Maschmeyer

Buried under an avalanche of wonder

2012-02-02T11:54:00.001-05:00

"Whenever we encounter some truly novel phenomenon, one that reinvents the margins of our world, an old hankering is awakened. At such moments we are like explorers of an unknown dimension: everything appears fresh to our eyes, each idea seems unprecedented, virgin, strange. In the face of this newly made universe, we may be tempted to exclaim, 'It cannot be!,' yet our protests soon lie buried under an avalanche of wonder."
- Engraved plate at The Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A.

How to Write Good: 23 Not Really Rules on Making Words into Sentences into Paragraphs

2012-01-31T17:57:00.000-05:00

BERG: Artificial Empathy and The Increasingly Ambiguous "U" in "UI"

2012-01-07T11:40:00.002-05:00

This is a version of a talk BERG gave at the “In Progress” event, staged by ‘It’s Nice That‘ magazine. See the comments thread on their site. Provocative and worth a read.

BEGIN...

Let me introduce a few characters…

This is my frying pan. I bought it in Helsinki. It’s very good at making omelettes.

This is Sukie. She’s a pot-plant that we adopted from our friend Heather’s ‘Wayward Plants‘ project, at the Radical Nature exhibit at the Barbican (where “In Progress” is!)

This is a puppy – we’ll call him ‘Bruno’.

I have no idea if that’s his name, but it’s from our friend Matt Cottam’s “Dogs I Meet” flickr set, and Matt’s dog is called Bruno – so it seemed fitting.

And finally, this is Siri – a bot.

And, I’m Matt Jones – a designer and one of the principals at BERG, a design and invention studio.

There are currently 13 of us – half-technologists, half-designers, sharing a room in East London where we invent products for ourselves and for other people – generally large technology and media companies.

This is Availabot, one of the first products that we designed – it’s a small connected product that represents your online status physically…

But I’m going to talk today about the near-future of connected products.

And it is a near-future, not far from the present.

In fact, one of our favourite quotes about the future is from William Burroughs: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out…“

A place we like to ‘cut into the present’ is the Argos catalogue! Matt Webb’s talked about this before.

It’s really where you see Moore’s Law hit the high-street.

Whether it’s toys, kitchen gear or sports equipment – it’s getting hard to find consumer goods that don’t have software inside them.

This is near-future where the things around us start to display behaviour – acquiring motive and agency as they act and react to the context around them according to the software they have inside them, and increasingly the information they get from (and publish back to) the network.

In this near-future, it’s very hard to identify the ‘U’ in UI’ – that is, the User in User-Interface. It’s not so clear anymore what these things are. Tools… or something more.

Of course, I choose to illustrate this slightly-nuanced point with a video of kittens riding a Roomba that Matt Webb found, so you might not be convinced.

However, this brings us back to our new friends, the Bots.

By bot – I guess I mean a piece of software that displays a behaviour, that has motive and agency.

Let me show a clip about Siri, and how having bots in our lives might affect us [Contains Strong Language!]

Perhaps, like me – you have more sympathy for the non-human in that clip…

But how about some other visions of what it might be like to have non-human companions in our lives? For instance, the ‘daemons’ of Phillip Pullman’s ‘Dark Materials‘ trilogy. They are you, but not you – able to reveal things about you and reveal things to you. Able to interact naturally with you and each other.

Creatures we’ve made that play and explore the world don’t seem that far-fetched anymore.This is a clip of work on juggling robot quadcopters by ETH Zurich.

Which brings me back to my earlier thought – that it’s hard to see where the User in User-Interfaces might be. User-Centred Design has been the accepted wisdom for decades in interaction design.

I like this quote that my friend Karsten introduced me to, by Prof Bertrand Meyer (coincidentally at professor at ETH) that might offer an alternative view…

A more fruitful stance for interaction design in this new landscape might be that offered byActor-Network Theory?

I like this snippet from a formulation of ANT based on work by Geoff Walsham et al.

“Creating a body of allies, human and non-human…”

Which brings me back to this thing…

Which is pretty unequivocally a tool. No motive, no agency. The behaviour is that of it’s evident, material properties.

Domestic pets, by contrast, are chock-full of behaviour, motive, agency. We have a model of what they want, and how they behave in certain contexts – as they do of us, we think.

We’ll never know, truly of course.

They can surprise us.

That’s part of why we love them.

But what about these things?

Even though we might give them names, and have an idea of their ‘motive’ and behaviour, they have little or no direct agency. They move around by getting us to move them around, by thriving or wilting…

And – this occurred to me while doing this talk – what are houseplants for?

Let’s leave that one hanging for a while…

And come back to design – or more specifically – some of the impulses beneath it. To make things, and to make sense of things. This is one of my favourite quotes about that. I found it in an exhibition explaining the engineering design of the Sydney Opera House.

Making models to understand is what we do as we design.

And, as we design for slightly-unpredictable, non-human-centred near-futures we need to make more of them, and share them so we can play with them, spin them round, pick them apart and talk about what we want them to be – together.

I’ll just quickly mention some of the things we talk about a lot in our work. The things we think are important in the models, and designs we make for connected products. The first one is legibility. That the product or service presents a readable, evident model of how it works to the world on it’s surface. That there is legible feedback, and you can quickly construct a theory how it works through that feedback.

One of the least useful notions you come up against, particularly in technology companies, is the stated ambition that the use of products and services should be ‘seamless experiences’.

Matthew Chalmers has stated (after Mark Weiser, one of the founding figures of ‘ubicomp’) that we need to design “seamful systems, with beautiful seams”

Beautiful seams attract us to the legible surfaces of a thing, and allow our imagination in – so that we start to build a model in our minds (and appreciate the craft at work, the values of the thing, the values of those that made it, and how we might adapt it to our values – but that’s another topic)

Finally – this guy – who pops up a lot on whiteboards in the studio, or when we’re working with clients.

B.A.S.A.A.P. is a bit of an internal manifesto at BERG, and stands for Be As Smart As A Puppy – and it’s something I’ve written about at length before.

It stems from something robotics and AI expert Rodney Brooks said… that if we put the fifty smartest people in a room for fifty years, we’d be luck if we make AIs as smart as a puppy.

We see this an opportunity rather than a problem!

We’ve made our goal to look to other models of intelligence and emotional response in products and services than emulating what we’d expect from humans.

Which is what this talk is about. Sort-of.

But before we move on, a quick example of how we express these three values in our work.

“Text Camera” is a very quick sketch of something that we think illustrates legibility, seamful-ness and BASAAP neatly.

Text Camera is about making the inputs and inferences the phone sees around it to ask a series of friendly questions that help to make clearer what it can sense and interpret. It kind of reports back on what it sees in text, rather through a video feed.

Let me explain one of the things it can do as an example. Your smartphone camera has a bunch of software to interpret the light it’s seeing around you – in order to adjust the exposure automatically.

So, we look to that and see if it’s reporting ‘tungsten light’ for instance, and can infer from that whether to ask the question “Am I indoors?”.

Through the dialog we feel the seams – the capabilities and affordances of the smartphone, and start to make a model of what it can do.

So next, I want to talk a little about a story you might be familiar with – that of…

I hope that last line doesn’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet…

But – over the last year I’ve been talking with lot to people about a short scene in the original 1977 Star Wars movie ‘A New Hope’ – where Luke and his Uncle Owen are attempting to buy some droids from the Jawas that have pulled up outside their farmstead.

I’ve become a little obsessed with this sequence – where the droids are presented like… Appliances? Livestock?

Or more troublingly, slaves?

Luke and Uncle Owen relate to them as all three – at the same time addressing them directly, aggressively and passive-aggressively. It’s such a rich mix of ways that ‘human and non-human actors’ might communicate.

Odd, and perhaps the most interesting slice of ‘science-fiction’ in what otherwise is squarely a fantasy film.

Of course Artoo and Threepio are really just…

Men in tin-suits, but our suspension of belief is powerful! Which brings me to the next thing we should quickly throw into the mix of the near-future…

This is the pedal of my Brompton bike. It’s also a yapping dog (to me at least)

Our brains are hard-wired to see faces, it’s part of a phenomena called ‘Pareidolia‘

It’s something we’ve talked about before on the BERGblog, particularly in connection with Schoolscope. I started a group on flickr called “Hello Little Fella” to catalogue my pareidolic-excesses (other facespotting groups are available).

This little fella is probably my favourite.

He’s a little bit ill, and has a temperature.

Anyway.

The reason for this particular digression is to point out that one of the prime materials we work with as interaction designers is human perception. We try to design things that work to take advantage of its particular capabilities and peculiarities.

I’m not sure if anyone here remembers the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot?

The Newton was an incredible technological attainment for it’s time – recognising the user’s handwriting. The Palm instead forced us to learn a new type of writing (“Graffiti“).

We’re generally faster learners than our technology, as long as we are given something that can be easily approached and mastered. We’re more plastic and malleable – what we do changes our brains – so the ‘wily’ technology (and it’s designers) will sieze upon this and use it…

All of which leaves me wondering whether we are working towards Artificial Empathy, rather than Artificial Intelligence in the things we are designing…

If you’ve seen this video of ‘Big Dog’, an all-terrain robot by Boston Dynamics – and you’re anything like me – then you flinch when it’s tester kicks it.

To quote from our ‘Artificial Empathy’ post:

Big Dog’s movements and reactions – it’s behaviour in response to being kicked by one of it’s human testers (about 36 seconds into the video above) is not expressed in a designed face, or with sad ‘Dreamworks’ eyebrows – but in pure reaction – which uncannily resembles the evasion and unsteadiness of a just-abused animal.

Of course, before we get too carried away by artificial empathy, we shouldn’t forget what Big Dog is primarily designed for, and funded by…

Anyway – coming back to ‘wily’ tactics, here’s the often-referenced ‘Uncanny Valley’ diagram, showing the relationship between ever-more-realistic simulations of life, particularly humans and our ‘familiarity’ with them.

Basically, as we get ever closer to trying to create lifelike-simulations of humans, they start to creep us out.

It can perhaps be most neatly summed up as our reaction to things like the creepy, mocapped synthespians in the movie Polar Express…

The ‘wily’ tactic then would be to stay far away from the valley – aim to make technology behave with empathic qualities that aren’t human at all, and let us fill in the gaps as we do so well.

Which, brings us back to BASAAP, which as Rodney Brooks pointed out – is still really tough.

Bruno’s wild ancestors started to brute-force the problem of creating artificial empathy and a working companion-species relationship with humans through the long, complex process of domestication and selective-breeding…

…from that point the first time these kind of eyes were made towards scraps of meat held at the end of a campfire somewhere between 12-30,000 years ago…

Some robot designers have opted to stay on the non-human side of the uncanny valley, notably perhaps Sony with AIBO.

Here’s an interesting study from 2003 that hints a little at what the effects of designing for ‘artificial empathy’ might be.

