Week 20

We mentioned the movie The Social Network was mostly right on the events surrounding Facebook. However, it seems TBS got Zuckerberg's typing wrong. In the movie Zuckerberg is pictured as somewhat robotic, who parses language to death, anal about definitions, etc., implying an NT.

There are two issues here: One, Holywood has problems portraying NT characters to begin with. Due to NT's strategic, scientific preference, they are usually presented as mad scientists bent on world domination on the big screen. This is clearly a disservice to these people, among which, INTJs for one, do have a "soft side" (as do others); the "T" can be tough with people, but there are other elements in the character that softens the shell.

Zuckerberg's type is completely wrong as well; he is an NF, an Idealist, not an NT. A few sentences uttered by the man that are part of the public record would have cleared this up instantly. Pay attention also to what Facebook does: it connects people. NFs tend to be collaborative in reaching goals and I'd say a social network qualifies as a pretty good collaborative tool.

This is really messed up. Someone needs to start collecting data on worst polluters, map them out on Google Maps, and organize protests on these locations. I've seen a coal based power plant in Las Vegas, with stacks, mini-mountains of coal waiting to be burned, and the guy working there says one of those little mountains equals only to one hour of electricity for Las Vegas. This is f.cked up shit. Governments are asleep at the wheel. But then again, why should that be a surprise?

"Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially "dangerous climate change" – is likely to be just "a nice Utopia", according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions"

Obama suggests Bin Laden probably received support from the Pakistani government, or elements within it, to be able to reside at the compound where he was ultimately found. I agree. If he had explicit Pak support, he would be useful as a bargaining chip to be traded in later for some kind of US favor. If not, hell, during the war against Soviets, Taliban received support from ISI, and Paks for many years. During that time Taliban fighters' families lived in Pakistan and the mujaheddin used to come to visit them for holidays. There are a lot of old connections there, it would not be surprising if some remaining elements from that era helping Bin Laden.

Is it a good idea to hit Paks on the head on this issue? Yes. Ruffling some feathers, shaking things up little is a good idea, it might help Paks to take more responsibility and start putting their house in order.

Nice development... BTW, Marxist morons should think twice before celebrating, since this has nothing to do with disappearance of the free market, it has everything to do with the collapse of modernity. One-size-fits-all approaches to "using items (as in owning them)" is disappearing. People on the go, (a side effect of 3rd wave) need more flexible arrangements to use things, and more and more the new generation is finding out what is essential for living and what is not.

People who move after a long time are always surprised to discover how much junk they collected in their house, let's think about that and understand that the new generation does this much more frequently now and therefore has a better understanding of the issue of ownership in 21st century.

Markets are good at allocation of resources, and allocation of unused resources through these new scheduling, record keeping systems powered by the Internet is a shining example of this.

Fast Company: "[..] Gorenflo is a leading proselytizer of a global trend to make sharing something far more economically significant than a primitive behavior taught in preschool. Spawned by a confluence of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the maturation of the social web, an entirely new generation of businesses is popping up. They enable the sharing of cars, clothes, couches, apartments, tools, meals, and even skills. The basic characteristic of these you-name-it sharing marketplaces is that they extract value out of the stuff we already have. Many of these sites depend on millennials disenchanted by the housing bubble and the banking crisis, or uninterested in traditional icons of success such as house or auto ownership. But the number of people who have quietly begun tapping in is impressive: Already, more than 3 million people from 235 countries have couch-surfed, while 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month. Contends Rachel Botsman, coauthor of the recently published What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption: "This could be as big as the Industrial Revolution in the way we think about ownership."

The evolution of the social web, explains Botsman, first enabled programmers to share code (Linux), then allowed people to share their lives (Facebook), and most recently encouraged creators to share their content (YouTube). "Now we're going into the fourth phase," says Botsman, "where people are saying, 'I can apply the same technology to share all kinds of assets offline, from the real world.' [..] The central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them.

The earliest of these marketplaces, like Freecycle and CouchSurfing, encouraged the exchange of goods among peers for free. But the latest sharing platforms are anchored in commerce. They have the potential to amass a new ecosystem of entrepreneurs, just as eBay once aggregated fragmented buyers and sellers into a global online marketplace. Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013"

Also industrial production itself tends to become more automated, services-like, less dependent on labor, with higher degree of knowledge input as it develops, hence the political power distribution in the society will shift according to services no matter what.

The Economist: "Development [for poor countries] typically involves moving workers from low-productivity activities such as subsistence farming to high-productivity sectors. That points to a shift into manufacturing because it lends itself to specialisation and economies of scale [..] Services, in contrast, appear to be a graveyard for productivity. Because a haircut or a restaurant meal has to be delivered in person, there is almost no potential to exploit economies of scale and to export [..]

