friend requests coming his way.
That's a perfect example of the economics behind ICANN Chief Executive Rod Beckstrom's model for how to value a network. In a keynote speech Friday at Defcon, Beckstrom, former director of the U.S. National Cybersecurity Center, laid out an economic model for valuing not only Internet networks, but also social ones.
"Beckstrom's Law" says that the value of a network is the net value of each user's transaction summed up for all users. At its core, the concept is about transactions: The value for users is the total benefits from all transactions in a network minus the cost of those transactions.
Here's an example: Say you purchase $100 worth of stuff from Amazon each month over the course of a year. You could probably buy that stuff offline for about the same price, but you might pay extra for gas to drive to the store and an opportunity cost for your time. If the brick-and-mortar commerce cost amounted to $50 a month on top of the $100 you spent on books, then the value of Amazon's network to you would be $600 a year. Subtract from that the cost of connecting to Amazon's network, perhaps $40 a month for an Internet connection and computer hardware, and you have a value of something like $120.
That's the value you get from Amazon's network. Add up that amount across all Amazon users, and you have the total value of Amazon's network.
Beckstrom's concept was likely designed to target Internet networks, but its beauty is that it can be applied to real-world social networks as well. Take networks like private golf clubs, for example. Having lots of members is good because it keeps costs down, but at some point there are too many members to get a tee time. Beckstrom's Law could be used to help determine the kind of numbers that are good for everyone, and identify the tipping point where each new member makes everybody else worse off.
Beckstrom says that network value should be a big concern for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which all want to scale to massive numbers of users. Since users are typically concerned only about how much the network is worth to them, there can be an inflection point where suddenly each new user makes life harder for existing users.
That's where Bill Gates comes in. For him, the value of Facebook's network decreased with every new user who sent a friend request his way. The idea contrasts with a popular assumption called Metcalfe's Law that values networks based on the square of the number of users.
"If Metcalf's law was true, Bill Gates would say the more people the better," says Beckstrom. "But that's not true because you've got the transactions, all those updates and notices."
It's a new way of thinking about things and could take a while to catch on. But according to Beckstrom, the model couldn't be any simpler: Value is the total benefits minus costs. You tally transactions, and you measure them.
Via
5/19/11
Social Media Accepting Activist Role
After the Internet was shut down in Egypt, Twitter and Google actively helped protesters by producing a new service, speak2tweet, that allowed people to leave voice mail messages that would be filed as updates on Twitter. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, used it as an opportunity to emphasize the positive global impact that comes with the open exchange of information.
When the Internet was back up, YouTube, working with Storyful, a social media news curation service, took the thousands of videos pouring in from the protests in Tahrir Square to help people retrieve and share the information as quickly as possible on CitizenTube, its news and politics channel.
(via)
Posted on Googles Blog re: Speak2Tweet:
"Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.
"We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
"We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.
"Update Feb 1, 12:47 PM: When possible, we're now detecting the approximate (country-level) geographic origin of each call dialing one of our speak2tweet numbers and attaching a hashtag for that country to each tweet. For example, if a call comes from Switzerland, you'll see #switzerland in the tweet, and if one comes from Egypt you'll see #egypt. For calls when we can't detect the location, we default to an #egypt hashtag."
I love that they bought a company within a week to make the idea happen.
5/18/11
Open Source Science
David Dobbs:
"The current system, they note, grew out of meeting notes and journals published by societies in Europe over three centuries ago. Back then, quarterly or monthly volumes could accommodate the flow of ideas and data from most disciplines, and the printed journal, though it required a top-heavy, expensive printing and publishing infrastructure, was the most efficient way to share those ideas.
"But now," says Jonathan Eisen, "there's this thing called the Internet. It changes not just how things can be done but how they should be done."
