The Longest Now

I am constantly amazed by the froward march of technology · to a beat · you can’t touch.     So when it was decided to solve the world’s problems by allowing children and people to collaborate on every topic in the world, except war, I thought that was pretty fantastic.  OLPC is a step in that direction – Much as I have tried to do every imaginable thing with my XO,  war is right there in the small of my conceptual back that I just can’t scratch… even with the XO’s ears locked pointy-side out.

So you can Imagine my delight when that most famous of all Beatles, childhood idol John Lennon, dropped by to support this idea.  And this wasn’t any John Lennon, it was Reanimated John Lennon, the most accomodating instance of John Lennon in the known universe (easily identifiable by the glint of sunlight passing across his cheek when he grins).

He was captured on tape speaking reanimatedly about changing the world.  Spooky!  Before I could catch him to ask about the skills of peace, he was gone.

Simson Garfinkel recently penned a meandering piece on Wikipedia and Truth which never gets at the heart of either subject.

Wikipedia does not claim to define truth, and tries to avoid doing more than describing what others see as truth — which could lead to an interesting discussion of reflection, meta-levels of truth, the difference between truth and awareness, or between tight and loose asociation.  However, most of the words of this essay are spent describing mundane aspects of Wikihistory and article editing.  A familiar grapelike aroma permeates — the author confesses at one point being chastised for editing his own biography.

Natural contextual parallels — a discussion of the meaning and value of truth in various other media; modern press, journals, texts, lemmas, Theorems, and Laws — are not drawn.  When you digress to share the full history of Wikipedia and are limited to four pages, there isn’t much room for analysis.  But it does make me pine for a proper review of accuracy, precision, consistency, accountability, fact checking, reproducability, and reputation in the modern collective intelligence.  Much of what I read and hear today — from experts and amateurs alike — is partly misguided or misinformed.  (Experts tend to gloss over what is not known, or pretend recent disagreements don’t exist; amateurs tend to privilege new ideas and discoveries.)   In few places outside of math and hard science is there even a clear process for steady improvement with an eye towards closure, rather than simply expanding the heap of random facts on which contenders draw and the space in which they flail.

So let’s hear it for Truth and its pursuit, and those who care for it.  And let’s hope they draw useful inspiration from projects such as Wikipedia that identify a way for millions to do better than thousands, with room for iterative improvement.

…because he doesn’t mind when the chips are down, and can be mighty funny.

Bonus: When Photo Credits Go Bad :

Seen on the latimes blog : “Photo credit: Somebody who’s dead“. Why is it so hard to get these things right?  Isn’t this what photo archivists are for?

1 Drowning Street : differentiating market performance from the health of the economy.

Bringing down the House : People cared deeply about the inner workings of the House of Reps surrounding Monday’s failed bill… their website bowed under the attention.

My friend Seth (of zombie infocalypse infamy). who has been working on content and community media for our educational laptops, has just started a part-time internship with Yochai Benkler‘s new research group, and migrated his blog to this server.  Welcome, Seth!  We’re lucky to still have him at OLPC.

Infoseek: Finally, people visiting this blog are searching for some fascinating things:

– “things you never knew existed”
– “the desire to understand”
– The c’t Wikipedia comparison post (still popular even in other languages)

and my favorite,

– how does a hair dryer electrocute you

Our interconnected global economy is built on the illusion of trust.  Gautama himself would be impressed by how far we have advanced the texture of societal illusion.  While there are certainly many non-illusory sources of trust, the trust most modern men have in our financial instruments and currencies is based on a blind association of “interest rates”, “inflation”, “market valuation” and similar concepts with a hazy set of economic laws, as though they were fundamental laws in the sense that one discoveres Mathematical or Physical Laws.   Not social norms that could change on short notice; not starting rules of nomic games of risk and manipulation; not Massively Multilayered Online Resource-Permuting Guidelines, hundreds of indirections removed from the original social norm of personal credit and unenforcable on any large scale.  They are perceived instead as Laws, discoverable and immutable.  Not quite.