We’re good at holding conflicting models of things in our heads at the same time it seems. That AIBO is a technology, but that it also has ‘an inner life’.

Take a look at this blog, where an AIBO owner posts it’s favourite places, and laments:

“[he] almost never – well, make it never – leaves his station these days. It’s not for lack on interest – he still is in front of me at the office – but for want of preservation. You know, if he breaks a leg come a day or a year, will Sony still be there to fix him up?”

(One questioner after my talk asked: “What did the 25% of people who didn’t think AIBO was a technological gadget report it to be?” – Good question!)

Some recommendations of things to look at around this area: the work of Donna Haraway, esp. The Companion Species Manifesto.

Also, the work of Cynthia Brezeal, Heather Knight and Kacie Kinzer – and the ongoingLIREC research project that our friend Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is working with, that’s looking to studies of canine behaviour and companionship to influence the design of bots and robots.

In science-fiction there’s a long, long list that could go here – but for now I’ll just point to the most-affecting recent thing I’ve read in the area, Ted Chiang’s novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” – which I took as my title for a talk partly on this subject at UX London earlier in the year.

In our own recent work I’d pick out Suwappu, a collaboration with Dentsu London as something where we’re looking to animate, literally, toys with an inner life through a computer-vision application that recognises each character and overlays dialogue and environments around them.

I wonder how this type of technology might develop hand-in-hand with storytelling to engage and delight – while leaving room for the imagination and empathy that we so easily project on things, especially when we are young.

Finally, I want to move away from the companion animal as a model, back to these things…

I said we’d come back to this! Have you ever thought about why we have pot plants? What we have them in the corners of our lives? How did they get there? What are they up to?!?

(Seriously – I haven’t managed yet to find research or a cultural history of how pot-plants became part of our home life. There are obvious routes through farming, gardening and cooking – but what about ornamental plants? If anyone reading this wants to point me at some they’d recommend in the comments to this post, I’d be most grateful!)

Take a look at this – one of the favourite finds of the studio in 2011 – Sticky Light.

It is very beautifully simple. It displays motive and behaviour. We find it fascinating and playful. Of course, part of it’s charm is that it can move around of its own volition – it has agency.

Pot-plants have motives (stay alive, reproduce) and behaviour (grow towards the light, shrivel when not watered) but they don’t have much agency. They rely on us to move them into the light, to water them.

Some recent projects have looked to augment domestic plants with some agency –Botanicalls by Kati London, Kate Hartman, Rebecca Bray and Rob Faludi equips a plant not only with a network connection, but a twitter account! Activated by sensors it can report to you (and its followers) whether it is getting enough water. Some voice, some agency.

(I didn’t have time to mention it in the talk, but I’d also point to James Chamber’s evolution of the idea with his ‘Has Needs’ project, where an abused potplant not only has a network connection, but the means to advertise for a new owner on freecycle…)

Here’s my botanical, which I chose to call Robert Plant…

So, much simpler systems that people or pets can find places in our lives as companions. Legible motives, limited behaviours and agency can illicit response, empathy and engagement from us.

We think this is rich territory for design as the things around us start to acquire means of context-awareness, computation and connectivity.

As we move from making inert tools – that we are unequivocally the users of – to companions, with behaviours that animate them – we wonder whether we should go straight from this…

…to this…

Namely, straight from things with predictable and legible properties and affordances, to things that try and have a peer-relationship, speaking with human voice and making great technological leaps to relate to us in that way, but perhaps with a danger of entering the uncanny valley.

What if there’s an interesting space to design somewhere in-between?

This in part is the inspiration behind some of the thinking in our new platform Berg Cloud, and its first product – Little Printer.

We like to think of Little Printer as something of a ‘Cloud Companion Species’ that mediates the internet and the domestic, that speaks with your smartphone, and digests the web into delightful little chunks that it dispenses when you want.

Little Printer is the beginning of our explorations into these cloud-companions, and BERG Cloud is the means we’re creating to explore them.

Ultimately we’re interested in the potential for new forms of companion species that extend us. A favourite project for us is Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotic Dogs” – a fantastic example of legibility, seamful-ness and BASAAP.

Natalie went to communities near reclaimed-land that might still have harmful toxins present, and taught workshops where cheap (remember Argos?) robot dogs that could be bought for $30 or so where opened up and hacked to accommodate new sensors.

They were reprogrammed to seek the chemical traces associated with lingering toxins. Once release by the communities they ‘sniff’ them out, waddling towards the highest concentrations – an immediate tangible and legible visualisation of problem areas.

Perhaps most important was that the communities themselves were the ones taught to open the toys up, repurpose their motives and behaviour – giving them the agency over the technology and evidence they could build themselves.

In the coming world of bots – whether companions or not, we have to attempt to maintain this sort of open literacy. And it is partly the designer’s role to increase its legibility. Not only to beguile and create empathy – but to allow a dialogue.

As Kevin Slavin said about the world of algorithms growing around us – “We can write it but we can’t read it”

We need to engage with the complexity and make it open up to us.

To make evident, seamful surfaces through which we can engage with puppy-smart things.

As our friend Chris Heathcote has put so well:

Thanks for inviting me, and for your attention today.

FOOTNOTE: Auger & Loizeau’s Domestic Robots.

I didn’t get the chance to reference the work of James Auger & Jimmy Loizeau in the talk, but their “Carnivorous Robots” project deserves study.

From the project website:

“For a robot to comfortably migrate into our homes, appearance is critical. We applied the concept of adaptation to move beyond the functional forms employed in laboratories and the stereotypical fictional forms often applied to robots. In effect creating a clean slate for designing robot form, then looking to the contemporary domestic landscape and the related areas of fashion and trends for inspiration. The result is that on the surface the CDER series more resemble items of contemporary furniture than traditional robots. This is intended to facilitate a seamless transition into the home through aesthetic adaptation, there are however, subtle anomalies or alien features that are intended to draw the viewer in and encourage further investigation into the object.”

And on robots performing as “Companion Species”

”In the home there are several established object categories each in some way justifying the products presence through the benefit or comfort they bring to the occupant, these include: utility; ornament; companionship; entertainment and combinations of the above, for example, pets can be entertaining and chairs can be ornamental. The simplest route for robots to enter the home would be to follow one of these existing paths but by necessity of definition, offering something above and beyond the products currently occupying those roles.”

James Auger is currently completing his Phd at the RCA on ‘Domestication of Robotics’ and I can’t wait to read it.

The Mass Production Model? Your Opinion Wanted

2012-01-04T23:43:00.000-05:00

We've all heard someone say "we are moving towards a post-industrial model." By that they mean we're moving towards wirearchies, peer-to-peer models, mass collaboration models, networks, meshes, etc. Sure. Got it. They even have models to show what this new post-industrial production model looks like.

But what did that original industrial model look like? The factory / mass production model of controlled labor? Sure we all know the values that underly it: hierarchies, replication, control, division, homogeneity, linearity, streamlining, speed, efficiency. But what were its fundamental components? Just as a business model defines the fundamental components of what a business needs to establish itself and grow, the model of mass production should explicate the same thing. You'd think that'd be out there somewhere. And I'm sure it is. I just haven't found it. So I took a stab at it. Below is a draft of what I think that model of mass production would be. I'd appreciate your feedback and edits.

(click to enlarge)

1. Material / Capital Input

Because the mass production model is all about turning trees into toothpicks, there has to be raw material (as in natural resources or data) to transform and capital to pay for the production costs.

2. Output Schema

A blueprint of what is to be made must be determined prior to the coordination and commencement of labor and production.

3. Centralized Planning / Coordination

There is the expectation that those higher up the corporate food chain have the most experience and knowledge and know best in terms of producing products against that output schema. They plan what will happen to the material/capital input, how it will happen (coordination), and how long it will take to happen.

4. Division of Labor

A laborer that is focused on specific, narrowly defined tasks in the production process, so Adam smith said, becomes specialized and more efficient at that task. This improves efficiency throughout the production line. Therefore leadership divides the components of the schema, assigns specific people/divisions/outsourced companies to those tasks, and gives each of them goals/objectives.

5. Monitor (process / quality)

Because the centralized planners can't be on the factory floor, there must be a monitoring function installed so that information about the process is fed up the chain to those who make the decisions. Monitoring can be a person, as in a floor manager, it can be punch cards, it can be warehouse inventory, etc. Basically, anything that captures data and flows it to the centralized decision makers who want to fine tune the mass production process. Their goal is to measure the actual output and process against the idealized. If the two don't match up, the leadership tinkers with the output/process until it aligns with the idealized.

6. Assembler

Because the product is being produced in "pieces," it must be assembled before it can be shipped and sold. Therefore, any mass production process must have an "assembler." "Assembler" simply means the means by which something is made whole. For instance, book publishers have a assembler machine. It sends the text, paper, glue, and cover art to a printing apparatus that pieces it all together. In the case of a car factory, it has an assembler process. The car, in a nutshell, moves on a conveyor belt—an "assembly line"—while laborers add components to the car. When the car reaches then end of the line, it should be "completed."

7. Distribution Channel

You can't have all those products sit in a warehouse. Gotta get them to customers.

Anyway, that's a fast and dirty take on the mass production model. Please critique and help me make it better. What am I missing? What is nebulous? Better yet, if you know any academic or respected business mind whose made a more accurate model, let me know. I'll just use that.

The End of HIstory: It's all been done before

2012-01-02T14:25:00.001-05:00

We're just riding the pendulum back and forth. It's always fun/funny to catch these:

AT&T ad from 2011

FedEx ad from 2007

Manuel DeLanda: Immanent Patterns of Becoming

2011-12-29T20:10:00.002-05:00

Great lecture series from Manuel on Youtube. He lectures about the relationship between immanence and transcendence, focusing primarily on the materialist world of Gilles Deleuze concept of immanence during a seminar called Gilles Deleuze and Science" at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Manuel De Landa discussed the works of Henri Poinacaré and Réne Thom in relation to the topological thinking of Gilles Deleuze, specifically on differential calculus using topological thinking.

Overview: A Case Study of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory

2011-12-27T13:31:00.001-05:00

Author(s) / Editor(s)

Stark, Bennett

This paper explains why self-adaptation does not explain the global political system at this time and postulate what conditions must be met if it did. Self-adaptation, if it were achieved and maintained in some proximate form, would constitute a phase transition.

Publication Reference

Published in/by: University of Ljubjlana & Wisdom
Date: July 2009
Web Location

Findings

1. The strong nation system is one in which no governance capacity exists to impose an
international rule of law.

2. The costs of failure in designing adaptive institutions may be irreversible.

3. The passing of our aggregate system into the complexity phase is a profound
evolutionary event with profound consequences. Complexity has generated the
likelihood that if current practices continue, multiple failures of our tightly coupled
political, economic, social systems could take place in this century.

