Aku Aku

Where 2.0

I've been at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference yesterday and today. I'm too lazy to be live blogging it but if you're interested, Chris Pirillo is doing a great job on his blog. There's been some interesting talks and demos (a few by friends of mine, good job Sean, Schuyler, etc) that I might point to later.

server of the crowds

This post has been sitting in draft form for a couple of weeks now while I've been busy travelling the Eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.. I figure I should just go ahead an post it as is and finish up my thoughts after my trip concludes. A few months ago I made a prediction that user-created web app features would be a "next big thing" soon. I still believe this and thanks to some new popular developments I've managed to find a few better ways to explain it. You could think about it as server-side greasemonkey. Where greasemonkey allows users to add new features to a web site (and share them with other users) via client-side scripting, what I'm prediciting will allow users to do the same thing on the server side. There are advantages of this, in terms of ease of distribution/access, increased capabilities and performance. And of course users could still use greasemonkey for further features. Here's an example. Lately I've been caught up playing the Guess Where game on Flickr. Photos are uploaded to a group pool, such as Guess Where SF for San Francisco. Local residents try to guess where the photo was taken. Here's some features that would be nice to add:

• Score keeping: Who has the most correct guesses? What's the average time to achieve correct answers?
• Hide the answers for photos (so you can play even if you come late to the party)
• Add maps for located photos
• Enable/disable display of in photo notes
• When you upload a photo, input a set of hints that players can access after a certain time (if they like)

If Flickr had some sort of server-side scripting that allowed users to add these features they would probably be created within weeks. What do they gain from this? They'd gain more users who stick around longer and a more feature-rich site. They didn't have to do any market research, development or even come up with the ideas themselves. So if I'm right about this, the question arises: what's the minimum amount of functionality you need to provide to build a killer website built by the wisdom of crowds? Is it just a user login system, data storage, the serverside scripting API and perhaps a theme for general direction (for example: photos)? Maybe you don't even need the theme, just let it emerge naturally. Perhaps set up a dozen generic servers and see what happens.

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever

Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever by Ray Kurzweil. You can take this one straight from the subtitle: it's Ray Kurzweil's brain-dump on how to live long enough to be alive when science finds the cure for aging. I've said many times to anyone who'd listen that I'm pretty sure we might be the last generation to die of old age. If not us, then our children. I'm confident that my grandchildren will be able to read this blog entry on their 200th birthday. (aside: Hi kids!)

I sat next to Kurzweil today at the Accelerating Change conference and asked him a few questions about the diet. He told me I looked great for a 95 year old! :) I've been on the diet for about two months now and I'll be doing another post soon with details about how that's going (hint: great).

Wisdom of Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki I'm not sure why I started to read this book, since I'd already absorbed the bulk of it through osmosis since its concepts have permeated the Net-geek community that last couple of years. Still, I'm glad to have read the actual source. As for the thesis of the book, that groups with the right attributes can consistently make better decisions than even the smartest individuals, it's spot on. And the book piles on evidence (both scientific and anecdotal) to support this. Go crowds! In fact I'll have a blog post coming up soon that goes into how I think this will shape an upcoming trend in web applications.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

I was reading this one during my trip to Vietnam and Thailand last year: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Corporate Cons, Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters by Greg Palast. It made me so mad I almost didn't want to come back. It should be required reading for all citizens of the United States. Greg Palast does a rare thing in these days: actual investigative journalism. He uses the same methods as private investigators to uncover the truth. And the truth is as ugly as you fear it is.

