Ross Mayfield points out some disturbing facts about the boy scouts movement:
"Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts ban atheists and gays. With the supreme court granting the right to private civil society organizaitons to be exclusive, extreme interests are balkanizing. Again, this is a market with few sellers."
I guess this is no surprise from the organization that has historically shared some of the styling and aspirations of the Hitler Youth.
On my honor, I will do my best | csmonitor.com
How could you have made more than 10 times your money in less than a year, subsequent to the .com crash? - by buying stock in a .com
Last July Ask Jeeves teamed up with Google to have Google supply advertising alongside search. The deal replaced Overture and involves a revenue split between Google and Ask Jeeves, with the majority going to Ask Jeeves.
Since most of Ask Jeeves' revenue comes from this, and since most of Google's revenue comes from similar, this is a vicarious way of tracking Google's performance while they are still a private company.
The results are outstanding, Ask Jeeves is now worth 13 times what it was before the deal with Google.
Contra Costa Times | 07/19/2002 | Ask Jeeves, Google team up for profits
Dave Winer: "Anyway, I don't see any killer apps in the RDF crowd. I see lots of people with strong opinions and not much software."
Lets face it, this is true. But the fact that it is true hides something absolutely extraordinary.
From the way all of our brains are configured, to the way every language on earth has subjects, predicates and objects, to the way any box of any form you fill in on the web has a URL a label for the box and a value you type in - all these things are what the model of RDF is about. There is something profound about a non-hierarchical messy network and triples - I suspect it is the way our brain is wired and the way that any language or information based upon this wiring has to be expressed. So why aren't people using RDF, where are the apps and does it matter?
The ideas of the 'semantic web', increasingly the 'pedantic web' will eventually come to fruition. For it to happen there are two possibilities: either everyone agrees on standards that then get readily adopted and apps. built upon them, or it happens through a trial and error process of selection and adoption of successful elements.
Because the first route is not working, the slower pace of the latter process is making more headway. Some of the key components of the promise of RDF and more generally the semantic web are evolving, quite naturally around publishing tools - and specifically the tools that publish information easily and in an environment where graph-like links between sites are prolific.
There is no killer app for RDF but there is a killer app for what it was trying to do - the weblog publishing tool.
Before 911, the most serious impact on day-to-day life in the West might arguably have been a result of globalization. But globalization and its effects are still an issue: "The recent gyration in the prices of oil and other primary products was related to concerns about the Iraq war and terrorism and masks the trend of falling prices."
The former vice minister for international affairs in Japan's Finance Ministry thinks that there is a general trend towards global deflation caused by the information and life sciences revolution and globalization.
Cheap goods from China and India may once again account for nearly half the world's production after almost 200 years. He argues, however, that if deflation hits the US it will be nothing like as destructive as during the 1930's.
"The world is shifting from an era of structural inflation to one of deflation, in which prices for most manufactured goods and tradable services fall rather than rise...
...But the new wave of price falls has more in common with the mild deflation of the 1880s - which was associated with big productivity gains - than with the Depression of the 1930s...
...First, a wave of rapid technological innovation centered on information, telecommunication and biotechnology is changing economic and social systems in a fundamental way. This can justifiably be called the Third Industrial Revolution, as it is comparable to the industrial revolution of the late 18th century and to the second surge of technological progress in communication and distribution in the mid-to-late 19th century...
...Second, globalization has been dramatically altering the patterns of production, distribution and transactions. The re-emergence of former economic powers, particularly China and India, is helping to drive this increase in productivity and output..."
IHT: A global shift to deflation
Nick Aster points out that the 'World Council on Tall Buildings' (straight out of the X-men) decided that the Petronas Towers in KL are the tallest building in the world despite the fact that the Sears tower in Chicago is blatantly taller.
"Measured to the top of the radio masts, Sears' height is 1,518ft, which easily eclipses Petronas' 1,483ft. Trouble is, the masts on top of the Sears Tower don't count, but the mast on top of Petronas' does. Hmm, confused? The masts on the Sears tower are not considered to be a part of the actual building, so the official measurement stops at 1,450ft. So Petronas gets the crown."
Jeff Jarvis is sensibly skeptical of conspiracy theories:
"I never buy a conspiracy theory, for I argue that the world -- and especially government and especially big business and very especially big media -- are simply not well-organized enough to conspire. That's why synergy doesn't sell. No, I don't believe in conspiracies."
Given that: a. conspiracies, as a subset of mysteries, are seductive and intriguing; b. people who think alike will independently behave alike, without having to go to the significant bother of conspiring. One can assume that the universe of claimed conspiracies is much, much larger than the number which are real.
But I still think that Michael Jackson's behaviour plausibly points to him having been abducted by aliens.
So Howard Stern reads Gawker every day!
I can't even get my parents (known respectively as the 'old man' and 'old dear') to read mine.
