How to become smarter in the New Year

For those who are still groping around for a useful New Year resolution, Wired provides a suggestion: Be smarter in 4 weeks!

Good luck, RAEM

Bringing the Web to Rwanda - Another flash in the pan?

The Spiegel online reports about an initiative by some American millionaire who wants to bring the Web to all Rwandans and who hopes that everything else will then fall into place. The Rwandan government meantime dreams of Rwanda becoming something like an African counterpart to India's Bangalore. Perhaps; but more likely, not.

Already before the IT-boom Bangalore was a thriving city with excellent research insttitutes and universities, such as the IIM Bangalore; it is home to several engineering colleges. India has a culture of education which is rivalled by few countries outside Asia. Bangalore has a population of about 6 million and a 52 billion $ economy.

Rwanda, according to the CIA World Factbook 2006, is "a poor rural country with about 90% of the population engaged in (mainly subsistence) agriculture". Rwanda has a population of 8.6 million and it is a 12.5 billion$ economy. The country's adult literacy rate is about 70 percent.

Leapfrogging may occasionally succeed; but few frogs perform miracles.

RAEM

Jaron Lanier is worried about online crowds and explains the Web 2.0 business model

Jaron Lanier warns his readers in "Beware of the online collective":
" What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis."

Here is his description of the Web 2.0 business model, the best description I have seen so far:
"The Web 2.0 notion is that an entrepreneur comes up with some scheme that attracts huge numbers of people to participate in an activity online ? like the video sharing on YouTube, for instance. Then you can "monetize" at an astronomical level by offering a way to bring ads or online purchasing to people in your gigantic crowd of participants. What is amazing about this idea is that the people are the value ? and they also pay for the value they provide instead of being paid for it. For instance, when you buy something that is advertized, part of the price goes to the ads ? but in the new online world, you yourself were the bait for the ad you saw. The whole cycle is remarkably efficient and concentrates giant fortunes faster than any other business scheme in history."

RAEM

RSS & Internet Explorer 7

The New York Times of Dec 21st 2006 explains how RSS feeds can be used with the Internet Explorer 7.

RAEM

Amazon is on the Wiki trip

Various sources - O'Reilly Radar among them - have reported that Amazon.com has invested in Wikia, a "vertical" wiki.
RAEM

Wikis: Where is the money?

Searching for material on business models for wiks I found only few useful sources:

"New web sites seeking profit in wiki model" in the New York Times of Sept 4, 2006

"Compose yourself: journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better" in The Economist of April 20th 2006

"The gory antigora: Illusions of capitalism and computers" by Jaron Lanier, CATO Unbound, January 6th 2006

The NYT points at two characteristics of wiki business models:
(a) "If wikis become a big business, some of that idealism may fade ? and consumers may begin to resent contributing to the sites free. So far, though, the sites are growing fast, thanks to dedicated volunteers."
(b) "But Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PBwiki, another make-your-own wiki site, said that it was still too early to determine what model would turn wikis into money-makers. ?Nobody has found the de facto business model for wikis,? said ?It?s kind of the Wild West.?

The article in The Economist is not exactly on wiki but the tip-jar idea, invented by Ohmy News in South Korea, may be applicable to wikis too:
"The site [Ohmy News] has a ?tip-jar? system that invites readers to reward good work with small donations. All they have to do is click a little tip-jar button to have their mobile-phone or credit-card account debited. One particularly good article produced the equivalent of $30,000 in just five days." {I could not find this feature at the Ohmy News International site}

According to Lanier: "An Antigora is a privately owned digital meeting arena made rich by unpaid or marginally paid labor provided by people who crowd its periphery."
Lanier insists that the web is at its core a cultural and not a technical artifact: "... the Net only exists as a cultural phenomenon, however much it might be veiled by an illusion that it is primarily industrial or technical. If it were truly industrial, it would be impossible, because it would be too expensive to pay all the people who maintain it."

