A Networked World

Is Google building a 3D map?

OK, maybe its not, but I think somebody is.

For the last couple of nights, around 11PM (NZDST), while sloshing in my spa pool, I have spotted 3 satellites flying in exactly the same formation in a circumpolar orbit.

Two of them side by side in the lead, I would guess about 10 miles apart and a third following about 40 miles behind (I may be out by a factor of 10 given the other variables) in an isoceles triangle. Seeing them all in the same formation on two different nights argues for deliberate, to maintain that relationship for more than a few seconds they have to be in exactly the same orbit and exactly parallel tracks.

Any ideas?

Towards the new normal

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

• We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
  
• We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
• Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
• Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
• Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
• Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
• The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
• Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
• We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
• We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
  
• Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

• Low energy dismantle-ability
• Repurposing all manner of manufactures
  
• Building things that can be applied to new uses
• Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills
  

What else?

eDay, because every machine eventually dies

Among my tasks is to co-ordinate the Auckland sites for eDay - Cleaning up New Zealand's eWaste!

Recycling electronic waste (e-waste) enables the recovery and reuse of valuable materials and ensures toxic materials are not buried in our landfills - so it's better for our environment.

eDay is a cars-only drive-through recycling event which gives you the opportunity to recycle old computers or mobile phones in an environmentally sustainable way.

Over 16,550 cars dropped off 87,056 items during eDay 2008. A total of 946 tonnes of e-waste was diverted from our landfills. This year we hope to divert over 1,000 tonnes of e-waste from New Zealand landfills.

eDay 2009 is to be held on Saturday 12th September 2009.

If your old machine is sputtering and collapsing, here's your chance to unload it in an environmentally acceptable way. Oh, and if you have half a day spare, we could do with some more volunteers

The linearity problem

Yet another great link from Johnnie that triggers something. No straight lines

I enjoyed Alan Moore's slideshare from Reboot Britain, No Straight Lines. It's worth taking a good look.

Al kicks off with a very funny story about a train journey and an iPod that I won't spoil by summarising. And goes into a passionate diatribe against the limits of linear thinking.

Its not just the lack of linearity that we need to accept, its the lack of sequence. Also not wanting to screw up the joke.

But we almost never learn anything in a stepwise, linear fashion. We grab bits of it passing by, and fiddle with our understanding of them, and sometimes for a long time we "just don't get it" because even when we have all the bits they are like a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, the picture is there but we can't 'see" it.

And some people never do. Especially, paradoxically, those who are best at stuff like computer programming where sequence and excruciating detail is critical. Then one day, apparently without any relevant input, we "get" it.

And I suspect that is where, god help me, real innovation occurs. Someone has most of the bits, but can't make them fit so they create a bit, a new bit that didn't exist before but which connects the thing in an entirely different way

And because the world is NOT a jigsaw puzzle, what happens is that the new bit makes all the old bits fit together in different ways as well. Which is why change can be so disorienting.

We recognise that many of the old bits are there but they are somehow distorted in ways we don't understand. So the response of those who were comfortable with the old ways things worked try to pretend that the old bits still work in the old ways, that its just their perception that is wonky; because to accept that the whole world is wonky is just too much of a challenge.

We are, in effect, betrayed by the proximity to familiarity that wouldn't happen if we, say, suddenly moved to Tanzania and had to learn Swahili to survive. When we shift our entire domain we recognise its foreignness, but when that shift happens around us it takes time to adjust to that suspiciously familiar but actually completely different reality.

That seems to me the problem with peak Oil, with Climate change, with the end of western financial capitalism, it all still LOOKS the same, or closely enough to fool us into believing that we don't have to change anything to deal with the problem.

Wrong.

And one more point about non-linearity, it entails outputs that are grossly inconsistent with the inputs and apparently disconnected from them.

Embedding the payment option

One of the challenges of Micropayments has always been that the transaction costs quickly exceed the transaction value, and that makes great sense for the transaction processor and is totally stupid for everyone else. I've never understood why Telcos, which have solved the micropayment problem years ago didn't put their transaction management services online for everyone and make a bundle.