... To get a sense of how the current system curbs science, consider a rare case in whichresearchers attacked a big medical problem with an open-science model. In 2004, in the United States, a network of government and private researchers, including large drug companies, used open-science principles to accelerate research into Alzheimer's. The project, as Gina Kolata aptly described it in the New York Times last summer, "was an agreement ... not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding immediately available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. Before that, researchers worked separately, siloing off much of their work. Now methods and data formats were standardized. The data would immediately enter the public domain, where anyone could build on it."
An extraordinary project ensued. The U.S. National Institute on Aging contributed over $40 million, and 20 companies and two nonprofit groups kicked in another $25 million to fund the first six years. The program produced an explosion of papers on early diagnosis and helped generate more than 100 studies to test drugs or other treatments. It greatly sped and opened the flow of findings and data. According to the New York Times, the project's entire massive database had been downloaded more than 3,200 times by last summer, and the data sets containing images of brain scans was downloaded almost a million times. Everyone was so pleased with the results that they renewed the accord this year. And all because, as a researcher told Kolata, "we parked our egos and intellectual-property noses at the door."
Read the whole article
5/7/11
5/4/11
More on Complexity Science
This is consistent with the findings of IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study, where complexity emerged as the overriding challenge facing the 1500 CEOs and senior public leaders interviewed. They said that they are now operating in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex, and where incremental changes are no longer sufficient because the world is behaving in fundamentally different ways.
The study of complex systems is truly fascinating, especially those systems whose components and interrelationships are themselves quite complex, as is the case with evolutionary biology and with organizational systems, whose main components or actors are people. In such systems, the dynamic nature of the components, as well as their intricate interrelationships renders them increasingly unpredictable and accounts for theiremergent behavior.
John Sterman - professor in MIT’s Sloan School of Management and director of the Systems Dynamics Group - gave a very interesting talk: A Banquet of Consequences: Systems Thinking and Modeling for Climate Policy. The title of his talk is based on a quote by Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson: Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences. Sterman said that when he meets with business or government leaders they generally tell him that in spite of all the tools, methods, information and models we now have at our disposal, it seems that things around us are getting more difficult to understand and manage. Our own actions and decisions are not helping and perhaps they are making things worse.
Why do people - even highly educated, experienced and accomplished leaders in business and government - find dealing with dynamic, complex systems so challenging? Why is it so difficult to make sound decisions about highly complex problems? Why are we so often surprised by the unanticipated, negative (sometimes disastrously so) consequences of our actions and decisions involving such systems?
Professor Sterman has been addressing these questions in his research and in his extensive publications. As he wrote in Learning from Evidence in a Complex World:
“Complexity hinders our ability to discover the delayed and distal impacts of interventions, generating unintended “side effects.” Yet learning often fails even when strong evidence is available: common mental models lead to erroneous but self-confirming inferences, allowing harmful beliefs and behaviors to persist and undermining implementation of beneficial policies.”
He believes that unanticipated events and side effects are not features of reality in complex systems, but a result of overly simplistic, incomplete models:
“We have been trained to view our situation as the result of forces outside ourselves, forces largely unpredictable and uncontrollable. Consider the “unanticipated events” and “side effects” so often invoked to explain policy failure. Political leaders blame recession on corporate fraud or terrorism. Managers blame bankruptcy on events outside their organizations and (they want us to believe) outside their control. But there are no side effects - just effects. Those we expected or that prove beneficial we call the main effects and claim credit. Those that undercut our policies and cause harm we claim to be side effects, hoping to excuse the failure of our intervention. “Side effects” are not a feature of reality, but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short.”
We do best when dealing with simple, sequential mental models. We identify the problem, gather data, evaluate alternatives, select a solution and proceed to implement. These models work quite well in situations with short time horizons and narrow boundaries, such as trying to decide how to safely cross a busy street or (a long time ago) whether to confront or avoid a potential predator. Most of the decisions and actions in our everyday life are based on such simple models. The ability to quickly learn them is likely wired into our brains.