The capacity of biological and ecological systems for self-adaptation or self-organization has been a significant theme in the current life-science academic literature. The article is a case study of complex adaptive systems theory, focusing upon the global political system as a part of a biophysical aggregate system in which we are embedded. This paper explains why self-adaptation does not explain the global political system at this time and postulate what conditions must be met if it did. Self-adaptation, if it were achieved and maintained in some proximate form, would constitute a phase transition.

Our species’ cumulative actions on the environment (including those generating global warming, environmental pollution, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss) are the dominant source of the increasing density of causal connectedness between human and natural systems. Given the dramatic rise in the world’s population, technological growth--that affecting industrial practices, life-style behavior, and global trade and investment and military weaponry—is the underlying factor that has driven rising causal interconnectedness. I conjecture that the current density of connectedness constitutes a complexity phase into which humanity has entered. The rapidity with which the banking and economic collapse in the United States proliferated into a global recession contributes to my conjecture. Entering into the complexity phase is a profound non-genetically based evolutionary event with profound consequences. As a consequence, humanity is perilously close to what theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman has called a “complexity catastrophe,” sharply limiting the capacity for self-adaptation, and in matters of global governance dramatically increasing the degree of difficulty of effective governance.

This paper focuses on the structural properties of the global political system and argue that its anarchic conditions are maladaptive. The anarchic quality of the strong nation system and the aggressive, self-maximizing behavior of the strong nation it generates serve to diminish the possibility of achieving sustainability. Moreover, the justification for aggressive, self-maximizing behavior within the strong nation system is weakened once in the complexity phase, and such behavior and its justification are no longer viable when a related conflict exists or emerges between global security and national security. The signature characteristic of global governance for global problems is that global security takes precedence over national security when a conflict arises.

The paper maintains that global governance for global problems is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the achievement of sustainable global governance, and is not likely to occur without strong nation advocacy. Sustainable global governance requires, among other things, the development and maintenance of resilience within and between our tightly-coupled human-made and natural systems.

Rising density of casual interconnectedness may generate a heightened concern for global problems creating, in turn, an unprecedented commonality of interests among nations, especially strong nations, and their respective citizens. Should global “localization” occur, it would produce a veritable compression of ideational space characterized by fewer differences in policy prescriptions between (and within) nations. We would expect the emergence of vocal interest groups and revitalized, if not new constituencies, sympathetic to an ethos that extends beyond the narrow self-interest of the strong nation system. Such a compression might parallel the characteristics of the small world network. However, the likelihood is that a struggle for power between those advocating narrow self-interest within the strong nation system and those favoring a wider and global interest, will undoubtedly playout, and no one can predict in advance its outcome.

Economic globalization has contributed to the dense, causal interconnectedness both within and between nations. The management of the global economy in accordance with neo-liberal policies reflect the distribution of power within the strong nation system. These policies with their embrace of market fundamentalism have had destabilizing, global effects, especially upon third world nations.

via

Overview of: The Parable of the Tribes

2011-12-27T13:25:00.000-05:00

A new look at how the history of civilization may have been largely shaped by the raw struggle for power between societies

Author(s) / Editor(s)

Schmookler, Andrew Bard

Publication Reference

“The parable of the tribes” is used to describe schematically how one aggressive tribe among an otherwise peaceful group can force the spread of the “ways of power” throughout the system: power becomes a contaminant that, once introduced, becomes universal abetted and magnified through innovations in organization and technology.

Published in/by: Governance, page 5.
Date: Autumn 1984

Findings

The evolution of civilization can be seen as a dialectic between the commonsense view of a benign striving for and choice of a humane world and a more problematic systematic selection for power and dominance over others.
“The parable of the tribes” is used to describe schematically how one aggressive tribe among an otherwise peaceful group can force the spread of the “ways of power” throughout the system: power becomes a contaminant that, one introduced, becomes universal abetted and magnified through innovations in organization and technology.
The drive for societal survival makes the selection for power among civilized societies inevitable.
The synthesis of the compulsive spread of power with the benign choice for the diffusion of beneficial inventions through human and humane aspirations is possible. These “different truths” need to be combined in a balanced way.

The commonsense view of social evolution as the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities resulting in the continuous betterment of the human condition is flawed.

The rise of civilization, paradoxically, reduced the natural limits separating societies. In such a situation, Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes describes how, in a situation in which two or more actors desire to exploit a limited resource, power becomes important and a contaminant of the possibility of peaceful co-existence:

All of a group of tribes living within reach of each other choose peace. However, if all but one choose peace, there are four possibilities for the threatened neighbors:

Destruction.
Absorption and enslavement.
Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
Imitation of the aggressive behavior.

Technological innovation and “improvement,” far from making things inevitably better, can extend the reach of aggressors throughout the world.

Cultural homogenization and the diminishment of diversity happens both through benign, commonsense choice (i.e., innovations as improvements) as well as through compulsion by dominant aggressors.

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Overview: Social Dilemmas: The Anatomy of Cooperation

2011-12-27T13:15:00.003-05:00

Author(s) / Editor(s)

Kollock, Peter

Kollock provides a literature review and taxonomy of social dilemma models and social dilemma solutions, as well as current issues and future directions of studying social dilemmas.

Publication Reference

Published in/by: Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 183-214
Date: August 1998

Findings

Social dilemmas reflect a ‘deficient equilibrium’ because there is at least another outcome in which everyone is better off, but nobody has an incentive to change their behavior. Shaping and managing incentives is critical for shifting out of situations of deficient equilibrium. It's an equilibrium because two players, in the absence of certainty about how the other is going to act, choose the least damaging strategy for themselves -- assuming that the other will defect – and their strategies, taken together, represent a logical balance. It's a deficient balance because if they each had chosen to cooperate, their strategies, taken together, would have paid off better for both.
If you reward individuals, they have less incentive to work as a group, but if you reward only the group, they have no choice but to work for the common goal.
Moving from 2 person to N person dilemmas crosses a threshold in which anonymity becomes possible and free riding becomes more significant because not all actions are transparent to all actors. As N increases the costs one can impose on those who fail to cooperate are diffused and diluted, thus having less impact.
Three mythic narratives have shaped research and thinking about social dilemmas: the prisoner’s dilemma, the creation of public goods, and the tragedy of the commons. While these narratives can limit our thinking, they point to three critical challenges for overcoming social dilemmas: developing trust to secure transactions, overcoming the “social fence” of incurring immediate individual cost to generate a shared benefit (or public good), and overcoming the temptation to obtain immediate individual benefit that produces a shared cost for others.
The role of communication is significant in shaping cooperation with the context of prisoner’s dilemmas. Information gathering about behaviors, explicit promises regarding future behavior, persuasion, and the ability to establish group identity are all critical communication activities that increase the likelihood of cooperation.
The expectation of reciprocity can effect situations and moderate temptations to defect (free ride or abuse commons). The expectation of in-group reciprocity (if you think someone is going to participate, you will) seems to serve as a very deep heuristic that shapes strategic decisions about social dilemmas.
Cooperation rates are tied to payoff structures; changing the payoff structure or clearly communicating it can change the level of cooperation. Cooperation rates increase as payoffs increase, even when they just increase for others. If a dilemma is structured such that individuals have an effect on the outcome, the cooperation rate can increase.
Transforming social dilemmas is sometime more effective, and easier, than trying to solve them as they exist. For example, increasing communication or sense of affiliation (group identity) can transform a prisoner’s dilemma to an assurance game and increase the likelihood of cooperation. Looking for way to transform the context and nature of the dilemma is another important path for solving social dilemmas.
Some people are, by nature, more likely to trust others. In order to solve both the first-order dilemma (how to agree to organize collective action) and the second order dilemma (who’s going to police the agreement), you need both kinds of people: the more trusting people are necessary in order to make an agreement, and the less trusting people are necessary in order to police the agreement.

“The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled.” The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the problem of providing public goods, and Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons are three powerful metaphors that facilitated and structured research but also served as blinders since their limitations are often not recognized.

Models:

Kollock’s analysis divides dilemmas into two-person and N-person dilemmas. The key two-person dilemmas are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Assurance Game, and the Chicken Game. Each of these models is defined by the ordering of four possible outcomes: mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and either first or second person’s unilateral defection. Each of these outcomes generates an individual benefit for each person and is ordered by the benefit for the first person.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma models unsecured transactions, e.g. buying and selling over the Internet. The best outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma is unilateral defection of the first person, followed by mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and the worst outcome is the first person’s unilateral cooperation. Since defection has the highest potential benefit and cooperation the highest potential risk, the equilibrium of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is mutual defection. This equilibrium is deficient because the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.

The Assurance Game is similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma except it models situations where mutual cooperation is more benefical for each player than unilateral defection, e.g. a project that requires collaboration. This extra motivation to mutually cooperate creates two equilibria, one optimal, which is mutual cooperation, and one deficient, which is mutual defection. The optimal equilibrium requires trust between the two persons sufficient to assure each other that the other will cooperate. Insufficient trust leads to the deficient equilibrium.

The Chicken Game is again similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma except mutual defection is the worst outcome, worse than unilateral cooperation. This replaces the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s mutual defection equilibrium by two equilibria, unilateral defection and unilateral cooperation because of the strong motivation to not mutually defect. The Chicken Game is a model for situations that require volunteer effort to avoid the worst outcome but where duplicate effort is less desirable.

Kollock divides N-person dilemmas into two types based on cost and benefit for each individual. The first type is known as the social fence,s where an individual is presented with an immediate cost that generates a benefit shared by all. The individual wants to avoid the cost but if all do, everyone is worse off. A common metaphor of the social fence is the provisioning of public goods, which are (to a varying degree) non-excludable and nonrival. The key characteristic of a public good dilemma is the production function which defines the relationship between the level of resources contributed and the level of public good provided. Production functions are classified into decelarating, linear, accelerating, and step functions. Various production functions can produce N-person versions of any of the 2-person dilemmas.

The second type is know as social trap where the “individual is tempted by an immediate benefit that produces a cost to all. If all succumb to the temptation, the outcome is a collective disaster.” The usual metaphor of the social trap is the tragedy of the commons. A key feature of commons dilemmas is that the benefits are non-excludable (or difficult to make excludable) and subtractable. The key characteristic of commons dilemmas is the carrying capacity of the commons which depends on the replenishment rate of the subtractable joint resource.

Important (but not inevitable) features that affect N-person dilemma dynamics and contrast them to two-person dilemmas are anonymity, diffusion of defection cost, and little or no direct control on others. Some of these features are also found in two-person dilemmas, e.g. blaming defection on out-of-control circumstances is a form of anonymity in two-person games.

Solutions:

“The second part of [Kollock’s paper] is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solutions that do involve changing the rules of the game are [called] structural solutions.”