Well, actually, that's not true, I know why they didn't, it meant losing control of the thing that mattered most to them, the services on the network. As soon as they encourage others to use their payments systems they implicitly encourage others to create services that the Telcos don't own and THAT was anathema.

So, once again, they get trumped. PayPal’s New ‘Open’ Payment Platform Gets Microsoft’s Endorsement

PayPal has ... it’s got its eyes on the newly booming apps and cloud computing market.

The eBay-owned company is opening up its platform to third-party developers this fall, so that everyone from individual app-makers, to social gaming companies and software startups will be able to plug global payment options into their applications from the start.

That means users in different countries, with different currencies, and even on different devices (including mobile phones and set-top boxes) will be able to start paying for apps and services as quickly and securely as they’re used to doing on the desktop.

And during the kickoff of a developer training session for the new “PayPal X” platform, it got an endorsement from arguably one of the most powerful companies in software development today: Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), which announced that it will be supporting PayPal X in its own cloud-computing platform, Windows Azure.

If they can enable us all to embed a payment option such as 'flick earl 20c for an interesting post" or "that YouTube video was worth 10c" and if they can make it simple enough for bunnies like me to USE, they will be on to something really interesting.
Video version

Wasting their time

The thing I like about the net is that everyone gets to have a say, even pontificating jerks like me, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. Given the underlying mischievousness of so many net based stuff, I'm betting this is a have. But if it isn't, the StupidFilter is a cool way to waste their time.

The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise.

HAH! The net has ALWAYS been littered with drivel, egos, flame wars, cods, gags and stupidity. Get over it guys.

The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

Diddums. What we USED to have was a filter called the media but it too has largely joined the baying, as distinct from Bayesian, pack of  pavlovian droolers

It's time to fight back.

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Yep, this is a send up.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

Wot? No Twitter filter?

Seriously, they should read Shirky, the net IS the filter.

In other news, Michael Jackson, having been dead for a number of years, has finally decided to lie down. The media is full of, even more than usual.

Back to the garden.

Update: I fed this page into the filter and it picked not one as stupid.

Fail.           

Jeff Jonas is an idealist

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this look at how Jeff Jonas Explores the Nature of Data

On a trip to Washington D.C., Jonas spoke with a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst at a governmental agency. "What do you wish you could have if you could have anything?" Jonas asked her. Answers to my questions faster, she said. "It sounds reasonable," Jonas told the audience, "but then I realized it was insane." Insane, because "What if the question was not a smart question today, but it's a smart question on Thursday?" Jonas says.

The point is, we cannot assume that data needed to answer the query existed and been recorded before the query was asked. In other words, it's a timing problem. "I said, 'What are the chances you could have every smart question, every day?'"

[...] Jonas related an example of a financial scam at a bank. An outside perpetrator is arrested, but investigators suspect he may have been working with somebody inside the bank. Six months later, one of the employees changes their home address in payroll system to the same address as in the case. How would they know that occurred, Jonas asked. "They wouldn't know. There's not a company out there that would have known, unless they're playing the game of data finds data and the relevance finds the user."

This led Jonas to expound his first principle. "If you do not treat new data in your enterprise as part of a question, you will never know the patterns, unless someone asks."

[...] Getting smarter by asking questions with every new piece of data is the same as putting a picture puzzle together, Jonas said. This is something that Jonas calls persistent context. "You find one piece that's simply blades of grass, but this is the piece that connects the windmill scene to the alligator scene," he says. "Without this one piece that you asked about, you'd have no way of knowing these two scenes are connected."

[...] But large numbers can also work against you. At another federal agency (he wouldn't say which), Jonas got to thinking: What if they had a very large data warehouse in the basement with 4 exabytes (EB) of data, and it was expanding at the rate of 5 TB per minute. "You sit there and you realize you don't get to Friday night and run a batch job to answer the question of what does it all mean," he says. "You could use all the computing power and energy on Earth and you wouldn't be able to do it." The "it" he is referring to, of course, is seeing how each new piece of data affects all the other pieces of data.