But, these simple models are of limited value when dealing with dynamic, complex systems, such as you find in areas from health care to financial markets to climate change. We make the wrong decisions and get in trouble when there is a large gap between the complexity of the real problems we are trying to address and our simple mental picture of the problem. “. . . Where the world is dynamic, evolving, and interconnected, we tend to make decisions using mental models that are static, narrow, and reductionist. Among the elements of dynamic complexity people find most problematic are feedback, time delays, and stocks and flows.”
With a simple, sequential model, once we make a decision and take an action, we are done. But, that does not work with complex, interconnected systems, where our actions have consequences and feed back on themselves. The world reacts to and is changed by our interventions.
“Our decisions alter the state of the world, causing changes in nature and triggering others to act, thus giving rise to a new situation, which then influences our next decisions. Like organisms, social systems contain intricate networks of feedback processes, both self-reinforcing (positive) and self-correcting (negative) loops. However, studies show that people recognize few feedbacks; rather, people usually think in short, causal chains, tend to assume each effect has a single cause, and often cease their search for explanations when the first sufficient cause is found.”
Feedback loops are easier to deal with when our actions or decisions cause a quick reaction. We can then take corrective actions to help us attain the desired state. Riding a bicycle is an obvious example. But dealing with the impact of our actions is much harder when there are time delays involved. “Most obviously, delays slow the accumulation of evidence. More problematic, the short- and long-run impacts of our policies are often different (smoking gives immediate pleasure, while lung cancer develops over decades).”
“Delays also create instability and fluctuations that confound our ability to learn. Driving a car, drinking alcohol, and building a new semiconductor plant all involve time delays between the initiation of a control action (accelerating/braking, deciding to “have another,” the decision to build) and its effects on the state of the system. As a result, decision makers often continue to intervene to correct apparent discrepancies between the desired and actual state of the system even after sufficient corrective actions have been taken to restore equilibrium. The result is overshoot and oscillation: stop-and-go traffic, drunkenness, and high-tech boom and bust cycles.”
Sterman’s seminar at the MIT Systems Thinking Conference focused on climate change policy and the widespread misunderstanding of the stocks and flows which underlie climate science.
Stocks are accumulations, - like water filling a bathtub. The difference between the inflows and outflows of a stock, govern its level at any point in time as well as its rate of accumulation. If water is pouring into (inflow) the bathtub faster than it’s draining (outflow), the tub will fill up over time and eventually spill over. If water is pouring in slower than it’s draining, the tub will eventially empty out. This is intuitively obvious to most people.
You can think of the atmosphere as a giant carbon bathtub. “It’s simple, really: As long as we pour CO2 into the atmosphere faster than nature drains it out, the planet warms. And that extra carbon takes a long time to drain out of the tub.” But in his research Sterman has found that a fundamental human cognitive limitation is impeding action on global warming. He has documented this problem in human reasoning by testing graduate students at his MIT classes. He found that “his students, though very bright and schooled in calculus, lack an intuitive grasp of a simple, crucial system: a bathtub.”
Research shows widespread misunderstanding of stocks and flows and of the process of accumulation. People often fail to grasp that any stock rises (falls) when the inflow exceeds (is less than) the outflow. “Most people assume that system inputs and outputs are correlated (e.g., the higher the federal budget deficit, the greater the national debt will be). However, stocks integrate (accumulate) their net inflows. A stock rises even as its net inflow falls, as long as the net inflow is positive: the national debt rises even as the deficit falls - debt falls only when the government runs a surplus; the number of people living with HIV continues to rise even as incidence falls - prevalence falls only when infection falls below mortality.”