The motivation of not completely egoistic actors to cooperate is influenced by social value orientation, communication, and group identity. The social value orientation of a person seems to be acquired from the person’s social environment and is some linear combination of a cooperator who tries to maximize joint outcome, a competitor who tries to maximize own outcome relative to partner, and an individualist who tries to maximize own outcome. Kollock does not find any conclusive results in how to influence social value orientation but does find evidence that it varies between different countries.

The presence of communication positively affects cooperation rates. Communication enables a person to find out about others’ choices, to make explicit commitments, to appeal to what is the moral thing to do, and most importantly, to create or reinforce a sense of group identity. The effect of group identity is in fact so strong that it can affect cooperation rates even in the absence of communication. In-group behavior of individuals frequently includes personal restraint and treating Prisoner’s Dilemma situations as Assurance Games. However, in-group behavior implies out-group behavior with the potential to cause severe social costs due to intergroup conflicts.

“[Strategic solutions] rely on the ability of [egoistic] actors to shape to shape the outcomes and hence behavior of other actors. For this reason, many of these strategic solutions are limited to repeated two-person dilemmas.” Axelrod (see The Evolution of Cooperation) identifies three requirements for strategic solutions: ongoing relationships between actors (i.e. all expect shared dilemmas in their future), ability to identify each other, and ability to keep track of the other’s past behavior.

The most successful strategy in iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments (everyone against everyone) that meet these requirements is Tit-for-Tat which starts out with cooperation and then matches the partner’s previous behavior. This strategy transforms a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma into a repeated Assurance Game since the only long-term outcome of this strategy is either mutual cooperation or mutual defection (the two equilibria of the Assurance Game). Key aspects of successful strategies in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments are (1) to realize that it is not a zero-sum game hence does not benefit from a competitive social orientation (“don’t be envious”), (2) to not defect first, (3) to reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and (4) to be predictable so that the partner clearly understands one's strategy. One important caveat is that repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments assume perfect communication. In real life where communication is often imperfect more generous or forgiving strategies can avoid accidental cycles of recrimination.

Recent evidence suggests that the strategy of choosing partners is more important than the strategy used within a dilemma. In a modified version of iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament actors can exit current relationships and choose alternative partners. A very successful strategy in this environment is Out-for-Tat which exits a relationship as soon as the partner defects. A more forgiving version that gives a defecting partner a second chance is even more successful.

Strategies for N-person dilemmas involve grim triggers, social learning, and group reciprocity. In a “grim trigger” strategy an individual only cooperates if all other group members cooperate and defects as soon as one other group member defects. Social learning is the basis of a cognitively less taxing class of strategies that involves imitating other group members and look for thresholds in public good provisioning instead of calculating marginal rates of return or figuring out dominating strategies. Group identity increases cooperation rates because group members follow strategies that assume that all members share a strong expectation of group reciprocity (reciprocity within the group).

Structural solutions change the rules of the dilemma thereby changing or eliminating it. One approach is to reinforce prerequisites for strategic solutions by introducing long-term accountability (shadow of the future) that influences individual reputations. However, accountability and reputation are not sufficient to escape the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s equilibrium of mutual defection (in two- or N-person version) if the means to encourage cooperation are too weak (e.g. production function for public good too flat or too much effort required to reach provisioning point).

Many people seem to positively weigh others’ outcomes since cooperation increases significantly as the benefits to others from one’s cooperation increase. Cooperation levels are also higher if group members are asked to contribute to a non-divisible public good that only benefits the whole group, probably due to an increased sense of group identity (see group reciprocity).

Cooperation in N-person dilemmas increases if individual contributions have (or are perceived to have) a discernable effect, i.e. make an efficacious contribution. For public goods with step-level production function one can create a minimal subgroup that requires every member to contribute in order to reach the provisioning point or let two groups compete for contributions, turning an N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma into an N-person Chicken Game. Another example are "matching grants" or "adopting" an individual from a large group of benefactors.

Increasing group size makes defection more anonymous and increases the cost of organizing. However, research results on cooperation depending on group size alone are inconclusive. In the case of highly non-rival goods with a threshold production function a larger group is more likely to contain a "critical mass" of cooperating individuals. Diversity of group members' interests and resources encourages formation of critical mass.

A common structural strategy for N-person dilemmas is the creation of boundaries in an attempt to make public goods or commons more excludable. There are three main approaches: The first one is to institute an external authority or trusted leader to govern access to commons. This approach appears to be less preferable if other structural changes are possible. Establishing an external authority can raise severe problems of justice, enforcement, corruption, and scalability. The second approach is to break up commons into private parcels assuming that individuals will take better care of own property than common property. However, privatization does not work for non-divisible goods, raises the social question of who gets to own commons, does not prevent owners to routinely destroy their own property (“tragedy of enclosure”), and requires institutional support to enforce private property rights. A third approach is to locally regulate “access to and use of common property by those who actually use and have local knowledge of the resource.” One key characteristic of successful and long-lasting local regulations is clearly defined boundaries.

Sanctions are a structural method to encourage cooperation where the outcomes themselves of N-person dilemmas are too weak of a motivator. However, the implementation of sanctions can be very expensive. Local monitoring and sanctioning systems are more practical and less costly. Another way to reduce cost is to use a graduated system of sanctions with low-cost conflict resolution. A sanctioning system is itself a public good and therefore poses a second-order dilemma. Communities with a high level of trust readily cooperate in a first-order dilemma but cooperate less in a second-order dilemma hence are less willing to support a sanctioning system. The opposite is true for communities with a high level of distrust.

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Overview of The Evolution of Cooperation

2011-12-27T13:06:00.001-05:00

Author(s) / Editor(s)

Axelrod, Robert

"The objective of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge."

Publication Reference

Published in/by: Basic Books
Date: August 1, 1985

Findings

The emergence of cooperation can be seen as a consequence of agents pursuing their own interests. It is not necessary to assume that those agents are more honest, more generous, or more cooperative per se.
What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the agents might interact again. The choice made now of whether or not to cooperate will affect choices made in later interactions. This called the 'shadow of the future.' The shadow of the future can exist even when the participants are unaware of it, as is the case in biological cooperation (symbiosis).
No best rule exists independently of the strategy being used by others. Despite this fact, robust strategies, useful in many contexts, are possible.
The evolution of cooperation requires high levels of reciprocal interactions between agents. The absolute number of agents can be small as long as their interactions are numerous.
Communities of cooperation, once established, can protect themselves from 'invasion' by less cooperative strategies. "The gear wheels of social evolution have a ratchet."
The winning tit-for-tat strategy:
1. Don't be envious. Don't compare your success to others, only to your own strategic possibilities, i.e. are you employing the best strategy you have?
2. Don't be the first to defect. Cooperate as long as others are cooperating.
3. Reciprocate both cooperation and defection. Enforcing the rules is as important as playing by them.
4. Be transparent. In order for others to coordinate their choices with yours, they have to understand your behavior. Keep it simple and out in the open.
Ways to promote cooperation:
1. Enlarge the shadow of the future. Increase the permanence of cooperative choices or the frequency of interactions.
2. Change the payoffs. Make the long-term incentives to cooperate greater than the short-term incentives to defect.
3. Socialize reciprocal cooperation as a norm. Teach people to cooperate first.
4. Improve collective memory. Collective memory, or culture, is embedded in institutions. Provide access to collective memory.
The foundation of cooperation is the durability of the relationship, which allows agents to learn about each other in order to cooperate.

Chapter 1, The Problem of Cooperation. Why do people (or other actors) cooperate? "The objective of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge." It uses the Prisoner's Dilemma as a framework for testing theories about balancing self-interest and competition.

"In the Prisoners' Dilemma, the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using and, in particular, on whether this strategy leaves room for the development of mutual cooperation."

Chapter 2, TIT FOR TAT. "The iterated Prisoners' Dilemma has become the E. Coli of social psychology," yet people have not paid much attention to how to play the game well. Axelrod organized a computer tournament to which people familiar with PD submitted programs encoding different strategies. The winner was one of the simplest, TIT FOR TAT.

Axelrod then constructed an environment in which different programs competed, and the losing programs were eliminated: this was an ecology that rewarded high scoring programs, and punished others. "This process simulates survival of the fittest. A rule that is successful on average with the current distribution of rules in the population will become an even larger proportion of the environment of the other rules in the next generation. At first, a rule that is successful with all sorts of rules will proliferate, but later as the unsuccessful rules disappear, success requires good performance with other successful rules." In other words, the competition gets tougher.

"The analysis of the tournament results indicate that there is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematics made the systematic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other side."

The tournaments reveal that "there is a single property which distinguishes the relatively high-scoring entries from the relatively low-scoring entries. This is the property of being nice, which is to say never being the first to defect."

TIT FOR TAT's rules for success:

Be nice. Don't be the first to go on the attack. This demonstrates good will, and avoids provoking others.
Retaliate. If others attack, retaliate. Not doing so encourages bad behavior and gives niceness a bad reputation.
Be forgiving. If others defect but then go back to cooperating, accept the opportunity to move back to a cooperative mode.
Be clear. Others can predict what you'll do, be certain that their moves will have definite outcomes. "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 4, Trench Warfare. During World War I, "live and let live" arrangements emerged spontaneously between opposing units on the Western Front. Cooperation could take hold because "the same small units faced each other in immobile sectors for extended periods of time." Consequently, they had a more sustained relationship than in mobile warfare, and could develop commonly-understood rules, reciprocity and restraint in attacks, displays of strength (e.g., snipers shooting at hard targets)as well as ethics (recognition that there was an arrangement and violating it was immoral) and rituals (e.g., regular artillery firing).

"Cooperation first emerged spontaneously in a variety of contexts, such as restraint in attacking the distribution of enemy rations, a pause during the first Christmas in the trenches, and a slow resumption of fighting after bad weather made sustained combat almost impossible. These restraints quickly evolved into clear patterns of mutually understood behavior, such as two-for-one or three-for-one retaliation for actions that were taken to be unacceptable."

Chapter 6, How to Choose Effectively. Four suggestions about how to do well in PD:

Don't be envious. In a PD, "envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other player is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other player." However, in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, you can't do better than the other player, unless they're always suckers. "In a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. The other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself."
Don't be the first to defect (be nice). "It pays to cooperate as long as the other player is cooperating." In a short game, defection can make sense; but in a relationship, taking advantage of the other person is self-defeating.
Reciprocate both cooperation and defection. TIT FOR TAT "does not destroy the basis of its own success. On the contrary, it thrives on interactions with other successful rules." However, the right level of forgiveness depends on the context, and the other players' strategies.
Don't be too clever. "In a zero-sum game, such as chess it pays for us to be as sophisticated and as complex in our analysis as we can. Non-zero-sum games are not like this. The other player can respond to your own choices. And unlike the chess opponent, the other player in a PD should not be regarded as someone who is out to defeat you." "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 7, How to Promote Cooperation. Promoting cooperation can be thought of as an exercise in tinkering with the variables in a PD. "As long as the interaction is not iterated, cooperation is very difficult. That is why an important way to promote cooperation is to arrange that the same two individuals will meet each other again, be able to recognize each other from the past, and to recall how the other has behaved until now."

