But I am reminded that it is the young, mobile, and healthy that are taking the biggest risk with not having insurance - and increasing the told cost of health care as they find themselves in the emergency rooms. And to a certain extent, I agree. But against my libertarian tendencies, I want to argue that giving people the choice to opt in and out of insurance actually creates a moral hazard, with a solution that must ignore the individual and solved only with a macro approach.

Let’s begin by looking at what insurance is: insurance is social system that distributes the financial costs of catastrophes across a population. Individuals pay a share into a system and extreme fluctuations in small segments of the population are absorbed.

In order for this system to work, a very large portion of the population must believe that they are risk and want to buy into the scheme. The reality is, though, that the risk of a catastrophe occurring to any single individual is quite small. The chances that your house will burn down: small. Getting in a serious car accident: relatively small. Being struck by some inexplicable disease and having to be hospitalized: very small. In the developed world most people live relatively long lives - and are more often set back by slow onset conditions caused by lifestyle decisions, such as heart disease and stroke. So on an individual basis, you can’t sell insurance on a catastrophe basis, without there being some level of deception.

Moreover, individuals have a hard time accurately gauging their own risks. People rarely have adequate information about their risks to make a rational decision – and I mentioned before, if they did, the risks would appear small. Some risks, like getting hurt in terrorist attack or a plane crash are extremely rare, yet most effective in mobilizing fear.

So we’re presented with two basic ideas: we need insurance for known fluctuations in the population, which we would all like to be protected from. But individuals have a hard time gauging their own risks, but we are asked to predict. This asymmetry of information lends itself to abuse and, I think, resembling other morally ambiguous situations, like gambling.

While specific risks to individuals are statistically rare, we know - with certainty - that small segments of the population will be afflicted with all sorts of catastrophes. Since insurance is a tool that works best everyone participates and we cannot expect individuals to ever know their own risks, it makes sense that the industry resembles a public service as apposed to a gambling business.

Yet, we are in the midst of yet another bailout by US government - again, by institutions deemed “too big to let fail.” The auto industry is asking for $25 billion, which as of now, appears could come from the $700 billion intended (and also failing) to restore liquidity in the financial markets. The financial markets are in turmoil and it would seem like a bad time to consider letting the auto industry collapse. But, we might also want to consider this a good opportunity to do what’s been needed for a long time now - and that is restructure our economy.

Before I give my reading on the situation I want to make clear that I understand that people’s livelihoods are at stake here. Even more so, our entire economy at risk. Here is some perspective:

GM’s payroll pumps $8.7 billion a year into its assembly workers’ pockets. Directly or indirectly, it supports nearly 900,000 jobs — everyone from auto-parts workers to advertising writers, car salespeople, and office-supply vendors. When GM shut down for 54 days during a 1998 labor action, it knocked a full percentage point off the U.S. economic growth rate that quarter. So what’s bad for General Motors is still, undeniably, bad for America.

That reason alone should discourage any talks of letting these companies fail. But how long can we put off restructuring this industry? If the government had not coddled these companies for the past decades we would not be in this situation today. There is no reason to believe that in future it will be easier to restructure the industry. It will be hard no matter when it happens. The reality is that the American carmakers have been zombies - clinically dead, yet still walking around - for years now. Not only that, they have been dead weight, preventing the modernization of our entire economy.

the U.S. automotive industry has been on the wrong side of almost every environmental, social and safety issue since the 1960s. The industry objected to the Clean Air Act, publicly opposed fuel economy standards, fought against seat belt and air bag legislation, dragged its feet on alternative-fuel vehicles and lobbied against almost every socially responsible initiative. Exactly why would the public want to bail out an industry that has failed in the market and been so unresponsive to the public good?

The decisions we make right now will shape our future economy in dramatic ways. As the world economy swerves in every which way, we have to make sure that we don’t just straighten out, but also end up going in the right direction. And for that, I believe what we need is a well-managed dismembering of the auto industry. We certainly do not want a situation where the industry meets a sudden and catastrophic end. But that’s the direction we are going. Market pressures from Japan, Korea, and now, China, will only continue to squeeze the auto industry and I am not willing to bet our future economy on their resurgence.

the solutions will slip from GM’s control. At some point the laws of physics take over and, like steel-makers and airlines, GM is at the mercy of global forces. It simply cannot compete in a global economy with the enormous burden it now carries in legacy costs. It certainly cannot meet those costs for long off a shrinking sales base and negative cash flow. And distracted by those woes, it can’t begin to make the investments necessary to match the Koreans on price, the Japanese on quality, and the Europeans on performance.