Jeff Jarvis: Attention Howard Stern fans
Interesting empirical study of rules of meme spreading from looking at weblog postings, from the excellent Microdoc News. via Doc Searls
"Rarely can an individual blogger get a story going."
"The best blog stories are those that are branded with a word or phrase that is highly identifiable with that story."
"The stories that get going are not usually subject specific blogs but stories that cut across all interests of the blogging community."
"When bloggers action is not requested, most often stories get up and running for longer."
"Perhaps the last conclusion we came to in this study is that blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared. "
Microdoc News: Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story
James Dyson (inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner) has created a waterfall that creates the illusion of water following an endless spiral uphill.
BBC NEWS | UK | How does Dyson make water go uphill?
Western economies are largely becoming service based economies, and irreversibly so, the US cannot compete globally in manufacturing and production, as witnessed by the huge subsidies to farming or steel manufacture.
What if many of the services that rely on information technology are not economically viable in the long run? What if never ending cheapness created by the applicability of Moores Law and lack of scarcity in digital media conspire to create hyper-deflation?
Kevin Werbach recently delivered "the notion that many media organizations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of ‘scarcity’". And we can see that the music industry is just one example of an area that is in dire trouble because of the efficiencies of zero cost manufacture and distribution.
Cory Doctorow explained the economics of the inspired fictional 'Whuffie' based economy as: "I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics looks like. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with the management of resources that are scarce. If it's valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted]. Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn't a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep shit grass -- where the more you graze, the more commons you get."
Is the future bright where the tragedy of the commons is removed in an information economy? Certainly it seems that the utopian ideal of free grazing for all is possible. But the difference is that this only works for virtual goods such as information, there will never be free grazing, free food, for all because tangible goods will still abide by the economics of scarcity. On the other hand, for information, although the tragedy of the commons has been removed, it means that all ground might as well be common. In the short term this all sounds great, all the things that the US is famous for, from Rock and Roll to Software become cheap and plentiful. Software necessarily becomes open source, the radio spectrum open and music free. But if food and clothing can't become free and if it only pays for western economies to outsource unsubsidized production to poorer countries, then how do the domestic proletariat earn money to feed and cloth themselves?
Of course this dystopic view is a huge generalization and the US economy does far more than pump out bits and bytes, but what if the current fears of deflation were caused just in part by the opening up of the commons for everyone's enjoyment.
"Richard Dawkins perhaps provided the best visual for our link to chimps," Fouts told Discovery News. "Imagine taking the hand of your grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the women would be holding the hand of a chimpanzee."
This is not what Dawkins said and is complete BS. rather like saying "Imagine a chimpanzee taking the hand of her grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the chimps would be holding the hand of a human".
Chimps and humans share a common ancestor, we are not decended from chimps any more than chimps are from us, but we share an ape ancestor.
Discovery Channel :: Study: Chimps Belong In Human Genus
Although deflation strikes fear in the minds of governments (the principal economic stabilizing mechanism, interest rate adjustment, is no longer viable) and bankers ("because a zero rate would roil money market funds, which rely on a positive interest rate to cover their own operating costs") it is ordinary people who would lose out most.
Low interest rates on mortgages may have created a false euphoria where people believe they can afford house prices that would normally be out of their reach. Deflation could spell bad news for anyone with debt, such as a mortgage, as the value of the debt would increase over time. For the poor, who often rely on extortionate loans just to survive, let alone buy property, the effects could be crippling. In the early 19th century in Britain, social unrest brought on from the effects of deflation almost caused a revolution.
Deflation Hints Feed Talk of Radical Fed Tools
Europemedia on a virtuoso Kevin Werbach performance:
"The notion that many media organisations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of 'scarcity' is as radical as it is true. As weblogs provide a rival to newspaper columnists, P2Ps topple record companies, open spectrum enables everyone to become a broadcaster and TiVo makes advertisers shudder."
Europemedia.net: News - TVMW Seminar: The Kevin Werbach experience
"Whereas Dr Wildman's team find that chimps and humans are 99.4% similar, other researchers last year put the similarity at around 95%; the figure you get depends on precisely which genetic differences you look at."
DNA mechanisms for reproduction are not a blueprint but a recipe. This BBC article does not mention that the 95% figure for chimp vs. human comparison takes into account how the recipe is followed and therefore may make more sense. i.e. it does not merely look at the ingredients of the recipe, the DNA sequences, which have usually indicated more than 98% concordance.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps genetically close to humans via Kottke
"Contrary to popular myth, Walt Disney did not choose to be frozen, though Dick Clair, a writer for "The Carol Burnett Show," did."
In case anyone misinterprets the previous post defending Matt Ridley's attack on those (such as Bill Joy) who see absolute dangers in innovation such as nanotechnology and concludes somehow that I am against environmentalist causes.
1. It is scientists who are arguing, backed up by solid evidence that we need to cut back pollution.
2. It is politicians, particularly those with religious beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence, that refuse to believe evidence for issues such as global warming.