Enlarge the shadow of the future. For cooperation to emerge, players must be in a continuing relationship, with the expectation that it will continue in the future. "Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the past." "There are two basic ways of doing this: by making the interactions more durable, and by making them more frequent. [P]rolonged interaction allows patterns of cooperation which are based on reciprocity to be worth trying and allows them to become established," Making interactions more frequent makes "the next interaction occur sooner, and hence the next move looms larger than it otherwise would." You might do this by enforcing isolation, or constructing hierarchies or organizations, which are "especially effective at concentrating the interactions between specific individuals."
Change the payoffs. Make defection less attractive, by enforcing laws, or growing the value of long-term incentives.
Teach people to care about each other.
Teach reciprocity. Reciprocity "actually helps not only oneself, but others as well. It helps others by making it hard for exploitative strategies to survive."
Improve recognition abilities. "The ability to recognize the other player from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, a player could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate."

Chapter 8, The Social Structure of Cooperation.
The social structure of cooperation involves labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality.

Labels are fixed characteristics of an agent that are observable by other agents. Labels affect reciprocity and retaliation via assumptions of group similarity and stereotypes.
Reputation is others' belief about the strategies an agent will employ. Reputation may be based on past behavior or on rumours, i.e. reputation can be accurate or merely believed. Reputation affects whether or not other agents will cooperate or defect with you.
Regulation involves setting the stringency of a standard of behavior "high enough to get most of the social benefits of regulation, and not so high as to prevent the evolution of a stable pattern of voluntary compliance from almost all of the companies" (or regulated agents).
Territoriality refers to both physical and conceptual spaces that can be 'invaded' by agents of differing strategies. Territoriality establishes boundaries within which behaviors will be reinforced or retaliated against depending on prevailing norms. Also, the boundary provides an 'inside' for agents that comply with the norms, and an 'outside' to which they can be expelled if they do not comply.

Chapter 9, The Robustness of Reciprocity.

Cooperation can get started by even a small cluster of individuals who are willing to reciprocate cooperation, even in a world where no one else will cooperate.
Once cooperation is establish, it protects itself from invasion by non-cooperative strategies.
The foundation of cooperation is the durability of the relationship, which allows agents to learn about each other in order to cooperate.

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Overview of "When Push comes To Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology"

2011-12-27T12:09:00.001-05:00

Summary of: When Push comes To Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology

Author(s) / Editor(s)

Bollier, David

Information and communication technology innovation have begun to transform commercial business and social institutions from a "push" technology approach (hierarchical "center out"), to a "pull" technology approach (networked -based and decentralized). This poses new challenges to social, political, and educational systems that are largely designed to support "push" economies.

Publication Reference

Published in/by: The Aspen Institute
Date: 2006

Findings

We are living in an epochal period of transition bridging two very different types of economies and cultures. We are transitioning from a "push" economy: that tries to anticipate consumer demand, and then creates a standardized product, and "pushes the product into the market and culture, using standardized distribution channels and marketing. We are transitioning to a "pull" economy: open and flexible production platforms that use network technologies to coordinate many different entities from disparate regions.. "Pull" economies produce customized products and services that serve localized needs (demand-driven), usually in a rapid manner.
"Pull" networks tend to build the capabilities of their networked partners, by providing performance feedback and sharing best practices among the network participants. "Pull" platforms therefore tend to better employ the enthusiasm of all of the participants.
The "pull" phenomenon is not confined to business/online commerce. The spread of common use of internet technologies is finding "pull" techniques being applied in entertainment, social life, politics, education, and government.
"Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them.

This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

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Overview of Ostram's "Governing the Commons"

2011-12-27T11:50:00.002-05:00

Summary of: Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Author(s) / Editor(s)

Ostrom, Elinor

Any group that attempts to manage a common resource (e.g., aquifers, judicial systems, pastures) for optimal sustainable production must solve a set of problems in order to create institutions for collective action; there is some evidence that following a small set of design principles in creating these institutions can overcome these problems.

Publication Reference

Published in/by: Cambridge University Press
Date: 1990

Findings

People are trapped by the Prisoner's Dilemma only if they treat themselves as prisoners by passively accepting the suboptimum strategy the dilemma locks them into, but if they try to work out a contract with the other players, or find the ones most likely to cooperate, or agree on rules for punishing cheaters, or artificially change the incentive ratios - they can create an institution for collective action that benefits them all. This resonates with Peter Kollock's taxonomy of strategies for dealing with social dilemmas - one strategy is to change the rules of the game.
Changing the rules of the game to turn zero-sum games into non-zero-sum games may be one way to describe the arc of civilization for the past 8000 years: using symbolic media and social inventions, people have created institutions for collective action since the emergence of agriculture spurred the invention of writing. But for the most part, we've overcome obstacles and built these institutions blindly, without any systematic knowledge about how the game works. Ostrom takes an empirical approach: By examining legal records and other public documents, is it possible to determine whether every population overconsumes and under-provisions all common pool resource? She found that in many different cultures all over the world, some groups would find ways to overcome the obstacles that defeated others - by creating contracts, agreements, incentives, constitutions, signals, media to enable cooperation for mutual benefit.
Social dilemmas of multiple dimensions are obstacles on the path to creating institutions for collective action; these dilemmas must be overcome if institutions are to succeed or exist at all. Lack of information about the system can be an obstacle to agreement among the individuals who make up the system.Systemic information about salinization of wells was an obstacle to water-sharing agreements in California; individual water-users knew whether their wells were pumping salt, but none of them had compiled the information to see the overall pattern in the watershed, and no individual was willing to pay the price of gathering it. In this case, the US Geographic Survey had the data, thus overcoming this obstacle. Another obstacle, free-riding, creates the second order social dilemma concerning who will bear the cost of policing the rules once they are agreed upon. So although the overall formula is simple - social dilemmas can be solved through institutions for collective action that are built by overcoming known obstacles - in practice, each group that struggles to build an institution works under the handicap of being largely unaware of knowledge about how such institutions succeed and fail.
In comparing the communities, Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the some basic design principles:
- Group boundaries are clearly defined.
- Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
- Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
- The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
- A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
- A graduated system of sanctions is used.
- Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
- For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Definitions

The commons is a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest. Studies on the commons include the information commons with issues about public knowledge, the public domain, open science, and the free exchange of ideas -- all issues at the core of a direct democracy.

Common-pool resources (CPRs) are natural or human-made resources where one person's use subtracts from another's use and where it is often necessary, but difficult and costly, to exclude other users outside the group from using the resource.. The majority of the CPR research to date has been in the areas of fisheries, forests, grazing systems, wildlife, water resources, irrigation systems, agriculture, land tenure and use, social organization, theory (social dilemmas, game theory, experimental economics, etc.), and global commons (climate change, air pollution, transboundary disputes, etc.), but CPR's can also include the broadcast spectrum.

Issues

Whenever a group of people depend on a resource that everybody uses but nobody owns, and where one person's use effects another person's ability to use the resource, either the population fails to provide the resource, overconsumes and/or fails to replenish it, or they construct an institution for undertaking and managing collective action. The common pool resource (CPR) can be a fishery, a grazing ground, the Internet, the electromagnetic spectrum, a park, the air, scientific knowledge. The institution can be a body of informal norms that are disseminated by word of mouth, enforced by gossip or religious stricture, and passed from one generation to another, or a body of formal written laws that are enforced by state agencies, or a marketplace that treats the resource as private property, or a mixture of these forms. In the real world of fishing grounds and wireless competition, CPR institutions that succeed are those that survive, and those that fail sometimes cause the resource to disappear (e.g., salmon in the Pacific Northwest).

Elinor Ostrom's founding role in the evolution of an interdiscipline of cooperation studies grew from her challenge to currently accepted wisdom about institutions for collective action, her careful inductive examination of empirical studies of common pool resource management, and her insistence on interdisciplinary analysis. The dynamics she uncovered in her research - seven principles common to most successful, enduring common pool resource arrangements - are the starting point for anyone who wants to know how careful theoretical and experimental work can provide practical guidance for policy.

"The word commons originally denoted pastureland treated as a common resource, where individual herders were free to graze their sheep or cattle. The land can support a limited number of grazing animals. The temptation to graze more than one's share is a rational strategy for an individual herder. But if all succumb to the same temptation, the grass ceases to grow and the value of the pasture to everybody disappears."

In a 1986 lecture, Elinor Ostrom challenged the inexorable inevitability of Hardin's tragedy, noting that the situation described in Garrett Hardin's classic 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" has "the same underlying structure as the decision facing each prisoner in the so-called Prisoner's dilemma game." She also wrote:

"The Prisoner's Dilemma game has fascinated scholars in many fields. The paradox that individually rational strategies lead to collectively irrational outcomes seems to challenge a fundamental faith that rational human beings can achieve rational results. In the introduction to a recently published book, Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation, Richmond Campbell explains the "deep attraction" of the dilemma".

In her 1986 lecture, Ostrom emphasized the connection between the tragedy of the commons and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, but had the scientific curiosity to inquire whether tragically locked-in Prisoner's Dilemma strategies actually constrained human choice in all cases where humans have documented their use of common pool resources - she shrewdly understand that the cases in which people overcame the barriers to collective action are as important as the cases in which they fail:

"Scholars and government officials presume that all participants in situations with the structure of a PD game are necessarily trapped in the structure of the situation; as prisoners are trapped in their cells, participants are themselves trapped in their own mental apparatus. I shall argue that the structure is conceptually and methodologically necessary for analysis, but not an empirical necessity. The inability of participants to change the structure may be an empirical reality in some situations. It is not an empirical reality in many situations, however."

Ostrom argued from well-documented cases of informal institutions that had evolved into formal if localized arrangements, sometimes lasting for centuries, that groups could evolve effective institutions without externally coercive authority - if they could solve the "common set of problems." The design principles that Ostrom extracted from cases of successful CPR management turned out to be missing from most of the cases of failed CPR management she investigated - evidence that these design principles are clues to solutions to the problems preventing collective action in many instances. Ostrom argued forcefully that neither direct intervention by the state nor total privatization are necessary for people to evolve successful institutions - although state-provided courts lower the costs of creating the institutions, and the market value of well-managed CPRs provides strong incentive to create, agree, and maintain such arrangements.

Conclusions

Ostrom claims that "all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems." These problems are "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules." Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

Group boundaries are clearly defined.
Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
A graduated system of sanctions is used.
Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

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Sharing Networks: Network dynamics can catalyze community trust faster

2011-12-25T14:05:00.000-05:00

A 44-year-old woman in Helsinki, Finland, put it: “[If I designed a sharing service], it would work on network based on recommendations: I know you and you know someone, so you build trust—sort of ‘get introduced.’ Based on trust and community relationships, it’s easier to broaden one’s perspective towards sharing almost anything.”