So what does the future hold? Well, if we take a long-term view of the economy, it’s clear that the search for sustainable sources of energy will be key to our economic future, similar to the way transportation was an important economic struggle of the 19th and 20th centuries. The car brought mobility to the masses, but now transportation, as a problem, is for the most part solved. With planes, buses, trains, cars and boats we can reach most places of the world in a matter of hours - not months. We will continue to make improvements to transportation (coupled with telecommunications) but we need a larger economic scope if we are to lead in the new century.

As I said before, there needs to be a well managed dismembering of the industry. First, the companies need to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The government can then move in and - and as was the case with the FDIC-managed dismembering of Washington Mutual and Wachovia - assets can be sold to highest bidder. The government can then invest in and encourage Toyota, Honda and Nissan to take over as much of manufacturing as they can. The government can assume responsibility for the pensions of the oldest employees and focus on retraining and job placement programs for the youngest.

We’d rather the government spend billions on retraining and job placement than on propping up perpetually weak companies that can’t fix themselves. We also don’t buy the argument that bankruptcy would be a deathblow for GM. The only folks it would be a death-blow for would be shareholders and many bondholders.

Will it be expensive? Yes. Is it necessary? Absolutely.

Retraining should focus on manufacturing and retrofitting our existing infrastructure with “green technologies.” When we reach an acceptable level of stability, we should consider taxing inefficient and wasteful sources of energy to increase market pressure and encourage innovation. This way we can solve the short-term economic problem of keeping people employed and the long term problem of promoting sustainability.

Obviously there will many more issues that need to be considered in this transition and there will be seen and unforeseen problems that will pop up. But if we don’t keep a long-term view when solving these issues, we are surely to find ourselves here again in the not too distant future - having accomplished little.

I first encountered this idea in Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near a few years ago (given as a gift by my good friend David Macaluso), and fell in love with the topic. The book discussed mind-digitization, human fusion with technology, nano technology, and raised interesting thoughts about genetics, evolution and death. I read this book at a time when I was also researching topics like quantum computing, teleportation and dabbling in the philosophy of human nature, evolution and consciousness. Needless to say, the book played a role in shaping many of my views today and how to look into the future.

But as with any new and fascinating topic, the novelty wore off and time brought perspective and a critical eye. And that’s where I have been for the past few years. Fascinated, but critical. Yet, I find myself defending the ideas of the Singularity quite vigorously. Not because I am fully convinced of their validity. But because the issues that they raise seem to be playing an ever increasing role into our lives.

In defending Singularity research, I find myself answering the following the points.

• The Singularity is not possible. The premise assumes that we will be able to understand everything about the human brain and human biology and the universe. History shows that whenever we think we have a holistic view of the universe, science reshuffles everything again.

Even if the singularity is not possible, it is an interesting topic to discuss for the questions that it raises about philosophy and technology. We are shaped by technology every day. Technological advances have spread across the world and have influenced every significant culture in the world. There have been few things throughout history that transcended and influenced all cultures of the world as rapidly as recent technological advancements have - take for example, the cellphone. If for no other reason, that seems to be a good reason to think long term of what we, as a species, seem to be building.

• Even if it’s possible, I disagree with the overall vision and don’t want to support it. (i.e it feels like a new religion with technology at it’s center)

There are many things I don’t like about the Singularity. It raises very uncomfortable questions about humans, nature and our place in the universe. One thing that it does not do is dictating the direction of where technology is taking us. We are all part of a system that is taking us in the direction that the Singularity is pointing us towards. It is our modern economy in finance and technology research that is powering this machine.

• Even if it’s correct, I don’t want to support these ideas. It might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We would have to change more than just wacky futurist ideas to prevent us going down this path. The institutions and research powering our world are based on the belief that “progress” must continue to sustain our way of living. If we are concerned of possibly “losing our humanity” then we need to be willing to give up many of our modern niceties - which is a topic that also interests me and enjoy entertaining. But I believe that it is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. It a building of foresight. And it’s best to have thought about the complications of these issues before we have to deal with them directly.