Dr. Strangelove's Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius

I forget where I picked up A Brief History of Economic Genius by Paul Strathern, but I'm glad I did. It is an entertaining and engaging romp through the history of the study of Economics. This was a big hole in my education thus far in life and I thoroughly enjoyed running through the cast of characters (and there were some real characters) that have contributed to the development of economic theories. After finishing reading it, I decided to go back and take notes in outline form. I never quite finished this project and I reasonably don't expect to finish it any time soon. So what I'm going to do here is paste in the notes for how far I have gotten and then link to the Wikipedia entries for the people whom I have not filled out details for. See, I'm only half slack. Actually, I also thought of taking the Wikipedia entries for these folks and parsing out just the bits about their contributions to Economics and releasing that as a wholly-derived wikipedia online "book". I need to look into the licensing issues with that. Here it goes: concept of zero arrived in europe c. 1200 from the Levant Luca Pacioli b. 1445 double-entry bookkeeping - caused rise in the understanding that "Everything has a price" Leonardo da Vinci learned maths from Pacioli (housemate c.1497) Rise of Mercantilism response to economic troubles - Run the country like a business - a countries wealth == how much gold it has - foreign trade, but not with neighbors Spain sees first Inflation - discovers mile wide mountain of gold in Potosi, Bolivia - increased coinage in Spain causes prices to rise 400% John Becher, Mercantilist b. 1635 in Germany - phlogiston theory (negative weight) - turn beaches of Holland to gold Tulip Mania - 1500's, vienesse ambasador returns from turkey with tulips - 1562 amsterdam goes into tulip business - prices of tulips skyrocket - in 1611 Bourse established (first modern stock exchange) - concept of buying options introduced (buy an option to buy at specific price at a later date) - 1635 single bulb of Semper Augustus sells for 3000 florins - 1637, as Europe's Thirty Years War was reaching its heaight, and money was starting to dry up, some dealers started quietly cashing in their profits - market collapsed, first specualtion bubble in history - "Gambling must always have winners and losers. Speculation can temporarily separate this conjunction. It is possible for everyone to win (as the bubble expands) but this means it is also possible for everyone to lose (when the bubble bursts)." John Graunt, Father of Statistics b.1620 London - haberdasher - studied details from City of London Bills of Mortality to learn the extent, age and composition of his market - Bills of Mortality started being generated during the plague, when officials wanted to determine if the plague was increasing or decreasing - Bills of Mortality also included numbers of all children christened - invented staisitcal infernece to reason the infant mortality rate - began studying maps of london, made further inferences to determine number of people living in every 100 sq yards - thus was able to calculate population of London at 384,000, which today is thought to be more accurate than the contemporary official # of 2M - created life expectancy chart - 1162 published Natural and Political Observations made upon Bills of Mortality (regarded as the founding of demography) - Londoners feared lightning, he showed them they were twice as likely to die by mad dog bite - Elected to Royal Society at the insistence of King Charles II William Petty b.1623 Hampshire - studied medice and became professor of anatomy at oxford at age 28 - a year later he became Chair of Music at Gersham College in London - a year later became chief medical officer for the army in Ireland - soon talked his way into leading an expedition to map all of ireland - recorded every scrap of land, the owner, and the land's worth which was set as 20x the annual income it produced from farming or rent - three years after completing this venture he owner <50k acres of land all over ireland - wasn't very popular and had bad eyesight. once when challenged to a duel he chose a dark cellar and great battle axe as format - became very wealthy from land/rents - joined parliment - became interested in economic theory and translating it into a field of mathematics, as newton had done for astronomy - he recognized the moral effect of economics, but cared more for ultimate results than who might suffer in the mechanism - was first to try to calculate wealth as a factor of Labour. much as land, he was to say a Man was worth 20x his annual production - this allowed the value of either to be expressed in terms of the other - could calcualte the loss of a nation in terms of deaths (from plague or war) - felt that money was "the measure of society and could be used to control it" - meaning there was no need for kings or priests - introduced Graunt to High Society - familiar with anatomy and the circulation system, felt money was the blood of the nation - money must flow to all parts, and parts ignored can harm the whole body, hence employement should be created by the government in the forms of public works - Petty's Law: as an economy develops, the percentage of the population in service jobs will increase - believed that too much money in the economy was like too much fat in the body, unhealthy - a worker who had surplus money often ceased to work in pre-industrial age times - contrary to mercantilists, he