Many people embrace the notion that sharing networks might complement or replace social institutions that have declined in power and importance. “What I'd want to set up is free sharing of services and stuff amongst a community of people in the way that a small town might once have functioned,” said one 38-year-old woman in Providence, RI. “I think this kind of interaction is part of community ties and support networks that used to develop naturally and spontaneously and need some encouragement now.”

Kim Gaskins of Latitude Research argues this creates “a huge opportunity for businesses to create the technological and community infrastructure that will help people to share in new ways, locally and across much broader distances, than was ever possible before.” And the really interesting thing is that this business activity may actually build social trust.

“There was a day when it would have seemed like a crazy idea to send your goods to people you had never met,” CouchSurfing founder Casey Fenton told us. “But [businesses like eBay] implemented different trust systems and it worked really well. And when you say it like that, people realize we have overcome the trust barrier through the CouchSurfing system. In fact, we are in the businesses of helping people understand just how trustworthy someone they have never met is. It is not our mission, but it is core to why we exist.”

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Building Social-Ecological Systems

2011-12-25T13:52:00.004-05:00

Over many decades, Ostrom has documented how various communities manage common resources—grazing lands, forests, irrigation waters, fisheries—equitably and sustainably over the long term," wrote Jay Walljasper in Shareable.net. "The Nobel Committee’s recognition of her work effectively debunks popular theories about the Tragedy of the Commons, which hold that private property is the only effective method to prevent finite resources from being ruined or depleted."

According to Cooperation Commons (a great resource, by the way) Elinor Ostrom claims that "all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems." These problems are "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules."

In comparing communities, Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the some basic design principles:

Group boundaries are clearly defined.

Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.

Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.

The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.

A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.

A graduated system of sanctions is used.

Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.

For common-pool resources that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Social media is catalyzing offline sharing

2011-12-25T13:45:00.000-05:00

Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research's The New Sharing Economy study released today indicates that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they're not just sharing to save money - an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.

The research was prompted by a recent surge in sharing startups driven by social technology, a generational shift, and new consumption patternsbrought on by economic and environmental crisis. Two new books, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption and The Mesh, argue that this trend is part of a fundamental shift from an ownership to an access economy. They document the rapid growth of the sector and its reach into an increasing number categories of shared use including office space, travel accommodations, textbooks, kids clothes, parking spaces, garden plots, private planes, camera lenses, luxury handbags, boats, household items, and more.

These new services offer citizens use of an asset without the burden of ownership. With a sharing economy comes the promise of cost savings, stronger communities, environmental conservation, broader access to resources, and higher quality products made for sharing. Sharing addresses many problems at once - an appropriate solution for an era of interconnected crises.

There are a number of helpful findings for sharing entrepreneurs including:

Sharing online content is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline too. 78% of participants felt that experiences they've had interacting with people online have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers. In fact, every study participant who shared content online also shared various things offline. Sharing entrepreneurs are already taking advantage of this by seeding their services in contextually relevant online communities. For instance, online kids clothing exchange thredUP build relationships with prominent mommy bloggers to speed their launch.

75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase in the next 5 years. While fast growing, this new sector has lots of unmet demand. More than half of all participants either shared vehicles casually or expressed interest in doing so. Similarly, 62% of participants either share household items casually or expressed interest in doing so. There's also high interest in sharing of physical spaces for travel, storage, and work - even with complete strangers.

The most popular perceived benefits of sharing (67% each) were “saving money” and being “good for society,” echoing the “me+we” mentality popular amongst Millennials and offering insight on how to brand sharing services. People increasingly expect that saving money needn’t come at the expense of doing good, so gravitate to solutions like sharing that enable them to do both. In addition, two thirds of participants said they were more likely to share their belongings if they could make money from it. Brands should align with this "doing well by doing good" world view.

Car sharers share across significantly more categories than non-car sharers – 11 versus 8 categories. Ironically, the very thing that catalyzed consumer culture may be the vehicle into the sharing economy. Carsharing preceded the recent surge in sharing startups, and apparently car sharers are leading the behavior shift into a sharing economy. The finding suggests that once someone tries a sharing service they're more likely to begin sharing in other areas of their life. With this in mind, sharing enterprises would do well to seek partnerships with carsharing and like services, seek out users of other sharing services as new customers, and begin offering other items to share once established in a category.

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Changing role of teachers in classroom

2011-12-23T02:18:00.001-05:00

Grade 7 teacher Royan Lee is so committed to making learning collaborative, he won’t call himself a teacher, preferring the moniker “lead learner.”

He sees himself as guiding his English and math students at Beverley Acres Public School in Richmond Hill, Ont., in a space where they don’t just do the usual group work, but constantly think together and critique each other.

His classroom is profoundly social and virtually paperless. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones – some belonging to pupils, some supplied by the school – link each learner to Web-based spaces where everyone interacts, not just the bold few who would have dared to raise a hand.

At times, Mr. Lee will pose questions such as, “Look at this picture: what equivalent fractions do you see?” and the pupils tackle them together in chat rooms or multimedia Web forums. They have also experimented with a Twitter-based “back channel,” an ongoing stream of pupils’ feedback and questions projected at the front of the class.

Even individual work is shared: Pupils submit assignments, notes and thoughts to networked personal blogs, forming digital portfolios they can all see and comment on.

“We try to learn out in the open,” Mr. Lee says. “[My pupils] feel like they can’t achieve the heights they want to without one another. … It’s almost a method of crowd-sourcing understanding.”

The key is less what students learn than how they learn it: The Googles of the world have decentralized knowledge, meaning the teacher’s role is now much more about helping students assess information and apply it.

The Wieman Initiative changed [the teacher's] mind when it linked him with a science teaching and learning fellow to help him transform his upper-year optical physics course.

He started assigning the raw materials to be absorbed as homework, as well as short online quizzes before class to keep students doing the readings. In class, he presented students with activities and problems, had them split up any way they wished to solve them together, and offered help where it was needed.

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Affordance

2011-12-19T15:31:00.001-05:00

"A New Retail Selling 'Stunt'" 1918 New York Times article

2011-12-15T21:40:00.001-05:00

Starlings: A Beautiful Emergent Behavior Example

2011-12-09T13:43:00.001-05:00

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Triumph of the Commons featured on The Daily Heller

2011-12-09T10:05:00.001-05:00

Triumph of the Commons is featured on today's Daily Heller. Thanks to Steven Heller for highlighting the work of so many great artists:

Nikolay Saveliev, Michael Schwab, Jan Wilker, Ed Fella, Serifcan Ozcan, Erik Yang, Michael Rock, Jason Musante, Thomas Porostocky, Thomas Wilder, Jakob Trollback, Amy Wang, Allen Hori, Dora and Maja Christina Nizar, Tim Goodman, Karin Soukup, Jiyun Ha, Milan Zrnic, Matteo Bologna, Isidro Ferrer, Nick Law,Sumayya Alsenan, Rebeca Mendez, Simon Johnston, Brian Roettinger, Josh Smith, Bryan Collins, Kevin Brainard/Darren Cox, Woody Pirtle, John Bielenberg, Matt Luckhurst, Jeff Rogers, Brad Bartlett, Gail Anderson, Steve Haslip, Dana Tanamachi, Ji Lee, Eric Hu, Seth Mroczka, LaurieRosenwald, James Victore, Erin Wahed, Noreen Morioka, Jennifer Kinon, Rick/Jess Boyko, Sean Adams, Jessica Hische, Nick Ace, David Ricart, Seymour Chwast, Bobby Martin, Nancy Vonk, Gustavo Cordova

Betray the Age

2011-12-05T16:48:00.001-05:00

“If you want to serve the age, betray it.”
Irish poet Brendan Kennelly

The Free Market Freefall: Why China Can Teach us Something

2011-12-04T13:18:00.001-05:00

Andy Grove, the founder and chairman of Intel, provocatively wrote in Businessweek last year that, "Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better."

The past few weeks have proven Mr. Grove's point, as our relations with China, and that country's impact on America's future, came to the forefront of American politics. Our inert Senate, while preparing for the super committee to fail, crossed the normally insurmountable political divide to pass legislation to address China's currency manipulation. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Gov. Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama all weighed in with their views—ranging from warnings that China must "end unfair discrimination" (Mrs. Clinton) to complaints that the U.S. has "been played like a fiddle" (Mr. Romney) and that China needs to stop "gaming" the international system (Mr. Obama).

As this was happening, I was part of a U.S.-China dialogue—a trip organized by the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Center for American Progress—with high-ranking Chinese government officials, both past and present. For me, the tension resulting from the chorus of American criticism paled in significance compared to reading the emerging outline of China's 12th five-year plan. The aims: a 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection—all while promoting social equity and rural development.

Some Americans are drawing lessons from this. Last month, the China Daily quoted Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, as saying: "I think we have come to realize the ability to plan is exactly what is missing in America." The article also noted that Robert Engle, who won a Nobel Prize in 2003 for economics, has said that while China is making five-year plans for the next generation, Americans are planning only for the next election.

The world has been made "flat" by the technological miracles of Andy Grove, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This has forced all institutions to confront what is clearly the third economic revolution in world history. The Agricultural Revolution was a roughly 3,000-year transition, the Industrial Revolution lasted 300 years, and this technology-led Global Revolution will take only 30-odd years. No single generation has witnessed so much change in a single lifetime.

The current debates about China's currency, the trade imbalance, our debt and China's excessive use of pirated American intellectual property are evidence that the Global Revolution—coupled with Deng Xiaoping's government-led, growth-oriented reforms—has created the planet's second-largest economy. It's on a clear trajectory to knock America off its perch by 2025.

As Andy Grove so presciently articulated in the July 1, 2010, issue of Businessweek, the economies of China, Singapore, Germany, Brazil and India have demonstrated "that a plan for job creation must be the number-one objective of state economic policy; and that the government must play a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces of organization necessary to achieve this goal."

The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model—so successful in the 20th century—is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA's results—a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1%—are pathetic.

This should motivate leaders to rethink, rather than double down on an empirically failing free-market extremism. As painful and humbling as it may be, America needs to do what a once-dominant business or sports team would do when the tide turns: study the ingredients of its competitors' success.

While we debate, Team China rolls on. Our delegation witnessed China's people-oriented development in Chongqing, a city of 32 million in Western China, which is led by an aggressive and popular Communist Party leader—Bo Xilai. A skyline of cranes are building roughly 1.5 million square feet of usable floor space daily—including, our delegation was told, 700,000 units of public housing annually.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5% annual growth and 49% growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10% a year.

For those of us who love this country and believe America has every asset it needs to remain the No. 1 economic engine of the world, it is troubling that we have no plan—and substitute a demonization of government and worship of the free market at a historical moment that requires a rethinking of both those beliefs.