"What's happening is data volumes are growing at this pace, yet an organization's ability to make sense of them isn't keeping up," Jonas said. "Today, say you can make sense of 7 percent of what's available, and in a few years it might be 4 percent, and in a few years after that it might be one percent. So the percentage of what's knowable is on the decline."

[...] "I think the only way forward is going from applying algorithms to individual transactions, to first placing information in context--pixels to pictures--and only applying algorithms after one sees how the transaction relates to the other data," he said. "It's the only way that I can see that it's going to close this sense-making gap."

I can see three problems here at least that Jeff can't solve and which continues to give me hope that Big Brother will drown in his own data.

1. The counter terrosim expert problem is not that she can't get her questions answered, nor that, as he asserts, she needs to know what questions to ask and when to ask them. Her problem is that even when she has the right answers to the right questions, they wont be actioned unless they help with “fixing” the data around the policy
2. His approach essentially requires that the organisation and its management continuously reconstruct their view of reality and constantly work without a context into which to fit the data because, by definition, the next bit of data could collapse and reconstruct that picture as something completely new. The level of self confidence that would take for people whose lives depend on structure, order, process, CYA best practise and, above all, control, is wholly at odds with the kind of people you recruit to fill those roles. Oh, and
   
3. You still can't know everything. The data you have can only tell you so much, but the data you are not collecting is what will kill you.

Jeff is, no doubt, a seriously smart guy, but he is also a technologist who believes in the perfectability of human society through technology. But while we are driven by greed, fear, ambition, hatred and pride, fixing our ignorance wont change anything.

Doc Searls still on the cutting edge

With the 10th anniversary edition of  Cluetrain coming out, Doc is trying to keep up with postings that mention it. Trainfeed spotting

But the meat of the post is this bit.

... my son Allen came up with the “Live Web” line way back in 2003, and correctly observed that the Web of sites was essentially a static one, and that the World Live Web would branch off of it.

The language alone is a give-away. The Static Web is full of real estate language: sites, domains and locations that you architect, design and build. While the Live Web is one with feeds where you write, post, update, syndicate and now also tweet and re-tweet. To me the differences between static and live are much clearer than those between ______ (find a word) and real time.

Here's a word, history. Ossified, fixed, outdated are pretty good too.

But I love the idea of the World Live Web which, I think we'll see, is a function of bandwidth. In dialup days web p[ages needed to be relatively fixed because the constant chatter between server and client would be too much for the bandwidth to manage.

Grow that bandwidth and suddenly the conversation becomes possible and whenever we can converse, we will.

And the control freaks, freak.

Good

On not getting Twitter

My colleague Shelby Wright (not her real name) just unloaded this email on me in response to Time magazine putting twitter on its front page.

I get it but  ...  I don't get it  ...  ie Twitter . This has made me deeply unpopular in certain digitally inclined circles

My first line of defence for  being openly cynical of Twitter is to hide behind  William Blake
" The art of being wise is  the art of knowing what to overlook "

The point here is

I have NO interest in knowing if someone is picking their nose with their left or right hand and what they had for breakfast

Moving on

I have some very fundamental concerns if the sum total of peoples relationship with the world around them is  solely governed by 140 characters or less - whether it be twitter or text messaging

And Shelby is not alone in decrying the triviality and mind-numbing insignificance of a lot of Twitter content. I wont even argue that the people I follow such as Tim O'Reilly or Euan Semple or OCR Report etc are useful, informative and mercifully brief in their pointers to good material. Its irrelevant because its the wrong question.

What we need to be asking is "what about Twitter and txt is so very attractive to us about these tools?" They fail entirely in the multimedia, all singing all dancing broadband world of opportunity yet they take off like rockets.

I have a theory about why this is so, my wife Linda who is a speech/language pathology lecturer and linguistics specialist has a theory about why so many people like us (excessively verbal opinionated extroverts with huge vocabularies and masses of information to backup those opinions) are so inclined to get pissed off by trivial stuff like txt and Twitter.

Mine first.

These tools match perfectly the way we acquire and share information.