That conventional wisdom is now under fire, in a book edited by Ejaz Ghani of the World Bank [..] The authors argue that technology and outsourcing are enabling services to overcome their former handicaps. Traditional services such as trade, hotels, restaurants and public administration remain largely bound by the old constraints. But [new age] services, such as software development, call centres and outsourced business processes (from insurance claims to transcribing medical records), use skilled workers, exploit economies of scale and can be exported. In other words, they are just like manufacturing. If that is the case, then poor countries should be able to go straight from agriculture to services, leapfrogging manufacturing [..]

In poor countries as a whole, services have contributed more to growth since 1980 than has industry"

Great news. As we wrote before in Bloodshed and the Roman Empire [..] According to Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong? Bin Laden talks about a saddening point in time in history and mentions the year 1918. Most people in the world do not know the significance that year, but people in Asia Minor know it very well. It is a great day (in my view) because it's the time when the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed. Sadly what came in its place wasnt that great either, but I am just glad that the old archaic structure finally disappeared. Now what do we have here? Rome Version 3.0, which represents another authrotic, despotic marriage between centralized religion and state, this structure collapses and Bin Laden is SAD ABOUT THAT. This is the same Bin Laden who is responsible for thousands of deaths in 9/11.

Nuf said.

We talked about how lots of data can make a difference in some application, not in others. But of course, more data is always better than none. I am trying to find data on Earth's crust, its composition in a resolution of, say, down to 100 meters.. and there is none. We have the tools to store, visualize, process and disseminate such data, yet we do not have data itself.

Maybe we need a data collection of effort on the scale of Google's StreetView for earth crust data (as well as other things) w/ ppl poking equipment in the ground all over the world.

We still lack a lot of data like this that can be used by scientists, amateur or otherwise. Researchers funded by taxpayers are also sitting on data that can be useful for modelers, we saw this in Scholarly-Industrial Complex post). Releasing data to all can do magic, the Goldscorp example in Wikinomics book (Donald Tapscott) comes to mind.

Peter Lax: "It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which modern applied mathematics has been shaped and fueled by the general availability of fast computers with large memories. Their impact on mathematics, both applied and pure, is comparable to the role of the telescopes in astronomy and microscopes in biology".

"You read that correctly--Bezos is betting on nuclear fusion, the holy grail of nuclear nerds everywhere. Today's nuclear plants generate power from fission, a process that splits atoms to release energy as heat.[..] The amount of hydrogen isotopes found in one liter of water could generate the power of 1,000 liters of gasoline. Some of the hydrogen isotopes for the process can be found in seawater, and others can be found in lithium. This means that nuclear fusion should be able to provide virtually unlimited amounts of clean energy. [..] There is also no risk of meltdown or production of long-lived nuclear waste. In other words, there will never be a nuclear fusion Fukushima disaster.

In the past, no one has been able to create a controlled fusion reaction that creates more energy than was used to start it. So General Fusion certainly sounds a little crazy in saying that it can. But the company is confident, claiming that it will have a full-scale proof-of-concept fusion generator within four years"

"I finished reading In The Plex, a great book on Google. There were some interesting passages on how some Google employees went to Washington, their experiences, the animosity they drew in while they were there. Their experiences is a perfect example of the conflict between two waves. Two waves are different from eachother as oil and water, they cannot mix, and eventually one will rise to top and replace other (the older one always loses). Some important paragraphs:

They joined a team of techie Obamanauts who saw their job as bringing the digital tools of empowerment to Washington. [..]

But when the outsiders like Stanton hit the nation’s capital, they went straight into a buzz saw of illogic, bad intentions, mistrust, and, worst of all, obsolete gadgets. Not only were they chained to outdated Windows computers, but they were denied the Internet tools they had come to rely on as much as breathing. Rules dictated that there could be no Facebook, no Google Talk, no Gmail, no Twitter, no Skype. (Even the president had to fight to retain his BlackBerry, and the one he wound up with was slowed down by security add-ons and cordoned off to all but a few designated texters.) “I’d been going a million miles an hour at Google,” she says. “And suddenly there were all these rules. Where you can put content. The Presidential Records Act. Terms of service agreements.” [..]. Not long after she took the job, Stanton did a reply-all email, which was common at Google. At the White House, someone took her aside and reprimanded her. [..]

The job was frustrating. Google hadn’t been perfect, but people got things done [..]. One of the big ideas of Google was that if you gave engineers the freedom to dream big and the power to do it—if you built the whole operation around their mind-set and made it clear that they were in charge—the impossible could be accomplished. But in the government, even though Stanton’s job was to build new technologies and programs, “I didn’t meet one engineer,” she says. “Not one software engineer who works for the United States government. I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t met any. At Google I worked with people far smarter and creative than me, and they were engineers, and they always made everyone else look good. They’re doers. We get stuck in the government because we really don’t have a lot of those people.” [..]

