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)

Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest

"It is now up to all of us to figure out how to build a sustainable civilization within the new information rainforest - which provides sustenance and shelter, as well as poisonous plants and deadly predators. Success is by no means inevitable. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that make it in people's interest to behave constructively, and which create strong disincentives for destructive behavior in this new environment. We need to help everybody understand how to participate constructively and responsibly in this new space, and protect the rights of minorities and dissenters. We are in uncharted territory, but we have to start somewhere. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive "internet users" - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our information society."

in reference to:

"Global Voices 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile brought together people from 60 different countries"
- RConversation: Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest (view on Google Sidewiki)

Customer-Centric Capitalism

"What is the primary responsibility of a business? Renowned management professor and writer Peter Drucker gave a succinct answer to this question in his 1954 book The Practice of Management: “A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers . . . Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence.”

For the last thirty years, maximizing shareholder value has replaced customer value as the key objective of many companies. But, a number of experts are now raising questions about this widespread business practice and the extreme preoccupation with short term profits that inevitably results from putting shareholders over customers.

A 2006 study co-sponsored by the Business Roundtable and the CFA Institute concluded that: “the obsession with short-term results by investors, asset management firms, and corporate managers collectively leads to the unintended consequences of destroying long-term value, which decreases market efficiency, reduces investment returns, and impedes efforts to strengthen corporate governance.”

in reference to:

"“For three decades, executives have made maximizing shareholder value their top priority.  But evidence suggests that shareholders actually do better when firms put the customer first.”"
- Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Customer-Centric Capitalism (view on Google Sidewiki)

Gaming and families

"BECTA have just released a new report on the use of gaming in families. It’s a really interesting document – supported by an extensive literature review and a record of the parents’ and children’s views on and experiences of gaming from the survey analysis."

Nice.

in reference to:

"parents and young people reported the following benefits from playing video games together"
- Derek's Blog » Gaming and families (view on Google Sidewiki)

They Are Watching You. And They Are Judging You.

"A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. … Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be."

in reference to:

"Smart Babies"
- http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/they-are-watching-you-and-they-are-judging-you/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Is Free Turning into Just Another Old Telco ?

"Once more, his diatribe takes the North American players as targets: « you cannot give ever growing capacity to American providers (and the largest all are, Youtube, Amazon...) without them contributing anything whatsoever », he stated during the [ARCEP] conference, stating also that he thought regrettable that the public authorities had already abandoned « the idea of taxing Google.»."

in reference to:

"There are many reasons why this is disturbing to me: First of all, it's a patent lie."
- Fiberevolution: Is Free Turning into Just Another Old Telco ? (view on Google Sidewiki)

Evidence based smear campaigns

"All the studies found exactly the same thing: if the original dodgy fact fits with your prejudices, a correction only reinforces these even more. If your goal is to move opinion, then this depressing finding suggests that smears work, and what’s more, corrections don’t challenge them much: because for people who already agree with you, it only make them agree even more."

in reference to:

"A new experiment published this month in the journal “Political Behaviour”"
- http://www.badscience.net/2010/05/evidence-based-smear-campaigns/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

On pasta and music and copyright

"Basically, you can do what you like with pasta, starting with the wheat and water and ending with the cooked meal. At each stage, you have the choice of whether you want to pay someone else to do something or not. Someone else can make the pasta for you. Sell you a machine to make pasta. Write a book and tell you how to make the pasta. Or the meal itself. Someone else can cook it for you, amateur or professional. There are a million ways people can participate in the design, making, cooking and eating of pasta, a million ways people can make money with pasta.

Wonderful, isn’t it? The freedom and creativity that has given us over 1300 types of pasta over centuries, shared and enjoyed by billions.

But you know something? It would take very little to screw all this up, to make a complete codswallop out of pasta. Imagine this scenario:"

Too horrible to continue. Go read.

in reference to:

"Step 7: And so the pasta “bandit” is born. And over time, five thousand years of eating pasta comes to a halt."
- On pasta and music and copyright – confused of calcutta (view on Google Sidewiki)

IFPI’s child porn strategy

”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.