judged a nations wealth by the flow of money rather than savings - published Quantulumcunque Concering Money which outlined his views - tested his theories on his irish estates John Law b. 1671 Edinburgh - by 1720 the richest man in history! - known as Father of Paper Money or Founder of our Monetary System - was born son of a goldsmith - goldsmiths of the time provided simple banking services like cash on deposit and loans - "the notes given by these goldsmiths to depositors were earliest form of paper money in british isles, though not legal tender" - grew up wealthy, with expensive tastes and a skilled gambler - killed a man in a duel over a dispute about the kings mistress and was arrested, then snuck out of jail and the country - moved about the continent (probably under assumed names) in high society gambling circles, womanizing over the next decade - he was free with his money (he won a lot) and considered unspent money only a potential. money (still coins of metal) was meant to be used - in Paris met Lady Catherine Knollys and eloped (although she was already married) - travelled to Amsterdam (then the financial cetnre of europe) and observed the latest mechanisms: - banks issuing loans secured by titles to land - much about international trade (Dutch East India Company) - returned to scotland (where he was not wanted like in England) which was reeling from the failure of the Darien Expedition to build a canal in Panama - published Money and Trade Considered with a Proposal for Suppluing the Nation with Money - money needed to be used/spent to keep economy healthy - when there is not enough money credit notes can be used - land can be used to back these paper notes (since scotland had no mines for precious metals) - was accused of plagarism by Chamberlen who had run a land bank in England and had run out on it, becoming also wanted south of the border - Chamberlen had powerful friends so Law came up with a new idea, back the notes by the confidence of the gorvernment to repay in the future - such as by taxation - this type of money know called Fiat Money, from fiduciary issue (fiduciary from latin for "confidence"), is what all money is in modern times - the new idea was also rejected, and soon Scotland joined with England causing Law to run back to the continent - eventually he was able to bring his idea to the Regeant of France Phillipe II - France was in bad shape from the reign of Louis XIV (wars, building of Versailles, etc) - May 1716 Law opened the Banque Royale with a grant of 6M livres from the throne (only 350,000 in actual coins, the rest in notes and state bonds) - started a checking account system for xfer of money between accounts - was allowed to print paper money which could in theory be exchanged for coins - the paper money was extremely popuplar: it was easier to carry and hide - people rushed to the bank to change coins for paper, law was forced to print more money - government used paper notes to pay its debts, law printed more money - this money flooding the economy caused a consumer spending revival - Law started the Mississippi Company with a grant from Phillippe II of the entire Lousiana Purchase - in 1718 he sold shares in the company with the intent to mount expeditions to the New World to recover the vast gold deposits of Lousiana (ha) - Rue Quincampoix (the street for small bankers and loan sharks) became awash with investors trading in stocks of Mississippi Company from all over - by late 1719 over 380M livres of paper money had been printed, with less than 1/10 of that in the bank as solid assets - by mid 1719 the original 500 livre shares of Miss Co were trading for 5000 livres, eventually reaching 12000 - so many people, even commoners, became wealthy in the stock exchange the word "millionnaires" was coined to describe the new rich - Law's methods soon became known as the System - he eventually controlled all of the governments finaces including tax collection - the influx in cash had provided full employment for all french people - the extra money pursuing limited goods started to raise prices, as much as 75-300% - people spent cash unlike they had spent coins, theaters and the like prospored, consumerism ruled - Law tried some tricks - first he declared a 10-livre note was worth twice a 10-livre coin - later as things got worse he announced notes would be devalued by 50% over 6 months - he also declared Miss stock would be reduced from 9k to 5k - people flocked to buy shares as they were reduced less, but since price was fixed, they became in effect money - pretty quickly people panicked and the bubble burst - The System failed but it succeeded in some ways, debts were repaid, seeds of democracy were sown, there were more property owners. France was better off - Law left France in fear of his life, was granted pardon in England but had to leave Lady Catherine behind. Died soon later supporting himself as a gambler in Venice John Blunt and the South Sea Company Bernard Mandeville De Moivre Francois Quesnay Adam Smith David Hume Condorcet Robert Malthus Jean-Baptiste Say David Ricardo Comte de Saint-Simon Robert Owen Jeremey Bentham John Stuart Mill Karl Marx - sold his pants for a box of cigars Friedrich Engels Karl Friedrich Gauss Francis Edgeworth Leon Walras Vilfredo Pareto William Jevons Alfred Marshall Knut Wicksell Thorstein Veblen - Wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class Joseph Schumpeter - Kitchin Cycle - Juglar Cycle - Kondratieff Cycle John Maynard Keynes John von Neumann George Marshall John Nash Milton Friedman