At a conference in January 2010, Stanton expressed her feelings about the difference between the White House and Google. “Working in government,” she said, “is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags.” Whereas Google was collegial, working for the White House was like a season of the reality show Survivor, whose motto was “Outwit, outplay, outlast.” [..]

[M]any of the Obamanauts’ dreams seemed to dissipate. Julius Genachowski’s efforts to extend broadband coverage met resistance at every turn. He did manage to get some billions of stimulus-related dollars devoted to building out broadband. But his efforts to enforce “net neutrality”—ensuring equal treatment of Internet services by providers such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast—were blocked by the corporations and even the courts. [..]

Both the government and Google found themselves targets of the powerful communications companies, who had used their power to profit from a system where Americans paid more for and got worse Internet service than much of the rest of the developed world.

The corporations spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to make sure that regulations would not impede their efforts. They funded think tanks to create studies that attempted to prove that the current U.S. broadband coverage really wasn’t so bad. (What’s wrong with being twelfth out of the top twelve economies in the developed world?) One organization the corporations helped finance, called Consumer Watchdog, created a blog called “Inside Google” that demonized every move from Mountain View, from Google’s China policy to its ad quality algorithm. Opponents of Google characterized net neutrality as akin to communism.

Katie Stanton felt she’d had enough. “I feel like I’m a vegetarian trapped inside the sausage factory and it’s kind of ugly on the inside,” she said in the spring of 2010. In July, she left the State Department and took a job at Twitter. [.. T]here was one thing she could not understand. For all the love that Google got from its users and all the support that the Obama administration had gotten from Google, actually being from Google was almost like a handicap. “I was shocked at how much it almost hurt me,” she said. “Sometimes people treated it like a criminal record.”"

"The body of a girl thought to have been murdered by Roman soldiers has been discovered in north Kent. Archaeologists working on the site of a Roman settlement near the A2 uncovered the girl who died almost 2,000 years ago. "She was killed by a Roman sword stabbing her in the back of the head," said Dr Paul Wilkinson, director of the excavation. "By the position of the entry wound she would have been kneeling at the time."

The Roman conquest of Britain began in AD43, and the construction of Watling Street started soon afterwards linking Canterbury to St Albans [..] Dr Wilkinson said that she had been between 16 and 20 years old when she was killed, and her bones suggested that she had been in good health. [..]

The burial site was just outside the Roman town, with cemeteries close by. Many people have a romantic view of the Roman invasion, Dr Wilkinson said. "Now, for the first time, we have an indication of how the Roman armies treated people, and that large numbers of the local populations were killed"

Wired: "On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45. [..]

How hard could it be? Howard Eisen had been a federal employee, so his work rightly lay in some sense in the public domain. And Jonathan, as an heir, presumably owned copyright anyway, along with his brother Michael (also a biologist, and one of PLoS’s founders). Yet to the brothers’ continuing chagrin, Jonathan has found securing and publishing his father’s papers to be far harder than he expected.

For instance, even though Jonathan has access to the enormous University of California library system, which subscribes to a particularly high number of journals, he often can’t even find some his father’s papers. And when he finds a paper in a journal the university doesn’t subscribe to, he is asked to pay as much as $50 to read the paper — even though his father did the work with public funds. He’s not alone; one recent study found that even most university researchers have access to only about half the papers they need to cite for a given bit of research. Just yesterday, in fact, Jonathan asked on Twitter if anyone could send him a copy of one of his father’s paper and confronted a paywall asking for his credit card number. “I ain’t payin’,” he replied.

So for now, his father’s work remains buried in an old structure — a calcified matrix. Though Jonathan bangs away at the surrounding rock, he knows he hasn’t really pried the work loose. This frustrates him on two fronts: It stops him from freeing his father’s work. And it confirms to him science, which should be a fluid medium, has much of its content still trapped in old structures.

Jonathan Eisen’s quest has solidified his conviction that science needs to radically rework the way it collects and shares its data, methods, and findings. He has plenty of company. A growing number of prominent scientists want to replace the aging journal system with something faster, cheaper, and richer. The current system, they note, grew out of meeting notes and journals published by societies in Europe over three centuries ago. Back then, quarterly or monthly volumes could accommodate the flow of ideas and data from most disciplines, and the printed journal, though it required a top-heavy, expensive printing and publishing infrastructure, was the most efficient way to share those ideas.

“But now,” says Jonathan Eisen, “there’s this thing called the Internet. It changes not just how things can be done but how they should be done.”

