SmallTorque: Minority Rule

SmallTorque: Minority Rule: Nassim Taleb has a great post on how quite small minorities can win over the majority in social matters: It suffices for an intransigent ...

Wow!

For date data this is superb, the scaling of period has removed the need for multiple graphs.

And finally clicking the graph invokes the script I'd associated, futilely, with the old version. Might be good to mention right-clicking is now required to edit the upgraded graph.

Ranges could be improved to use entire column (where I add a row per day).

This information on updating could be improved by a link to whatever tutorial material is available.

in reference to: Upgrading your old charts : Getting started with charts - Google Docs Help (view on Google Sidewiki)

Neil de Wit gives his views after leaving fibre provider CityLink

“However, we have an epidemic of MBAs who look purely at business cases. At some point you have to take the punt. With Government, there is a great danger that it will be over-analysed by the likes of the Reserve Bank and the Treasury.

“If it is built in a highly competitive environment, it might be doomed to failure. There’s got to be some sort of coming together, because broadband is a national good.”

in reference to:

"Neil de Wit gives his views after leaving fibre provider"
- Ex-CityLink boss looks at fibre scene | Computerworld NZ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Thinking about social objects and limbo dancing

"When we see lists like that, we can start believing that all social objects are “content”, which gets the “rightsholders” of content salivating up the wazoo. Perish the thought.

Content is not what makes an object social. We do.

There was a time when “content” was created by a tiny minority of people, largely because the tools for making that content were elitist in nature. Scarce, expensive, needing specialist skills. To make matters worse, the techniques for distributing and sharing that “content” were also elitist in nature. So people who “owned” that “content” felt like kings."

Dubber meet JP

in reference to:

"Ever since Hugh Macleod spoke to me about social objects, and pointed me towards what Jyri Engestrom had written, I’ve been fascinated by the concept."
- Thinking about social objects and limbo dancing – confused of calcutta (view on Google Sidewiki)

A theory of the internet and the art of protest

"The working theory

You may recall a little while back that I posted a blog entry about the Five Ages of Media. My contention is that digital media – and specifically the internet – works differently than broadcast media.

Simply put, on the web, you don’t have a platform to shout to an undifferentiated mass of people – so just putting up a webpage that acts as a brochure, and says “come to our exhibition” doesn’t really work.

Instead, the web is a conversational medium – and there are really only two main types of content:

1) The conversation;
2) The stuff about which the conversation is taking place.

This second category of thing is what is often referred to as a ’social object’ – a term coined by Jyri Engeström to describe the way in which sociality online is not simply about relationships, but particularly about sharing things like videos, photos, audio and text."

in reference to:

"And why was it so powerful as a part of the conversation? Because it’s a good and very simple story. People are hard-wired for narrative. The theory that there are only really seven stories and we keep telling them to ourselves over and over through different media contexts is a reasonably compelling one."
- A theory of the internet and the art of protest by Andrew Dubber (view on Google Sidewiki)

"My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

"There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.
Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes."

in reference to:

"Worst-Case Thinking"
- http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/worst-case_thin.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

The Risk Management of Everything

"This warning about the escalation of the risk management of everything should be taken seriously. In his first Demos book, The Audit Explosion, Michael Power warned against that companies and governments preoccupation with measuring what is measurable – the now discredited ‘targets culture’.

Power traces the start of the risk management of everything back to 1995 – the year of the collapse Barings bank Shell’s Brent Spar PR disaster. Those events illustrated the two key aspects of the new obsession with risk management: internal control and reputation."

in reference to:

"“Reputation has become a new source of anxiety where organisational identity and economic survival are at stake And if everything may impact on organisational reputation, then reputational risk management demands the risk management of everything.”"
- http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/riskmanagementofeverythingcatalogue (view on Google Sidewiki)