RAEM

Intelligence from the blogosphere

Keith Schneider reports in the New York Times of Sunday, Dec. 17th 2006 on BuzzMetrics, a Cincinnati, OH firm that monitors the blogosphere for trends and sentiments that are relevant for consumer marketing.
According to Schneider, BuzzMetrics uses search engines that "retrieve phrases, opinions, keywords, sentences and images, and the company runs the data through processing programs powerful enough to sift millions of messages simultaneously. By analyzing vocabulary, language patterns and phrasing, the programs determine whether comments are positive or negative, and whether the authors are men or women, young or old. "

Nothing is said about whether the software can distinguish between people-blogs and robo-blogs. If it can't we might expect competitors try to fool each others by means of massive disinformation generated by robo-blogs.

RAEM

The bloggers react

On Dec 9th 2006 The Economist had a leader on "Ethical food: Good food?" and a special report on "Food policy: Voting with your trolley". The Economist made the point that non-conventional food production and trade, such a organic food, local food and fair trade may not achieve the environmental objectives they purport to achieve.
I thought that much of what The Economist had written was fairly obvious I only felt that something could also have been said about the irrational disparaging by the religeously green of GMO food, including the research on GMO food crops, research that is bound to benefit and not harm farmers and consumers in developing countries.
Apparently, The Economist has hit a raw nerve with some greens. On Dec 16th 2006 the NewYork Times reports that some bloggers have begun to voice their disaggreement with The Economist's view on food and food policy.

RAEM

Incentives for the dead

Lawrence Lessig is rightly perplexed by the argument that extending the protection that copyright law provides to creators of works of art is justfied by the increase in the incentives longer protection periods provide to artists, including those who are already dead.

RAEM

Report from a prediction market conference

The blog Read/Write Web reports on a prediction market conference that was held at Silicon Valley on Dec 13th 2006. Apparently, most of the big names from the prediction market field spoke at the meeting. The report closes with a good short list on conditions conducive for prediction markets. Takeaway #6 is, however, unconvincing.

RAEM

New Scientist: Brilliant minds forecast the next 50 years

In the New Scientist a number of well known scientists try their hands at predicting the future in their fields. Obviously, telling the future 50 years hence is an invitation to say something that, in hindsight, will sound quite silly.

I only skimmed the names and the sciences represented in the article. I particluarly liked the contribution by Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist. He wrote:

"I absolutely refuse even to pretend to guess about how I might speculate about what, hypothetically, could be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years. This is an invitation to look foolish, as with the predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that were made 50 years ago.
I will stick my neck out about the next five to ten years, however"

Geoffrey Miller, another evolutionary psychologist, foresees changing attitudes of people once they have become aware of the evolutionary history of social behavior:
"Applied evolutionary psychology should revolutionise life in three ways by 2056. First, Darwinian critiques of runaway consumer capitalism should undermine the social and sexual appeal of conspicuous consumption. Absurdly wasteful display will become less popular once people comprehend its origins in sexual selection, and its pathetic unreliability as a signal of individual merit or virtue.

Second, studies of human happiness informed by evolution will reveal ever more clearly the importance of "social capital" - neighbourliness, close-knit communities, local family support, and integration between kids, adults and the elderly. This will, I hope, lead to revolutionary changes in urban planning, leading to a New Urbanist revival of mixed-use landscapes. Enlightened citizens will demand to live in village-type spaces rather than alienating suburbs of single-family isolation and unbearable commutes."

Chemical engineer, mathematician and zoologist Robert May is concerned with social institutions; he writes:

"We live longer and healthier lives, food production has doubled in the past 35 years and energy subsidies have substituted for human labour, washing away hierarchies of servitude. But the unintended consequences of these well-intentioned actions - climate change, biodiversity loss, inadequate water supplies, and much else - could well make tomorrow the worst of times.

The significant breakthrough we really need is better understanding of human institutions, particularly of the impediments to collective, cooperative activity in which all individuals pay small costs to reap large group benefits."

The french sociologist Bruno Latour hopes that we (not me in 50 yrs!) will be able to visualize organzation-technology networks:

"In 50 years, social scientists will be able to visualise the connections between human organisations and technological objects. Today we know how to visualise technological systems using scientific images and technical drawings, but we have no idea of how to hook those designs up with the arrays of emails, spreadsheets, blogs and pieces of paper that organise the people who operate those systems."

RAEM