Outside the prolixity of bloggers there is a universe of human utterance that is short, inconsequential and completely essential to maintianing relationships and sharing crucial information about status, leadership, consensus etc. I'd give good odds that the average length of these utterances is 140 characters.

But this is nothing new. For a generation we have been listening to news headline bulletins that are effectively Tweets to us from the world. The BC does its World News in a minute bulletin many times a day. Here's one

• The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he will not walk away from his job, he responded to mounting pressure on him by bringing forward a reshuffle of his top team. 174 characters
  
• At the same time there have been more high profile resignations from Mr Brown's government, among them was the transport secretary Geoff Hoon. Five cabinet ministers have quit this week with one publicly calling for he prime minister to step down. 247 characters
• President Obama has visited the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald during his visit to Germany. The US president described the camp as the ultimate rebuke to the people who would deny the holocaust. He said such views were baseless ignorant and hateful. 260 characters
• At least 35 people have been killed in a suicide attack on a packed mosque in the north west of Pakistan. Many others were injured. It happened in a remote village in the upper Dir district 190 characters

Take out the necessary glosses like "The British Prime Minister " and "The US president" and you see what I mean.

Then there are elevator pitches, comedian's one-liners, wisecracks, repartee, gossip (OK, maybe not that one) rumours, an endless supply of short, pithy material slipped off the tongue and into the brain with speed economy and great effect.

These information tokens are vitally important to us and when we find new ways to exchange them we dive in boots and all. Hence the usually unexpected success of Twitter, txt, even email. We can object all we like but when something works we are fools to reject it.

Now Linda's theory about why some people get so seriously uppity about this stuff.

Its about status and communication modes. We have been taught, especially the oldies, that there is a palpable difference between spoken and written communication.

There's a formal and structural difference, a difference of context, intent, the whole shebang. And for those of us who are good at both, the ability to switch is a matter of pride but its also a shibboleth; a matter of distinction and pride. And its entirely artificial.

We are now using, in a very public sphere, language forms that have been much more intimate and others are responding in kind. That is feeding acceptance and attracting more users and so we go exponential; because it satisfies important emotional and communication needs that are encoded into the dna.

What this technolgy is doing is breaking down the distinctions which can also be sources of power, and those of us who benefited from the previous status quo get antsy about it.
 
Perfect example. Linda talks about how she is a descriptive linguist, interested only in the evolution of language and how it manages relationships, conveys meaning, yadda yadda. Right up till something someone says gets right up her grammatical or semantic nose, at which time she becomes a prescriptive linguist and is due for a serve from the husband about hypocrisy, inconsistency, more yadda yadda. To which the reply is usually along the lines of "tough, get used to it"

On the seriously plus side, I think tools like txt and twitter are possibly enabling us to use the same kinds of communication that have helped bind us into couples, families and communities over very short ranges, ie intimate voice distances, to apply those capabilities over much wider ranges. The ability to bind over great swathes of the world may very well undermine hyperlocal tribalism just as Chelsea fans have to cope with "their" team being made up of 22 players from 18 countries speaking 4 languages and cheering them on anyway.

This post will be automatically Twittered. Because its a good idea.

/2c

Innovation summit - a paradox

A while back we had a jobs summit that produced one good, original idea, a national cycleway from the top of the North to the bottom of the South. Incidentally a great way to lay a national fibre backbone. Since watered down to regional cycle bits of ways that would eventually be connected. Mhmm. Thhpbpbpppttt!

So yesterday they gave it another go, calling together 100 'entrepreneurs' to brainstorm new ideas for lifting the country out of the economic mire. Blue sky thinkers focus minds, spirits in quest for brainwaves.

Boooorrrriiinnnggg.

But in any case, this ain't how it happens. A summit, by definition takes the top people, innovation, by definition, breaks top people. Paradox. What we got was a bunch of oppertunists (that IS what an entrepreneur is yes?) wanting to stay on the bandwagon, and more power to them; but we need to be looking somewhere else.

On top of that the world has changed, the successful people from before 2007 are the very ones who are failing now, some of them spectacularly. To assume they are the people we should be asking for ideas doesn't hold water. And if an angry shouting, sorry, marketing campaign, free air travel for rich people and possum shooting are top of the list, we are sunk.