“Poor understanding of accumulation has significant consequences for public health and economic welfare. Surveys show most Americans believe climate change poses serious risks, but they also believe that reductions in GHG [greenhouse gases] emissions sufficient to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations can be deferred until there is greater evidence that climate change is harmful. Federal policy makers likewise argue that it is prudent to wait and see whether climate change will cause substantial economic harm before undertaking policies to reduce emissions. Such wait-and-see policies erroneously presume that climate change can be reversed quickly should harm become evident, underestimating immense delays in the climate’s response to GHG emissions. Emissions are now about twice the rate at which natural processes remove GHGs from the atmosphere. GHG concentrations will therefore continue to rise even if emissions fall, stabilizing only when emissions equal removal.”
5/3/11
This is everything that is wrong with Branding
I'm saving this article (Brian Braiker's"How Osama's death will affect the al-Qaeda name" in Adweek) not because it is insightful, but because it is asinine. It is the pinnacle expression of everything that is wrong with the ideology of branding. I'm saving it so I can deride it at a later date in a more thought out manner.
Some highlights (or lowlights):
"To be sure, al-Qaeda is by definition a fringe group—a brand aligned with extremism and out of touch with the rest of the world. But insofar as it is a brand, to what extent does the death of its founder affect its prospects going forward?"
"Adweek asked Brad VanAuken, chief brand strategist at the Blake Project, how he would (hypothetically) consult al-Qaeda going forward. "To live on past Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda must successfully launch attacks of at least the scale and shock value of the attacks of 9/11," he wrote—reluctantly, he said—in an email. "If this does not occur, al-Qaeda will eventually lose its cache."
"Something for the surviving members of al-Qaeda to ponder over a delicious glass of Florida orange juice."
Nathaniel Hawthorn discussing the Internet
Nathaniel Hawthorne had an inkling of what was going to happen in a super connected work.
Back in 1851:
“It is a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence. Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it.”
Pentagon: Spend Less on War, More on Education
Two Special Assistants to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen say (unofficially) it’s time, strategically, to spend more on education and less on guns. We’ll hear them out. What if the United States has started a new century stuck in the last one, pouring resources into its military and short-changing what should be the real heart of its strength – that is, strength at home?
A strong economy. A strong society. The point is raised and made powerfully in a new essay from – of all places – the heart of the Pentagon.
Two top U.S. military strategic thinkers under the pen name “Mr. Y” are pushing hard for a new American vision. Less bristling with guns. More spending on education. For real prosperity and security.
Here interview here
Excerpt from paper below:
A NATIONAL STRATEGIC NARRATIVE
By Mr. Y
This Strategic Narrative is intended to frame our National policy decisions regarding investment, security, economic development, the environment, and engagement well into this century. It is built upon the premise that we must sustain our enduring national interests – prosperity and security – within a “strategic ecosystem,” at home and abroad; that in complexity and uncertainty, there are opportunities and hope, as well as challenges, risk, and threat. The primary approach this Strategic Narrative advocates to achieve sustainable prosperity and security, is through the application of credible influence and strength, the pursuit of fair competition, acknowledgement of interdependencies and converging interests, and adaptation to complex, dynamic systems – all bounded by our national values.
From Containment to Sustainment: Control to Credible Influence
For those who believe that hope is not a strategy, America must seem a strange contradiction of anachronistic values and enduring interests amidst a constantly changing global environment. America is a country conceived in liberty, founded on hope, and built upon the notion that anything is possible with enough hard work and imagination. Over time we have continued to learn and mature even as we strive to remain true to those values our founding fathers set forth in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
America’s national strategy in the second half of the last century was anchored in the belief that our global environment is a closed system to be controlled by mankind – through technology, power, and determination – to achieve security and prosperity. From that perspective, anything that challenged our national interests was perceived as a threat or a risk to be managed. For forty years our nation prospered and was kept secure through a strategy of relied on control, deterrence, and the conviction that given the choice, people the world over share our vision for a better tomorrow. America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy. The new century brought with it a reminder that the world, in fact, is a complex, open system – constantly changing. And change brings with it uncertainty. What we really failed to recognize, is that in uncertainty and change, there is opportunity and hope.