Another book, which I just recently acquired - and recommend for pragmatic view of technogical change - is Francis Fuyikayama’s Our Post-Human Future, where he addresses specific political ramifications of the change we are experiencing.

And in comments to reporters at the White House, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., said that consumers should remain confident about the soundness of the American financial system.

They say that chocolate rations have risen again.

Utilitarians believe that people should work to maximize total happiness across the population. They believe that the only reason to do something or not to do something is because it will make people happier or unhappier respectively. Thus, whether something is good or bad depends to some extent on people’s preferences — whether it makes them happy or sad.

But this might leads to some odd conclusions in the case of what might be called “perverse preferences”. For example, some members of the Bush Administration say they get very sad when they see others eat ice cream in public. Yet many people like to eat ice cream in public. Should we stop them from doing so just because it makes others sad? Moreover, should they decide to stop doing so if they’re utilitarians?

My understanding of Utilitarianism is that it looks at the sum of all people affected by an action - not just influential groups.

According to Utilitarianism, if eating ice-cream negatively affects more people than not, then maybe we should reconsider eating ice-cream.

And that is why laws vary by peoples. There are cases, which, for historical or cultural reasons, more people of a population consider a specific act as affecting them negatively. So, to impose a historical or cultural justification for an act by a larger population onto a smaller - under the guise of the “greater good”, would be, i think, unjust.

What makes sense to me is to have smaller governing units, which permit for distinct populations to make their own decisions and assert their cultural beliefs (obviously, preserving basic human rights).

Utilitarianism can sometimes be a bit too universalistic and often forgets the most human of all social units: the family - and everything that stems out from family, like ethnicity, culture, nation etc.

Now, you can apply the same insights of John Stuart Mill to smaller social groups and allow for an even greater diversity of people who can be happy.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

A similar concern arose with the printing press:

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

And now, the concern has shifted to the Internet. The Internet allows us to retrieve information quickly, but doesn’t necessarily require us to go “deep” into a topic - changing the way we engage text completely, even offline. And there is a fear that the Internet might cause an epidemic in our culture that results in people being unable to hold a focus long to enough to grasp complex ideas.

If that’s a possibility then there is reason to be concerned. The New York Times, in a piece titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” explains how we are already moving away books and onto screens:

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

And the effects - at least in the way we currently test for them - seem to be negative:

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

While Socrates was right that writing made us lose our ability to memorize, he was unable to foresee (or maybe foresaw, but still did not approve) the rise of engaged and literate societies, which have been responsible for many of the great creations of humanity.

So what type of world are we unable to yet see by high level and data extracting reading that the Internet so easily provides? Well, it’s hard to say, but there is another angle we can approach this to give us an idea.

We have for the past hundred years - aided by technology - seen the rise of the “Multitasker.” Modern life requires the completion of many tasks and in the rush to complete these tasks; we break up into even smaller task, which allow us to incrementally work on many things simultaneously. That is how work is accomplished in the modern world and is also how reading is changing.

But we’re already aware of the dangers of multitasking in various parts of our lives.

A few months ago The Atlantic Monthly published an article by novelist and critic, Walter Kirn, titled “The Autumn of the Multitaskers“, that explains how multitasking affects our brain:

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.

This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

So, in our effort to complete many tasks, we inhibit our ability to complete any single one. And it doesn’t help that the computer is inherently multipurpose. What appears to be happening is that different behaviors are being consolidated into a single tool that by design favors multitasking - obstructing other possible ways to engage ideas.

Breaking up tasks has allowed for the development of the industrial revolution. Physical motions were broken up in simple actions - constraining the individual, but allowing for the “system” to work more efficiently. The computer revolution has also limited physical acts to moving our fingers and our minds too have become compartmentalized - suited to completing simple tasks.

What we find is that this compartmentalization of human minds and ideas can be beneficial to the “system.”

Wikipedia, I think, is a good example of this idea in action and I think can be a glimpse into the way we engage ideas in the future. Individuals are responsible for depositing tiny slivers of knowledge into large pools of information, but no individual idea is valued or acknowledged, while giving a sense of collective progress. But this system also deprives individuals of any deep sense of worth. Similar to mind-numbing factory jobs, I can see lives, thoughts, and entertainment being broken down into tiny plots that are easily satisfied… and never questioned.