For better or worse, we live in fascinating times.  Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day.  A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:

• Sunday: an unprecedented 4-hour Sunday afternoon org-to-org trading session, part of “last-ditch efforts to prevent toxic assets from ailing Lehman Brothers spilling into global markets and rupturing investor faith in the international financial system”.   The result: only $1B in trades, slightly less panic the following day, and a loosening of the shared global trust in unwavering financial regulation.
• Sunday night?: Banks are told they may use deposits to fund their investment bank subsidiaries, flaunting Federal Reserve Act Section 23A. potentially stabilizing failing banks at the cost of risk to individual investors.
• Monday: a ‘dramatic loosening’ of the standard for federal loans to banks, potentially stabilizing them at the cost of dramatically increased risk of government losses.  Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s S&P AAA rating is vulnerable. Shared global trust in regulation dips.
• Tuesday: The Fed lends $85B to AIG, after refusing them $20B over the weekend.  True, AIG isn’t a bank, but see FRA Section 13(3).  AIG uses ‘all of its assets’ as collateral, giving the Fed an 80% stake.
• Tuesday: the FDIC feels the crunch, says it’s ok for a while, but makes a medium-term request for a $500B line of credit.  Why?  Well, while there are over $6,000B in bank deposits in the US, more than half of them FDIC insured, banks report less than $300B cash on hand. And the FDIC reserve is down to $45B, only enough to cover ~15% of the difference in case of a widespread bank run.
• Wednesday: Banks may count goodwill as capital when meeting regulatory requirements for capital onhand.  This allows a deepening of the leveraging of assets of troubled banks, which only caused trouble during the S&L crisis; what’s different now?
• Thursday: After three Reserve Fund money market accounts drop below $1 a share, Putnam‘s Prime Money Market Fund shuts down to avoid losses.  It’s been a while.
• Friday: The Treasury pulls out a few more stops and assigns the $50B in the Exchange Stabilization Fund to current money market funds.

Updates as the week progresses.  The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.

Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold. (more…)

Please come to the first US storytelling jam, at UNICEF HQ in Manhattan, this Fri-Sun.  We begin Friday night at 6 with introductions and drinks, and continue through an intense schedule Saturday (10-10) and Sunday (10-6), wrapping up in the late afternoon.  I hope to see all of you New Yorkers there, and folks from the region; there are a handful of us coming up from Boston in the afternoon if anyone from these parts wants to travel together.

Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.

Everyone has heard of a few occasions when a major publication or
journal has an author or paper accused of plagiarism or copyright
violation.  Theoretically, the quote of even a short recognizable
excerpt from another’s work — a three-word characterization, a
one-term neologism, a 100-pixel icon — falls somewhere on the spectrum
of illegality from impolite non-attribution to outright theft.

Book authors have been roasted over this particular fire for a few
sentence-long sentences lifted from one or another source.  These
days, three notes is in some court cases enough to identify a bit of
creative work and indemnify someone who reuses it without
permission.  In theory, fragments far shorter than a sentence
could be every bit as illegal to reuse without great care.

The open secret of the history of creative work, authorship, and
copyright, is that significant portions of ‘original’ work have always
been copied without attribution, in some sense, from others. 
Modern copyright is continually being violated.  Early
dictionaries and
encyclopedias and compendia and histories were often quite brazen in
borrowing from previous works with no attribution.  Authors of
philosophy, poetry, and even fiction have similar issues; in a field
full of 100-word poems, could borrowing a few two-word phrases, rhyming
schemes, or conceptual conceits possibly go unnoticed?  This was
not always an absolute evil.  Attribution was not always desired
or even possible in the context of publication.  How does one
footnote or attribute one’s style, use of epithets for public figures,
choice of jargon? 

And when one has learned material from a few
dozen sources, compiled it in one’s own head, and synthesized it into
something “new”, how can that possibly be entirely separate from the
specific word-choice and thematic structure of what has been
read?  A significant % of authorship choices inevitably hearken
back to the choices made by those whose work has been read or watched
or listened to.  In practice, people often do less synthesis than might be ‘optimal’ in the legal sense. 

If one is writing to pursue a specific end other than the legal enforcement of copyright,
is it not right for others to come and use whole parts of one’s work in
a better way, demonstrate rearrangements and substitutions that yield
the best possible result?  This is not at all the same as allowing
anyone to reuse the entirety of one’s work without attribution. 
It is different from the kinds of freedoms offered by modern
‘copyleft’.  Key elements of the trouble with modern copyright
come from its not being subtle enough; from presuming too much; from
imagining every problem as a nail for its well-used hammer.  Some specific thoughts:

• Some very basic form of “financial protection from wanton
  copying” should be granted to all authors by default; under any
  provisions whatever (100-year, &c).
• Some forms of “protection from world-readability” should be
  available on request; with a well-organized database of works so
  protected.
• Some forms of “protection from being quoted, or having short
  segments reused or repurposed” might be available under restrictions
  and time-limits, again on request.  This is already an unusual
  provision to ask for publicly-distributed work.
• Some forms of “reduced/waived protection for reusers sharing some
  larger purpose” —  use under ‘a similar license’, use towards a
  specific goal (such as education, narrowly-defined).