[..] ‘I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, … of consulting the same authorities, … as the richest man in the kingdoms,’ is today within reach. With the Internet, we have the means to make humanity’s treasury of knowledge freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around the world.” “The existing system worked well for quite a while,” says Jonathan Eisen. “But it was not designed by theory. It was designed by constraints.” In a world that provides communications conduits far larger and faster, those constraints have now made science’s traditional pipeline a bottleneck. [..]

Why don’t we do [open] science [..] all the time? Part of the answer, strangely, is the very thing at the center of science: the paper. Once science’s main conduit, the paper has become its choke point.

It’s not just that the paper is slow, though that is a huge problem. A researcher who submits a paper to a traditional journal right now, for instance, won’t see the published piece for about a year. She must wait while the paper gets passed around among editors then goes through rounds of peer review by experts in her field who might and often do object not just to her methods or data but to her findings and interpretations. Finally, she must wait while it moves through an editing, layout, and publishing pipeline that itself might run anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks.

Yet the paper is not simply slow; it’s heavy. Even as increasingly data-rich science has outgrown the paper’s ability to deliver and describe all that science has to offer — its deep databases, its often elaborate methods — we’ve loaded it up needlessly with reputational weight and vital functions other than carrying data.

The paper is meant to be a conduit for the real content and currency of the science: the ideas, methods, data, and findings of the people who do science. But the tremendous publishing and commercial infrastructure built around the academic paper over the last half-century has concentrated so many functions and so much value in the journal that the paper itself, rather than the information in it, has become science’s main currency. It is the paper you must buy; the paper you must publish; the paper you must cite; the paper on which not just citations but tenure, reputation, status, and even school rankings are built"

I am catching up with my writing after a short break since I am in a tropical island that sometimes loses its Internet connection - whazzzup!. In The Plex has a very detailed account on how Chinese government broke into Google's computers and stole some of their proprietry internal software.

What the Chinese have done is perfectly on code. The culture code Chinese assign themselves is RECIPROCITY, meaning that do unto others as they do unto you. And, combined with some weird interpretation of their own history, this is the result, plain and simple. The Chinese view of history is that they developed an advanced civilization, made great strides in science and technology, and Westerners stole everything from them. And now due to RECIPROCITY, they are only paying the Westerners in kind. They stole things from us, we steal it right back from them.

There are also few additional factors, e.g. a Chinese student learns from his master / teacher, by copying. This is a sign of respect, but, the major factor is the code outlined above. Clotaire Rapaille who came up with this code goes as far as saying that it is not unfathomable that one day the Chinese government nationalize all foreign assets in China, and kick all foreign companies out -- he recommends a "short term strategy" in China for these companies.

Note: He made a similar prediction for Venezuella pre-Chavez which turned out to be correct.

" In a recent debate with Stephen Downes, I spent some time going through dozens of papers and meta-studies showing that the lecture is a largely disastrous pedagogic technique, devoid of formative assessment, diagnosis of student understanding, actual teaching or inspiration.

I wasn’t surprised at the qualitative nature of Stephen’s response, as I’ve heard it many times before 1) that lectures are not about ‘teaching’ but ‘showing practice ’i.e. what it’s like to be a physicist, whatever, 2) some lectures are good e.g. Martin Luther King’s speech etc. and 3) lectures must be good as they’ve been around for so long.

I don’t buy any of these arguments as 1) that’s not what lecturers or students think, expect or require, 2) the fact that a chosen few can do something well (like surgery or any other form of expertise) doesn’t mean that it should be done by everyone 3) slavery was around for millennia but it doesn’t make it right – you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. [..]

Academics will go to great lengths to defend traditional lectures [..] However, there comes appoint when the evidence [..] must win out. This paper points towards something that decades of research have confirmed, that there must be a rethink on lectures. We may then have a chance to dramatically change teaching in Higher Education for the better, also making to cheaper. In other words, get good teachers to teach and let researchers research."

"You might not be able to play Portal 2 on it, but a new product from the British nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation aims to put a working computer into children's hands for the ultra-low cost of $25 per device. [..] For average consumers, don't expect this computer to look anything like what you're used to seeing on your desk, in your lap, or stuffed in your messenger bag. [..] But it's certainly a computer. In fact, the 700-MHz ARM11 processor slapped on to the tiny piece of silicon, roughly the size of a USB stick, is a faster chip than what was originally found in Apple's iPhone 3G—just to put it into perspective.

A total of 128 megabytes of SDRAM joins the processor, allowing the super-tiny system to run a variety of Linux versions. [..] "In theory, they could be given away to the child, with other ways of funding it," said Braben in a YouTube interview. "What they would do with it is they would be able to engage in a lot of things that we're all consumers of but not actually creators of: Understanding how you put together little scripts that might run websites, that might look at things like Facebook and Twitter, also email.""