Worst of all, when people’s needs are so easily met, few would realize the worth of deep and uninterrupted thoughts.

The world feels like it’s slowly congealing, not into a sort of gray homogeneous mush, but into a diverse federation of cultures that identify strongly with their heritage and decidedly work together in a system of markets.

This is best captured by the news of Radovan Karadzic’s capture in Serbia. Here is a quote from the New York Times:

Serbs are not desperate and they have not sold out, but they have seen that the nationalist rhetoric and slogans are empty and don’t work,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor of Politika, a leading Serbian daily newspaper. “They see their manifest destiny in Europe.

I’ve never been  of a fan of the idea of a world culture or government. It has a influential niche, but it will never be (or at least, I hope it’d never be) universal. Social order works best when applied at a local and regional level, and takes into account distinct population’s leanings. But order and cooperation at a global level is still possible. When we look at history, it is the need of resources that creates conflict. Even religious strife can often be traced to competition of resources.

If the protocol for the allocation of resources is understood by all and considered legitimate by its constituents, then it is possible that seemingly incompatible peoples can work together. Markets appear to be that protocol. The fear, though, has  been that a single dominant market can - and will eventually - envelop its smaller members - as many think the United States has been doing across the world. But as countries have matured in this global system,  we are seeing a re-embrace of regionalism at the cultural level, but globalism at an economic level. I think the European Union - for all its flaws - is a model of a wide system that leaves each region autonomous, while providing a framework for cooporation. And the positive reaction of the Serbian population on the capture of Karadzic, shows the value of markets, even among extremely proud people.

But Google depends crucially and directly on the content created by users and more generally on the goodwill of the Internet community.

Equally, so do the many products Google creates and gives away, with no obvious path to future profit.

So, more than in the past, it makes sense for corporations to cultivate diffuse goodwill, rather than focusing solely on profit, perhaps modified by the need to buy off powerful interests.

I agree with your conclusions, but disagree with your analysis. Isn’t it more likely that the rules for making a profit have changed? It is not goodwill for the sake of goodness; it’s good - or at least the perception of goodness - that now helps yield profits.

Google creates products ‘with no obvious path to future profit’ because it understands that technology has changed the way business is done and the new methods require an embrace of creativity. But the motivations are still the same.

If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of ‘profits’ (as some people in this comment section appear to be) then nothing about the way the world is changing is encouraging. However, I think there is something else going on here. While the motivation is still profits, technology, which is so widely accessible, needs to provide something more than functionality. Functionality is easily replicated. What’s left is an aura. Something you use because you ‘believe’ in it, somehow.

That can be accomplished by branding. But also by what someone does with their money. So what a hotshot CEO does with their money is part of the ‘aura’ of goodness. This explains things like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google Foundation and all those little foundations scattered around the Bay Area, created by a new breed instant millionaires, who promise to be ‘good.’ And actually do end up doing good things.

That changes the argument of profits, doesn’t it? If people are doing something worthwhile with the money they make, then what’s the problem? You can easily reduce anyone’s actions into selfish motivations and you would have proved almost nothing. It’s external actions that matter most. It appears that we are moving in a direction that encourages both profits and goodwill.

But now, I am back in the States and enjoying transitioning back to normal life.  I hope to develop a few projects that have been on the back burner for a while now.

I live in Facebook land, but frequent a summer home in the Wikipedia islands. Where do you live?

The laws protecting animals are often well intentioned and the people working with them the most caring. So my issue is not with the laws, the people or great resource that zoos provide; they do what they can under the system we have in place. It is with the basic ethical issue of institutionally stripping animals from their natural habitat and creating an artificial world for them for our benifit. I am questioning the means, not the ends.

Modern ethics tell us that there is something intrinsically wrong with trapping someone, restricting their behavior and performing (physical or psychological) experiments on them. That’s why we don’t have humans in zoos. But even then, it wasn’t until 1974, with the creation of the IRB, that restrictions were applied to certain kinds behavioral experiment on humans…. so don’t count on laws, or even science, to be on par with ethics. We have to all realized it ourselves.