Cynical, they call me cynical.

in reference to:

"the copyright lobby never gives up."
- http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/ifpis-child-porn-strategy/ (view on Google Sidewiki)

Mexican bishop blames ‘eroticism and internet porn’ for clerical child abuse

"With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it’s not easy to stay celibate or to respect children. If on television and on the Internet and in so many media outlets there is pornography, it is very difficult to stay pure and chaste.

He added:

Obviously when there is generalized sexual freedom it’s more likely there could be cases of pedophilia."

But this takes the cake, the biscuit and the entire trolley:

"Bishop Bernando Álvarez said that there were chil­dren who want­ed to be abused.

Bishop Bernando Álvarez

There are 13 year old ado­les­cents who are under age and who are per­fectly in agree­ment with, and what’s more want­ing it, and if you are care­less they will even pro­voke you."

in reference to:

"Bishop Bernando Álvarez said that there were chil­dren who want­ed to be abused. Bishop Bernando Álvarez There are 13 year old ado­les­cents who are under age and who are per­fectly in agree­ment with, and what’s more want­ing it, and if you are care­less they will even pro­voke you."
- Mexican bishop blames ‘eroticism and internet porn’ for clerical child abuse (view on Google Sidewiki)

Evidence based voting

"But more than anything, this election offers a new opportunity: beyond expecting our politicians to follow the evidence, we can be evidence based ourselves, in our voting decisions, and hold ourselves to the same high standards. VoteMatch can match your views against the party manifestoes. SkepticalVoter knows if your MP believes in the homeopaths’ magic beans. Using TheyWorkForYou I can see that my last MP (Andrew Smith, Labour, Oxford East) voted very strongly in favour of the Iraq war, very strongly against an inquiry into it, very strongly in favour of ID cards, and so on. It’s grim reading. PoliticsPosters will print that on a poster, so you can make sure your neighbours know too."

Science, evidence, and the Internet.

in reference to:

"What can science and evidence bring to an election?"
- Evidence based voting – Bad Science (view on Google Sidewiki)

Build Your Own Cellular Network

"The task of running a cellular network has usually been reserved for major carriers. But now an open-source project called OpenBTS is proving that almost anyone can cheaply run a network with parts from a home-­supply or auto-supply store. Cell-phone users within such a network can place calls to each other and--if the network is connected to the Internet--to people anywhere in the world.

The project's cofounder, David Burgess, hopes that OpenBTS will mean easier and cheaper access to cellular service in remote parts of the world, including hard-to-reach locations like oil rigs and poor areas without much infrastructure."

in reference to:

"Just about anybody can create an inexpensive cellular base station that routes calls all over the world."
- Technology Review: Build Your Own Cellular Network (view on Google Sidewiki)

Taxpayers' bill $200m for blockbusters

"The government's Large Budget Screen Production Grant offers a 15 per cent rebate on production spending in New Zealand above $15m. The Government grant scheme was set up in 2003, and since then movie and television makers have received grants of $199.4m from the Government, after spending about $1.49b, latest figures show.

The makers of science fiction blockbuster Avatar spent more than $307m in New Zealand and qualified for a grant back of almost $45m. Avatar created jobs for up to 900 people at the peak of production in New Zealand."

Versus $2B spent funding productions locally. Either they're both too large, or neither is.

in reference to:

"The Lord of the Rings was a huge money spinner for film-makers New Line Cinema and its parent firm Time Warner shareholders. It is the best-selling trilogy ever, grossing US$2.9b since the first film came out in 2001."
- Taxpayers' bill $200m for blockbusters | Stuff.co.nz (view on Google Sidewiki)

Climate sceptic wins landmark data victory

"Over the subsequent three years, the university has claimed that it did not have to supply the data because it would be too time-consuming; because the data does not amount to environmental information; because the research is unfinished; because the data is private property, commercially confidential and of "negligible" public interest – and because Keenan would not understand them.

But Smith says the university, one of the world's leading centres for tree-ring research, is wrong on each count."

If the collection of data was paid for, we can lose the trudging over bogs and fields rubbish. For that they were paid and not under an exclusive arrangement AFAIK.

in reference to:

""a direct, and unpleasant, off-shoot of the information revolution. It now appears that research data can be demanded, and indeed obtained, by anyone.""
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/20/climate-sceptic-wins-data-victory (view on Google Sidewiki)