Futebol: the Brazilian Way of Life

I picked up a copy of Futebol the Brazilian Way of Life by Alex Bellos at the suggestion of a friend before I moved down to Brazil in February. I knew next to nothing about soccer and even less about Brazil. It turned out that this book was a wonderful way to learn about both, but especially the latter. It reads more like cultural essays than a sports history although there is probably a lot there for the longtime international soccer fan. It goes into the modern financial and political realities of the sport, the spiritual and religious aspects, the deep national and personal identity wrapped up in what happens on the pitch, and even a foray into the bizarre sport of motorized football that was a mix of demolition derby and soccer. When I lived in Brazil for three months, on many occasions I understood something only because I had read about it in this book. I can't recommend it enough for a non-Brazilian who plans to live there.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

I've been pretty bad about keeping up with my reading list here like I intended. I'm going to try to catch up now with a lot of books I've read over the past year. Unfortuantely since they aren't fresh in my mind my comments will probably be less than pithy, but this is more for my record than anything else so I apologize for filling your aggregator with crud. One of the better ones was Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright. I saw Robert Wright talk at the first Accelerating Change Conference back in 2003. That is still one of the best conferences I've ever attended, and Wright's talk was one of the best ones there due as much to his witty delivery as the content (I've got it on DVD if anyone wants to borrow it). The premise of the book is that there is a clear direction of human history, and that it is towards ever more complex non-zero sum games. A non-zero sum game is any social interaction in which the participants outcomes are intertwined in such a way that they can both lose or both win. A zero sum game is one where if one participant is winning, the other is losing. Wright makes a convincing case as he tracks the course of human civilization through the different levels of organization around the globe (how refreshing to read a history of humanity that doesn't consider only Greco-Roman's human). The latter part of the book takes these convincing arguments for cultural evolution and shows how they fit when layered on top of biological evolution. I love that fractal shit. This book fits in nicely with my curent philosophies drawn from The Lucifer Principle and The Global Brain.

a sailor's life for me

There are a handful of songs that I'll bellow (you can't call it singing) when I'm driving alone on the higway and they're playing on the stereo. "Story of My Life" by Social Distortion, "Web in Front" by Archers of Loaf, "Super Sex" by Morphine, "Brandy" by Looking Glass.... The last song has been running through my head a lot lately. The lyrics start off

There's a port on a western bay
And it serves a hundred ships a day
Lonely sailors pass the time away
And talk about their homes

and end with a sailor's departing lament that as wonderful as his harbor town girlfriend is, his life, lover and lady is the sea. I'm not quite that smitten with the sea (Mie is my life, lover and lady) but I have always wanted to be a sailor, especially since arriving at this western bay and watching the ships crisscross the waters every windy weekend. Fantasy became reality this week when I completed Basic Keelboat Sailing I at Spinnaker Sailing. I now know the basics on how to rig and sail a 22' Santana sloop (the model pictured at the left) including tacking, gybing and a slew of other weird salty nouns and verbs (and knots). The two day course was even blessed with about as mildly perfect conditions for learning as you can find in the San Francisco Bay; 15 knot winds, calm waters, shorts & t-shirt air temperatures. This was especially fortunate as SF Bay is known as the most challenging sailing waters in the continental USA with normally much tougher conditions. I just need to schedule two more days of classes and take an ASA test and then I am certified at the Basic Keelboat level which means I can charter boats up to 24' in length. It's been fun listening to sea stories from experienced sailors. I always appreciate exploring a subculture that is somehow closely tied to the natural environment and man's interaction with it. I've learned how to read tide/current charts and spot the effects of Sacramento River drainage by floodlines in the middle of the bay. Of course, the stories of near-death are compelling too. One man related a tale of trying to make his way blindly through dense fog from north of Angel Island to San Francisco one night and ending up in the path of a tanker without much steerage, water crashing over the bow, an air horn that disintegrated when he tried to use it and an outboard engine that wouldn't stay running. Things were looking quite bad but in the end he made it out luckily. Today he sent me this story of an over-capacity sailboat that flipped over last night in front of a tanker in the North Bay, they were rescued by the quick actions of a tugboat crew that happened to be nearby: CARQUINEZ STRAIT / Tanker veers in nick of time after 8 boaters tossed into its path

Minutes later, engineer Jennings spotted a light waving in the dark about 400 feet away, and through binoculars he saw arms flailing in the water. Jennings yelled to his captain, Mark Farran, who turned on the tugboat's spotlight, and it instantly became clear the sailboat party was in the tanker's way. Farran radioed to the Prima Bow captain, urgently asking him if he saw the hapless sailboaters. "I heard him (the tanker captain) screaming, 'I see 'em now!' " said Farran, 48, and the tanker veered hard to port. "He was getting ready to take 'em out."

I don't think I'll be night sailing anytime soon, by the way.