So why don’t our ethical revelations apply to animals? The old argument involved something about animals not having “souls.“ The modern argument morphed into something about animals not being “conscious”, giving us free reign over their lives under the guise that they don’t know what is happening to them anyway. But we don’t have a good idea of what consciousness is so we can’t use that as a fair argument. What we do know is that large animals, especially social ones, have natural behavior stifled by enclosures. The big cats, like lions, leopards and cheetahs often have territories that cover 50 square kilometers. Something zoos, especially urban zoos, cannot provide. So what happens to these animals? They go crazy. They pace. They pull out their hair. They ram into into things. They lash out. And often die.

I found the following quote in Wikipedia:

Historians Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier cite statistics showing that three-quarters of apes die in captivity within the first twenty months, with the overall “stock turnover“ of animals being one-fifth to one-fourth over the course of a year. They further note that this “extreme mortality of wild animals in zoos has always been the driving force behind the massive scale of importations.“

Additionally, many thousands of animals are placed on “surplus lists“ each year, where they are sold to, among other places, “circuses, animal merchants, auctions, individual pet owners, “game farms,“ “hunting ranches,“ and “trophy collectors.“

That system feels flawed.

I am not calling out for the abolishment of zoos, but I think that there needs to be a complete reconsidering of the role zoos play in our society that starts from the bottom and works its way up.

The basic conditions I would feel comfortable with a modern zoo meeting are: First, no “exotic“ animals in urban areas. Zoos should focus on the land’s indigenous creatures. The idea that I should be able to see, even study, a tiger locally unrealistic. If you want to see a tiger, it’s less risky for you to go to India than importing a tiger from India to every major city. Second: focus on preserving, expanding and creating national parks. Let the animals live free and study them at a distance - intervene only when necessary. And third: Limit human contact. Educate the public with films and documentaries, like March of the Penguin and Planet Earth, and tap into that sympathy to build support and expand protection. Modern media technologies, like high definition DVDs, allow us to learn more about our world, while leaving little or no impact on the environment.

This connection, in CommentPress, of an experiment into the organization of digital text with a desire to promote social interaction within and around it offers us the opportunity to resituate the problem of electronic publishing in a potentially productive way, and in so doing compels a new perspective on certain aspects of the historical development of publishing. This paper will take that look backward as a means of considering the significance of a project like CommentPress — which should be understood not as the apotheosis of electronic publishing, but rather as one example of a fruitful avenue of development — for the future of textuality online.

Here is a quote:

With CommentPress, released in July by the Institute for the Future of the Book, designers have endeavored to help digital books capture the immediacy and interactivity of the margin
note. “Text is meant to be a conversation,” says Ben Vershbow, an associate director at the institute, which is sponsored by the University of Southern California but is based in Brooklyn. “We’ve tried to create a reading environment that is more dynamic than you’d usually find on
a Web site.”

And:

The program — a template used with WordPress, a popular open-source blogging program — lets any scholar convert a book or paper into a digital text that can be analyzed and
commented upon by many readers.

That stands in sharp contrast to digital books, some of which come strewn with hyperlinks that let readers simulate the experience of moving from footnote to footnote, but don’t let
readers interact.

Traditional blogs let authors excerpt from books and then provide space beneath the text for readers to add their own comments. But CommentPress’s innovation, according to Mr.
Vershbow, is to “slightly rejigger the hierarchy of discussion, by putting comments next to text.” While a blog might support one linear conversation, he says, CommentPress lets
readers pull out multiple strands of text to start their own distinct discussions.

“What if you could travel to parallel worlds: the same year, the same earth, only different dimensions…?”

That’s the opening line to one of my favorite science fiction shows in the 90s called “Sliders.” The premise of the show was simple: a group of lost travelers traverse through different dimensions where history has played itself out differently, and need to navigate through unfamiliar cultural norms, values and beliefs. What if the United States lost the American Revolutionary War? Penicillin was never discovered? Or gender roles reversed?

An aspect of the show that I found interesting was in how our protagonists quickly adapted to subtly different worlds and developed a method for exploration: after their initial reconnaissance, they’d reconvene in a hotel room (when it existed) and assess their often dire - situation.

The way they “browsed” these alternate worlds stuck with me when reading Mary’s recent posts on new forms of fiction on the web:

Web reading tends towards entropy. You go looking for statistics on the Bornean rainforest and find yourself reading the blog of someone who collects orang utan coffee mugs. Anyone doing sustained research on the Web needs a well-developed ability to navigate countless digressions, and derive coherence from the sea of chatter.