It is time for America to re-focus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow. It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability); from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence; from a defensive posture of exclusion, to a proactive posture of engagement. We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies. To grow we must accept that competitors are not necessarily adversaries, and that a winner does not demand a loser. We must regain our credibility as a leader among peers, a beacon of hope, rather than an island fortress. It is only by balancing our interests with our principles that we can truly hope to sustain our growth as a nation and to restore our credibility as a world leader.
As we focus on the opportunities within our strategic environment, however, we must also address risk and threat. It is important to recognize that developing credible influence to pursue our enduring national interests in a sustainable manner requires strength with restraint, power with patience, deterrence with detente. The economic, diplomatic, educational, military, and commercial tools through which we foster that credibility must always be tempered and hardened by the values that define us as a people.
Our Values and Enduring National Interests
America was founded on the core values and principles enshrined in our Constitution and proven through war and peace. These values have served as both our anchor and our compass, at home and abroad, for more than two centuries. Our values define our national character, and they are our source of credibility and legitimacy in everything we do. Our values provide the bounds within which we pursue our enduring national interests. When these values are no longer sustainable, we have failed as a nation, because without our values, America has no credibility. As we continue to evolve, these values are reflected in a wider global application: tolerance for all cultures, races, and religions; global opportunity for self-fulfillment; human dignity and freedom from exploitation; justice with compassion and equality under internationally recognized rule of law; sovereignty without tyranny, with assured freedom of expression; and an environment for entrepreneurial freedom and global prosperity, with access to markets, plentiful water and arable soil, clean and abundant energy, and adequate health services.
From the earliest days of the Republic, America has depended on a vibrant free market and an indomitable entrepreneurial spirit to be the engines of our prosperity. Our strength as a world leader is largely derived from the central role we play in the global economy. Since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the United States has been viewed as an anchor of global economic security and the U.S. dollar has served as an internationally recognized medium of exchange, the monetary standard. The American economy is the strongest in the world and likely to remain so well into the foreseeable future. Yet, while the dramatic acceleration of globalization over the last fifteen years has provided for the cultural, intellectual and social comingling among people on every continent, of every race, and of every ideology, it has also increased international economic interdependence and has made a narrowly domestic economic perspective an unattractive impossibility. Without growth and competition economies stagnate and wither, so sustaining America’s prosperity requires a healthy global economy. Prosperity at home and through global economic competition and development is then, one of America’s enduring national interests.
It follows logically that prosperity without security is unsustainable. Security is a state of mind, as much as it is a physical aspect of our environment. For Americans, security is very closely related to freedom, because security represents freedom from anxiety and external threat, freedom from disease and poverty, freedom from tyranny and oppression, freedom of expression but also freedom from hurtful ideologies, prejudice and violations of human rights. Security cannot be safeguarded by borders or natural barriers; freedom cannot be secured with locks or by force alone. In our complex, interdependent, and constantly changing global environment, security is not achievable for one nation or by one people alone; rather it must be recognized as a common interest among all peoples. Otherwise, security is not sustainable, and without it there can be no peace of mind. Security, then, is our other enduring national interest….
Read the full PDF.
5/2/11
To become as gods is to relinquish sovereignty over their finest creations
"The wholesale transfer of bio-logic into machines should fill us with awe. When the union of the born and the made is complete, our fabrications will learn, adapt, heal themselves, and evolve. This is a power we have hardly dreamt of yet. The aggregate capacity of millions of biological machines may someday match our own skill of innovation. Ours may always be a flashy type of creativity, but there is something to be said for a slow, wide creativity of many dim parts working ceaselessly.
"Yet as we unleash living forces into our created machines, we lose control of them. They acquire wildness and some of the surprises that the wild entails. This, then, is the dilemma all gods must accept: that they can no longer be completely sovereign over their finest creations. The world of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adaptable, and creative but, consequently, out of our control. I think that’s a great bargain."
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (1994) page 8
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