America needs to embrace a plan for growth and innovation, with a streamlined government as a partner with the private sector. Economic revolutions require institutions to change and maybe make history, because if they stick to the status quo they soon become history. Our great country, which sparked and wants to lead this global revolution, needs a forward looking, long-term economic plan.

The imperative for change is simple. As Andy Grove pointed out: "If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us."

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The Science of Perception and some principles

2011-12-03T21:10:00.001-05:00

One of the earliest contributions to the science of perception was made by the Gestalt School of Psychology. The original intent of this effort when it began in 1912 was to uncover how we perceive pattern, form, and organization in what we see. The founders observed that we organize what we see in particular ways in an effort to make sense of it. The result of the effort was a series of Gestalt principles of perception, which are still respected today as accurate descriptions of visual behavior. Here are a few of the principles that can inform our data visualization efforts:

Proximity
Objects that are close together are perceived as a group.

Similarity
Objects that share similar attributes (e.g., color or shape) are perceived as a group.

Enclosure
Objects that appear to have a boundary around them (e.g., formed by a line or area of common color) are perceived as a group.

Closure
Open structures are perceived as closed, complete, and regular whenever there is a way that they can be reasonably interpreted as such.

Continuity
Objects that are aligned together or appear to be a continuation of one another are perceived as a group.

Connection
Objects that are connected (e.g., by a line) are perceived as a group.

New insights into visual perception and cognition are arising from work in various disciplines besides information visualization, such as human factors and human-computer interaction, but none are more ground-breaking than those arising from the cognitive sciences, especially cognitive psychology. Today, with new and improved technologies and methodologies for brain exploration, opportunities to improve the perceptual effectiveness of data visualization abound. Two areas of study in particular are especially useful:

preattentive visual processingmechanisms
limitations of attention and memory

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Autocatalysis

2011-11-23T14:46:00.001-05:00

Catalysts are chemical substances that modify reaction rates without themselves being changed in the process. Their kinetics are characterized by threshold and amplification phenomena. Enzymes are the major class of biological catalysts.

The molecules of an autocatalytic system speed up the very reactions by which they are formed. Autocatalytic loops are like feedback loops in that the presence of a substance stimulates production of the same element and that the kinetic equations describing them are non-linear . (Eg. the rate of variation of the concentration of X is proportional to the square of its concentration)

Cross-Catalysis is a similar loop involving several elements. The first element triggers the production of the second, which in turn produces the first. A hypercycle is a system of autocatalytic reactions arranged in a circle so each reaction's product catalyzes production of its clockwise neighbor.

The gene was described by H.J. Muller in 1926 as possessing the property of "specific autocatalysis," meaning self-replication. "Still more remarkable," he wrote, the gene can mutate without losing its specific autocatalytic power.

Stuart Kauffman studied auto-catalytic sets as a possible explanation of the origin of life, for they tend to grow as long as the materials for their synthesis are available. For Kaufman, at its heart, a living organism is a system of chemicals that has the capacity to catalyze its own reproduction. (See At Home in the Universe, p. 49) Different auto-catalytic sets might compete for the same raw materials and life could indeed have bootstraped itself into existence through this process rather than have waited for some ridiculously improbable random events. But is the occurence of auto-catalysis a simply fortuitous event? Kauffman studied systems to find out when auto-catalysis might occur and found that this tended to happen "at the edge of chaos" This state corresponded to the " phase transition" behaviour studied by Chris Langton and the students of Artificial life. For Langton, Life is eternally trying to keep its balance on the edge of chaos, always in danger of falling off into too much order on the one side, and too much chaos on the other.

For Kauffman, life, instead of being improbable, is an expected, emergent, collective property of complex systems of polymer catalysts when a system acheives catalytic closure. "As the complexity of a collection of polymer catalysts increases, a critical complexity threshold is reached. Beyond this threshold, the probability that a subsystem of polymers exists in which formation of each member is catalyzed by other members of the subsystem becomes very high" (p.289)

(See Prigogine Order Out of Chaos, pp. 133-135, Waldrop Complexity pp 124 - 125)

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Aristophanes Circle Creatures From Plato's Symposium

2011-11-23T13:47:00.001-05:00

Aristophanes professed to open another vein of discourse; he had a mind to praise Love in another way, unlike that either of Pausanias or Eryximachus. Mankind; he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained.

At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them, being the sections of entire men or women, and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are loves of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,-if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side, by side and to say to them, "What do you people want of one another?" they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: "Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two-I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?"-there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time, I say, when we were one, but now because of the wickedness of mankind God has dispersed us, as the Arcadians were dispersed into villages by the Lacedaemonians. And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies. via

Starbucks Lending

2011-11-15T11:25:00.001-05:00

Via

When last we left the chairman and chief executive of Starbucks, in mid-August, he had written a widely publicized e-mail lamenting the poisonous state of our nation’s politics. That led him to his first big idea: a call for a boycott of political contributions until Democrats and Republicans began to act in a nonpartisan way for the good of the country.

The idea had undeniable appeal. But it was also — let’s face it — pretty quixotic, fun to dream about but impossible to turn into reality.

Here we are two months later, and Schultz is back with Big Idea No. 2. It is every bit as idealistic as his first big idea, but far more practical. Starbucks is going to create a mechanism that will allow us citizens to do what the government and the banks won’t: lend money to small businesses. This mechanism is scheduled to be rolled out on Nov. 1. This time, Schultz is not tilting at windmills.

From the start, Schultz’s crusade has been focused on the need for jobs, or, as he likes to say, “the jobs emergency.” Should the government finance a sustained infrastructure program to create jobs? Of course. Should it give tax breaks to companies that hire the unemployed? Yes again. But with an election coming up, nothing of the sort is likely.

With the government a nonfactor, Schultz began mulling other ideas. He knew that small businesses created most new jobs, but that many small businesspeople couldn’t hire because they had lost access to credit after the financial crisis. He thought about Starbucks’s involvement in microlending programs in some of the countries where it bought coffee. He wondered if there was some way that that could be applied to small business lending in this country. Finally, he thought about the nearly 7,000 Starbucks stores in the United States, and its tens of millions of customers. Surely, he mused, there must be some way to take advantage of Starbucks’s sheer size.

In late August, Schultz invited a handful of employees to his home. He told them that they were not there to discuss Starbucks business. “Let’s try to take a big swing at job creation that will be unprecedented and unorthodox,” he said. The meeting went well into the evening. Schultz served pizza.

Here’s the idea they came up with: Americans themselves would start lending to small businesses, with Starbucks serving as the middleman. Starbucks would find financial institutions willing to loan to small businesses. Starbucks customers would be able to donate money to the effort when they bought their coffee. Those who gave $5 or more would get a red-white-and-blue wristband, which Schultz labeled “Indivisible.” “We are hoping it will bring back pride in the American dream,” he says. The tag line will read: “Americans Helping Americans.”

It didn’t take long for Starbucks to find the perfect financial partner: Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs. These are lenders, mostly under the radar, that specialize in underserved communities. Most, but not all, CDFIs are nonprofit, and their loan default rates are extremely low. “We specialize in expending credit, getting paid back, and paying back our investors,” says Mark Pinsky, whose organization, Opportunity Finance Network, acts as an umbrella group to the best of them.

Pinsky served on a board with a Starbucks executive. Schultz didn’t know that — indeed, he said he had never heard of a CDFI. But the young Starbucks executives charged with turning the idea into a reality soon found Pinsky — and realized that his organization was tailor-made for their project. Within a matter of days, he had met Schultz, and they had struck a deal.

Starbucks and the Starbucks Foundation will pay for the marketing costs, the wristbands and every other cost associated with the new program — which will be called Create Jobs for USA — out of its own coffers.

Here is the most beautiful part about the whole arrangement. The donations to Create Jobs for USA will not be loaned to the CDFIs. They will be turned into capital — equity that can be leveraged. Pinsky and others told me that that equity can be leveraged 7 to 1, meaning that if 10 million Starbucks customers donate $5, that will support $350 million worth of lending. That’s real money.

The Starbucks Foundation is starting things off with a $5 million donation. Schultz is hoping to convince other national retail chains to participate as well — so that Starbucks isn’t the only place people can join in the effort. And, of course, he is hoping that Starbucks customers will flock to it in droves.

So am I. With the government and banks unwilling or unable, it’s time we took matters into our own hands. At this point, who else can we count on?

A Rant on the Future of IxD by Bret Victor

2011-11-09T13:55:00.001-05:00

Below is quoted from Bret's blog

So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now.

My problem is ... [that] ... this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible. This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you're a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

Take another look at what our Future People are using to interact with their Future Technology. Do you see what everyone is interacting with? The central component of this Interactive Future? It's there in every photo! That's right! — HANDS. And that's great! I think hands are fantastic! Hands make us human! It's even there in the word — human, man, mankind — manual, la mano, la main. Our hands literally define us. Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them. Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things.

Go ahead and pick up a book. Open it up to some page. Notice how you know where you are in the book by the distribution of weight in each hand, and the thickness of the page stacks between your fingers. Turn a page, and notice how you would know if you grabbed two pages together, by how they would slip apart when you rub them against each other.

...

Almost every object in the world offers this sort of feedback. It's so taken for granted that we're usually not even aware of it. Take a moment to pick up the objects around you. Use them as you normally would, and sense their tactile response — their texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; how they respond in your hand as you use them. There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years.

Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit. What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

To take this to an extreme, imagine that you're completely blind. Yeah, that's a tough life, but you can still pretty much take care of yourself and do the things that people do. Do you know what it's called when you lose all sense of touch? It's called paralysis, and they push you around in a wheelchair while you calculate black hole radiation.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future. To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better. What can you do with a Picture Under Glass? You can slide it. That's the fundamental gesture in this technology. Sliding a finger along a flat surface. There is almost nothing in the natural world that we manipulate in this way.

...

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other. No creature on earth has a dexterity that compares to ours. The next time you make a sandwich, pay attention to your hands. Seriously! Notice the myriad little tricks your fingers have for manipulating the ingredients and the utensils and all the other objects involved in this enterprise. Then compare your experience to sliding around Pictures Under Glass.

So then. What is the Future Of Interaction? The most important thing to realize about the future is that it's a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers. Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn't just happen. It doesn't emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese.

Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don't just extrapolate yesterday's technology and then cram people into it. Our hands feel things, and our hands manipulate things. Why aim for anything less than a dynamic medium that we can see, feel, and manipulate?

...

An Anonymous French Woman Interviews Charles Eames

2011-10-04T19:33:00.000-04:00

I love the title cards and general look of this.