Boston will host Wikimania 2006.  Details to come.

Boston it is …

Some multilingual thoughts on a sunny day:  a UN history of massively parallel interpretation, and some old gathered advice on breaking into simultaneous interpreting.

Stewart Butterfield, asked about his role models, mentioned a few people who had inspired and guided him, including Wittgenstein, which philosophical bad boy was acrobatically allmost connected directly to Flickr. 
And to all you playboys and social barnacles out there : throwing fancy
dinner parties and making political connections will be the end of your
creativity and great ideas.  The audience was full of
Flickr’philes.

And Tracey Ho, as understated as she is hot, admits that despite believing she would spend her live in civil service
in Singapore, and doing just that after college, she came back around
to academia and was lured back to MIT and now Caltech.  It was
good to see the civil service come up as an important life-choice
option among these young stars.

The ‘late show with our moderator’ format didn’t work perfectly, but it
brought out a lighter side of the TR35 members and helped make the
awards ceremony more than just a show.

Hurricane Rita is apporaching the Gulf Coast, and will hit land somewhere between Texas’s Corpus Christi and New Orleans. 
Galveston, one of the country’s largest ports (New Orleans was the
largest), is the most vulnerable target, despite its protections
against normal storms.  Parts of Houston are also at risk, and the
early evacuation of Houston has lead to much of the clogging of roads
in southeast Texas.

The GFDL (an acronym for “Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory“),
is one of the key modern hurricane path-predicting models.  It is
a “limited-area baroclinic” model developed specifically for hurricane
prediction, including convective, radiative
and boundary layer parameterizations.  It makes special allowance
for
initializing the storm circulation.

GFDL is a ‘late‘ model, meaning that it is run with hard data, and not
with interpolations from earlier data… as of 10pm last night, the GFDL had Rita passing through central Houston and veering west once it comes level with Fort Worth.

GFDL places Rita directly over central Houston …

Some Wikimania coverage in English :

• Deutsche Welle (Wikimania hits Frankfurt)
  
• Danny Schechter (Beyond an encyclopedia: What
  Comments Off on A few quick media links
  
  

Address: Elizabethtown, NY 12932
Campground Phone: (518)942-5292

It’s no Heart Lake, but it’s moughty fine all the same.  Update:
Light, cascading showers!  Porters who smoke packs while running
up and down the mountain, as found about Kili, were nowhere in
sight.  Great fun was had by all.

The biggest lapse in the recent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galazy film wasn’t its disconnection, unbelievable romance, or score. It was Marvin, who the director, like trillions of others before him, didn’t understand. Marvin didn’t annoy merely with his voice and his sarcasm; he was a master of timing, annoying by waiting exactly the right number of milliseconds before responding or doing anything.

It is remarkable, how much meaning one can put into a pause, or a well timed step, look, twitch, or breath. Life can be lost or thrown out of joint by less. I’m not sure that hell is full of pain and suffering and lack of freedom. Worse would be the constant promise of freedom, curtailed by a stream of mishaps or reality shifts outside one’s control; I imagine Sisyphus’ unlife as complicated to the point that he can never be sure that success is truly outside his control.

For instance, for the last two weeks, ‘net access has been flaky. Not bad enough that Verizon techs can catch it when I call, but bad enough to cut me off a few times a day and interrupt a half-dozen important conversations. (We need to develop the network equivalent of a UPS for stateless services…) So I have to decide each night whether to go down to the campus lab to work, or stay home. Or to go to the theater across the street with superb wireless.

So that’s where I went yesterday night. There were too many people everywhere; I needed to get away. What a great atmosphere a movie theatre has for doing work. I could have camped out there all night, but I don’t think they would have approved. Maybe they should consider opening a side business after hours.

Thanks to greyhound racing and long-past temporary insanity, I will be antilaxing at a lavish de villa tomorrow, or in some sort of canadian bishopric, with a small casket of librarians.

I tried to put a positive spin on this, but rura quickly shot me down.

   No, you won't be special.  you're not a librarian.  

Gnaaaaaah. I certainly hope the Europeans are there over the weekend, or I will feel silly about the whole thing.

Which is better, a ride on an Airbus A320
or one on a 757? I’ll be doggoned if I don’t know the answer now, for all kinds of interpretations of better.

…not what you think.

BBC Backstage …