3. Although industry is the product of a technological society and is the cause for most pollution: a. there is a difference between science and the abuse of its innovation; b. contrary to popular opinion, non-industrial societies can be environmentally damaging; c. some scientific innovations would seem to be a very plausible way to reduce the environmentally damaging effect of industrialized society (for example, information technology increases opportunities for virtual communication and the need to burn fossil fuels for transportation).
Science means knowledge, and the opposite of knowledge is ignorance. A little or a lot of ignorance is a bad thing.
Matt Ridley very sensibly rebuffs the Bill Joy like hysteria in the latest doom mongering book, 'The Final Century':
"Consider what would have happened, for instance, if we had somehow waved a magic wand and prevented the invention of agriculture. Evidence suggests that increasingly efficient hunter-gatherers would have continued their extinction of prey species - they had already devastated the fauna of Australia, the Americas and many islands - stopping only when the last tree in the last rain forest was felled. Rees admits in passing that "the most dramatic engines of current economic growth - miniaturisation and information technology - are environmentally benign", but then fails to follow this thought."
Telegraph | Arts | Prophet or pessimist?
Like half of America I left the real world and re-entered the computer generated Matrix for a couple of hours of sensory overload this weekend. And perhaps San Francisco is fashionable again. How effortlessly the Prada wearing New Yorker types Trinity and Neo slipped into beads and hemp for their trip to Burning Man, sorry, Zion.
I'm not really a science fiction fan, however, the Matrix reloaded did remind me of one of the most priceless moments on TV, 'the hippy episode' of Star Trek where Spock becomes sentimental and plays a Vulcan Harp with a flower behind his ear.
The Matrix Reloaded (kottke.org)
It seems that Rube Goldberg is the American Heath Robinson, or is Heath Robinson the British Rube Goldberg? Either way, great commercial, shame about the car.
Honda's New Accord via Azeem Azhar
The Internet has revolutionized genealogy, however most people can only trace their family tree back to the beginning of the 19th century.
The price of genetic tests is dropping exponentially and it is now possible to test markers on Y Chromosome (male lineage) and Mitochondrial (female lineage) DNA to show where you came from over a 100,000 year timescale for $200.
What is so special about genetic genealogy is that it almost entirely dispels racist ideology. Although first identifiable humans appeared 2M years ago and spread throughout the world, all of us are descended from around 20,000 people who left Africa around 100,000 years ago. Although the Chinese government may insist that different races evolved from earlier hominids we are in fact all Africans.
While in the UK I met with the maker of The Journey of Man a documentary which tracks the ultimate genealogical goal, the trail of humans as they migrated from Africa. A new series of documentaries is being planned which will undertake the most ambitious genealogical study in history.
Back from the UK so the current hiatus here should be over. Despite the evidence from stocky hirsute Scotsmen like myself recent DNA analysis has all but proved that Human's did not interbreed with Neanderthals.
Blow to "human-Neanderthal inter-breeding" theory
Creationist dogma will be taught alongside evolution in a second UK school, despite the fact that even the Pope seems to accept the evidence for evolution these days.
"Evolution will be taught, other theories will be taught and children will be left to take a view of it themselves."
Creationism may be called a theory by some, but to compare creationism to evolution is not comparing like with like. When scientists refer to a theory, they mean something that there is evidence for. There is no evidence for creationism, it is a hypothesis and a hypothesis for which there are alternatives with evidence - theories.
The earth beneath our feet often looks the same color and texture as bullshit, lets call this the bullshit creation hypothesis. In this case, if children are to be taught all of the hypotheses of creation then we should teach them that the earth may be made entirely and quite literally out of bullshit.
I don't think we should teach children bullshit theories.
A web browser is at its core a simple thing, a few lines of PERL and you can write a very basic one. What is important about a browser is its elegance and simplicity and its reliance on simple standards like HTML or server logs etc.
Weblog tools can be simple and elegant and they too rely on simple standards however they are not formalized and this is getting scary. At first glance I can think of four key pseudo-standards for the writeable web. Getting these right will surely have huge implications if weblogging is anything like as important as web browsing:
1. The Meta Weblog API - needs to be modular.
2. Pings from posts (make weblogs.com the principal server and post the whole message)
3. RSS - freeze on 2.0 with slightly tweaked core and generic XSLT to create RDF if needed.
4. Permalinks (oh yes) - standardize formats and ability to alias through purl.org etc.
"In principle blogging promises us something close to Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of a writeable web because anyone can create their own constantly-updated site."
It seems that even the mainstream press are now saying that weblogging constitutes something more important than personal online diaries. Weblog tools are how you publish online and are as important for publishing on the Internet as the browser was for, well, browsing. Perhaps just like the word browsing effectively means reading things on the Internet (or we'd be gophering), blogging will mean publishing on the web, publishing anything, not just a diary.