Vonnegut's 3 story shapes

2011-09-28T16:54:00.001-04:00

How Psychology Solved A WWII Shipwreck Mystery

2011-09-28T12:54:00.001-04:00

Great story about how psychology found a sunken WWII ship from NPR:
DAVID GREENE, host: And I'm David Greene in for Renee Montagne.We're going to hear next the strange tale of how psychology pinpointed the location of a sunken ship. In November of 1941, the middle of the Second World War, two ships crossed paths off the coast of Australia. One was a German raider called the Kormoran, the other, an Australian warship called the Sydney.Guns were fired, both ships were damaged and both sank to the bottom of the ocean. It was two Australian psychologists working for a nonprofit called the Finding Sydney Foundation who located the wreckage of the boats. NPR's Alix Spiegel explains.
ALIX SPIEGEL: This story begins at the end of a battle, with two ships - both mortally wounded - drifting away from each other in the middle of the night. According to Bob Trotter, who used to direct the Finding Sydney Foundation, 300 of the surviving German sailors had packed themselves into lifeboats and were sitting there in the darkness watching the ship that they had just attacked slowly disappear.
BOB TROTTER: All they saw of Sydney was a glow on the horizon, which in the words of the German captain suddenly went out - no explosion, nothing, just a glow that suddenly went out like a light being switched off. And that was the last anyone saw of Sydney for 66 years. And all of the 645 men on board.
SPIEGEL: Now apparently this loss of the Sydney was really devastating for the Australian public.
TROTTER: The nation was thunderstruck. Sydney was what I guess you could describe as she was the jewel in the Navy's crown.
SPIEGEL: And then she wasn't. Then she was a pile of steel at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. But where, exactly was that pile? That was the question put to the 300 surviving Germans. Unfortunately, most of those Germans were fuzzy on where precisely the ships went down, which, Trotter says, isn't all that surprising.
TROTTER: Particularly in a wartime situation where the position of the ship is really kept in the bridge area, it would not be normal that the rest of the ship's company would be told.
SPIEGEL: Still, when the Germans were picked up and interrogated, around 70 did come up with a location. It's just those locations didn't make a lot of sense.
KIM KIRSNER: The positions are spread out, smeared over hundreds of miles.
SPIEGEL: This is Kim Kirsner, one of the two psychologists who worked on finding the Sydney. And he says the locations were all over the map, literally.
KIRSNER: A hundred and twenty miles from the coast. There's another one just 160 miles from Cape Cuvier. There's another one which is 130 miles from Shark Bay, which is a different type of referent.
SPIEGEL: One survivor placed the sinking halfway to Antarctica, which understandably raised this question in the minds of the Australian people.
JOHN DUNNE: There was a lot of discussion about whether you could believe these reports.
SPIEGEL: That's John Dunne, the second psychologist who worked to find the ships.
DUNNE: People were saying you can't believe what they are saying because these are the enemy. They're going to be telling lies under interrogation. And the reason you're getting all these different reports is that they're all telling different kinds of lies.
SPIEGEL: And according to Bob Trotter, because there was so little faith in the German reports, wild theories about what had happened and where the boats might be flourished.
TROTTER: If you didn't believe the Germans, the number of possibilities were endless as to what might've happened and where the ship might be.
SPIEGEL: But as cognitive psychologists, Kirsner and Dunne took a very different view of the German accounts. To them, the spread of the reports looked like the kind of data that they saw in memory experiments. And so they set out to prove scientifically that the Germans were probably telling the truth.
DUNNE: Show that the characteristics of these reports had the right kind of characteristics that you'd expect to see if it was all due to failures of memory and to the vagaries of transmitting information from person to person.
SPIEGEL: Now to make this case, Dunne says, they turned to the work of a British psychologist.
DUNNE: Sir Frederic Bartlett.
SPIEGEL: Sir Frederic Bartlett, like Kirsner and Dunne, was a psychologist interested in what happens to memory over time. And in the 1930s he did a series of experiments with a Native American folktale called "The War of the Ghosts." Now this story was, at least to a British mind, very, very strange, with lots of bizarre leaps in the narrative.
DUNNE: So the story starts by saying, there were two young men from Egulac.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: One night, two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm.
SPIEGEL: So in one of these experiments Bartlett would tell somebody this story.
DUNNE: Then he'd ask them to tell the story back to him. And he would write that down. He would then wait a little while, go back to those people and ask them to tell the story a second time.
SPIEGEL: Then he would write that down. And over months and years, he'd come back to that same person again and again and document how the story changed each time. So for example, listen to how one person changed the first two sentences of the story. Here's version one:
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) There were two young men. They went to the riverside. They heard war cries.S
PIEGEL: Version two, 14 days later:
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) There were two ghosts. They went on a river.
SPIEGEL: Version three, after a month:
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) There were ghosts. There took place a fight between them.SPIEGEL: So you see there's change. But the way Bartlett saw, it the change happens in very predictable ways.
DUNNE: In their recall attempts they try to move the elements of the story in a way, or change them in a way, or add things to them so that made them make more sense.
SPIEGEL: That is, they tried to make the stories conform to a more traditional Western narrative. And this made Bartlett theorize that memory is composed really of two parts. When you make a memory there's this content that you're trying to remember, which you embed in a schema or general theory of what is going on. And over time you remember less of the original content and more just the general theory. So you're remembering the basic gist of the story and supplementing it or changing it so that it fits a more comfortable mold.You see the same pattern of change if you pass the story from one person to the next, which is another experiment that Bartlett did.So how does all of this relate to the Germans?
DUNNE: We thought, OK. All of these reports by the survivors can be thought of rather like this experiment by Bartlett.
SPIEGEL: So what Dunne and Kirsner did was that they took the story versions from Bartlett and counted up all of the changes in them. So every time there was a change in a sentence they noted it and they put that on a graph.
DUNNE: We can count up the different kinds of versions of these stories and that has a particular statistical profile.
SPIEGEL: Then they did the same thing with the German accounts. They arranged the 70 accounts into groups that seemed to be related to one another, and then they charted them on a graph.
DUNNE: And what we found was that there was a correspondence, that our data looked like the kind of data that Bartlett had generated in his study.
SPIEGEL: If you placed one graph over the other, their profiles matched, which suggested to them that the Germans were not in fact lying.Kim Kirsner.
KIRSNER: It means it's not a contrived set of data.
SPIEGEL: So after all this, Kirsner and Dunne sit down with a map of the Indian Ocean, and what they did was try to pinpoint the place on that map which best fit all of the different accounts of where the ships had gone down.
DUNNE: That's what we did: we just took each point in the ocean, and we looked at how well it satisfied or conformed to each of these statements.
SPIEGEL: They then marked that spot down as the place where they thought the German ship would be found. And in 2004, gave that information to the Finding Sydney Foundation. Now, at that time there were no real plans to go hunting for the boats. So at least as far as John Dunne was concerned, that was that.
DUNNE: I never really thought that I would ever find out, you know, that if it was going to be right or wrong.
SPIEGEL: But then a funny thing happened. A professional shipwreck hunter named David Mearns independently convinced the Australian government to let him go searching for the wrecks. In March of 2008, he went out and actually discovered the wreck of the German ship. So how far exactly was the ship from the point that Kirsner and Dunne had marked down four years before?
DUNNE: Two point seven nautical miles from where it was found.
SPIEGEL: Two point seven nautical miles.
DUNNE: I thought, whoa...(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DUNNE: ...it worked. I was amazed actually.SPIEGEL: A couple days after the German ship was found, the wreck hunter David Mearns also found the Sydney. The boat had sunk to the bottom of the ocean a short distance away from the ship that had attacked it 67 years before.

Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.

Dreams Recorded

2011-09-23T13:05:00.000-04:00

Ever dreamed of recording your dreams and turning them into a video clip? The technology that enables you to do that is near: UC Berkeley scientists figured out a way to turn the way our brains interpret visual stimuli into a video, and the result is amazing.To be able to do this, the researches used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure the blood flow through brain’s visual cortex. Then, different parts of the brain were divided into volumetric pixels or voxels (the term might be familiar to those who remember early 3D games which were based on voxels instead of polygons which are more commonly used today). Finally, the scientists built a computational model which describes how visual information is mapped into brain activity.In practice, test subjects viewed some video clips, and their brain activity was recorded by a computer program, which learned how to associate the visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.Then, test subjects viewed a second set of clips. The movie reconstruction algorithm was fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos, which were used to teach the program how to predict the brain activity evoked by film clips. Finally, the program chose 100 clips which were most similar to the movie the subject had seen, which were merged to create a reconstruction of the original movie.The result is a video that shows how our brain sees things, and at moments it’s eerily similar to the original imagery.“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published in the journal Current Biology.Recording our dreams and “reading” the minds of coma patients requires a lot of work still, as current technology only enables scientists to interpret brain activity while the test subject is watching a movie. Ultimately, it could be used to decode how our brain processes visual events in everyday life or, perhaps, our dreams.Check out another video, which shows the movie reconstruction algorithm at work, below. More details about the study can be found here.

via

Introduction to System Dynamics

2011-09-21T15:16:00.001-04:00

Honoring911.com

2011-09-09T16:06:00.006-04:00

Last December, after years of lobbying and debate, Congress passed a health bill, which would later be known as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. Named after a New York City police officer who passed away from respiratory illness, the 9/11 health measure calls for full medical coverage to those who became sick from toxic fumes, dust and smoke during rescue efforts at the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

While the state has taken a first step in fulfilling their moral obligation to support the rescue workers who spent days, weeks and even months at ground zero, a large gap has yet to be filled. The Act excludes the increasing number of cancer victims who claim their sickness was caused by carcinogens released into the air in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. While coverage for cancer related illness is still up for debate, victims and their families struggle as they await relief for the unfortunate consequences of their brave efforts on that fateful day.

Accordingly, the Collins: team has chosen the initiative to support ground zero related cancer victims and their families as the center of our 9/11 commemorations. The Fire Fighters Cancer Foundation will receive all proceeds from The Permanent Mark, which is our token in remembering the challenging and internal lesson of that morning: we are as one.

To learn more about The Permanent Mark, please visit the honoring911.com.

To donate directly to the Fire Fighter Cancer Foundation, please visit ffcancer.org.

Credits go to Matt Luckhurst (design), Brian Collins (design), Christian Mrockza (video), Kenji Aoki (photography), Ingrid Pangandoyon (website).

Writers' Prayer

2011-09-02T00:41:00.000-04:00

Our father Aristotles, who art in Poetics, dramatized be thy structure; thy principles come, thy premise be done. On stages, as it is on screens. Give us this day our daily inspiration; And forgive us our deus ex machina's as we have forgiven our debtors of bad stories; And lead us not into exposition, but deliver us from didacticism. For thine is the crisis, and the climax, and the resolution, now and forever. Amen.

-Edward Olivier

Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen & W+K

2011-08-19T14:21:00.003-04:00

Congrats to W+K for adding a nice visual and aural layer to one of my favorite poems:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Charles Bukowski

Goes nicely with a favorite lyrics of mine:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"