So what should we be doing? The first thing is to try to tap into the permanent floating innovation pool that is the internet and find ways to attract ideas to our economy.

Here's an idea. A publicly owned, Open, venture capital Kiva, using community funds from the Government. It goes like this

1. The tax department sends out a letter to everyone with a tax file number. It includes a password and a URL. Use all three to login to a website for Open Business plans These people are the investors (their taxes will be the seed funds so they get a say) My mate in the UK Ross Gardler has the model and has built the software, we could tweak it a bit. - the link is not direct to his site for reason that will be obvious)
2. Anyone from anywhere who thinks they have a good idea can propose it. It can be as complete or as vague as you like. (Johnnie would be in favour of that)
3. The posting serves as proof of ownership unless someone can show prior art. Simplified IP as far as we can get.
4. Anyone can critique the idea and offer suggestions.
5. Anyone can offer resources, additional funding, services, bid for roles in the business etc, attach their CV's
6. Any proposer can take the business private at any stage by putting up the money.
7. Any tax file holder can vote on whether its a good idea and at the end of the month the government hands over $50k to the top 10.
8. The money goes into an account (any bank) and must be managed through an online accounting engine such as Xero to which anyone has read access until either the company goes broke or repays the $50k (which part of OPEN didn't you get?)
9. No GST (VAT) on any of the transactions through that account while the balance is below $50k or for the first year, whichever is first.
10. Nobody gets more than one chunk of change in any one year unless they repay their original investment - if they flip the company for a profit, good on them, if they make a fortune and want to try again, good on them. Success should not be a barrier.
11. All proposers are rated according to the success of their previous ideas on the site. Failure doesn't preclude more funding next year, but it is recorded.

It would cost us $6 million a year to float 120 companies whose ideas, pretty much by definition, would not get funded by anyone else. It woudl also act as an audition service for peopel without to engage with other business people and generate their own businesses.

It really saddens me to see people with 20 and 30 years' experience in business, so-called middle management and higher, complaining because they can't get a job. With all that experience, how come they aren't creating new businesses for themselves? God knows there are plenty of them around. Maybe if we had a marketplace for business ideas, with potential funding attached, in which anyone could play, not just those already successful, some new stuff might happen.

Hell, if these people can do it, why the hell can't we?

Update, here's another reason why senior people are the wrong ones to have leading the process. I comes from the Matthew may document linked from Johnnie's post. One of the thinkign omitations he identifies is Stifling

... years ago I played a dirty trick on a group of managers at a fairly large organization. Through my consulting work, I had discovered that a particular set of individuals of the command-and-control type were causing some fairly serious issues: some extremely lucrative opportunities were being dismissed, each at a high “lost opportunity” cost.

Root cause? these individuals to a person would not allow their subordinates to have ideas. they had various ways of shooting ideas down. (read a great manifesto here called “100 ways to kill a concept: why Most ideas get shot down”) this group of managers took issue with my report. luckily, an upcoming off-site presented me with the opportunity to prove it to them.

At the off-site, there were about 75 people of varying degrees of seniority, ranging from field 
supervisors to senior execs. I gave the assignment, one of those group priority exercises 
whereby you rank a list of items individually and then as a group and compare (sort of a “wisdom 
of crowds” exercise to show that “we” is smarter than “me”).

This specifc exercise required you to rank 25 items with which you’ve crashed on the moon in relation to how important they were to your survival. NASA had compiled the correct ranking, so there was a clear answer. I did the exercise with a twist. at each table I put a ringer. I gave the lowest-ranking person the answer. it was their job to convince the command-control types they knew the right answer.

During the group exercise, not a single correct answer got heard.

After debriefng the exercise in the regular way, I had each person to whom I had given the correct
answer stand up. I announced that these individuals had offered the right answer, but their ideas 
had been stifled, mostly due to their source and stature and seniority, or lack thereof.

That's why. Getting people who have a vested interest in the status quo the right to decide about how much that status quo is disrupted is stupid on its face.