Browsing takes us to unexpected places, but what about the starting point? Browsing does not begin arbitrarily. It usually begins in a trusted location, like a homepage or series of pages that you can easily refer back to or branch out from. But ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like World Without Oil, which Ben wrote about recently, require you to go some obscure corner of the internet and engage with it as if it was trusted source. What if the alternate world existed everywhere you went, like in Sliders?

In college, a friend of mine mirrored whitehouse.gov and replaced key words and phrases with terms he thought were more fitting. For example, “congressmen” was replaced by “oil-men” and “dollars” with “petro-dollars.” He had a clear idea of the world he wanted people to interact with (knowingly or not). The changes were subtle and website looked legitimate it and ultimately garnered lots of attention. Those who understood what was going on sent their praise and those who did not, sent confused and sometimes angry emails about their experience. A

(I believe he eventually he blocked the domain because he found it disconcerting that most traffic came from the military)

Although we’ll need very sophisticated technology to apply more interesting filters across large portions of the internet, I think “Fiction Portals”, engines that could alter the web slightly according to the “author” needs, could change the role of an author in an interesting way.

I want to play with the this idea of an author: Like a scientist, the author would need to understand how minor changes to society would manifest themselves across real content, tweaking words and ideas ever so slightly to produce a world that is that is vast, believable, and could be engaged from any direction, hopefully revealing some interesting truths about the real world.

So, after playing around with this idea for a bit, I threw together a very primitive prototype that alters the internet in a subtle way (maybe too subtle?) but I think hints at a form that could eventually allow us to Slide.

Harper’s has a new web concept designed by Paul Ford of F Train. History bears heavily on the refurbished site, almost overwhelmingly — especially compared to the stripped-down affair that preceded it. But considering that Harper’s has a more than ordinary amount of history to cart around — at 157 years, it’s the oldest general interest monthly in the United States — one has to appreciate the rather ovewhelming task that Ford and the editors faced. A journal that has published continuously since before the Civil War, on through Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, civil rights, the 60s, the Cold War, right up to the present carries a hefty chunk of the national memory — and a lot of baggage, good and bad. So it’s fitting that the new design is packed with dates, inviting readers to dig into the past while also surveying the present. I can’t think of another news site in which the archives mingle so promiscuously with the front page spread. The result is a site that feels as much like a library as a periodical.

There really aren’t good interfaces for representing large amounts of data through time, and the current website’s clutter is evidence for that. There are tag clouds that gives us a small taste on what could be done with time. But nothing exists in a large scale.

I think Harper’s website has the potential to make us to reconsider the role of a magazine and the way we engage with them in the digital age, and not just for Harpers or massive collections. While magazines have historically been self-contained published works, often with clearly stated views (much more so than newspapers), I think if people engage with them as archives of ideas, we could also see a change in the way magazines see themselves.

The magazine form has always had problems: it’s strict periodic format (monthlies, weeklies, etc) is an artifact of the print form. I think this redesign shows that we might to reconsider magazines as vessels filled with ideas; connected, but not bound to time. And since these vessels provide all the content all the time, then we can imagine time as the thing you “flip through” (as opposed to pages) and not a special mode of browsing. This has always been the case for researchers, who’ve used bound magazines in libraries… but this could be the way all engage magazines.

I recently heard an interesting discussion between Paul Glastris of The Washington Monthly and Franklin Foer of The New Republic on the direction that their magazines were taking. The consensus they arrived at was that blogs stripped away their need to cover topical issues and have allowed to focus on what magazines have always done best: long narratives.

This is not really a new idea. I mean we can see things like The Complete New Yorker on CD-ROM, which provide a collection of all their work. But what I think is significant here is that the default unit in which we engage with a magazine could change from issues, to just one unit: the magazine.

From the photographer:

Bjork (1991, Woodstock) - I’m often asked if I have a favorite photo and I can say without hesitation that it’s this one right here. All of the elements combined to make it one of my favorite moments as a photographer, and it happened purely by chance. I met Bjork the night before when she invited herself along and joined some friends and me for a late night pool game up in Woodstock. At the time she was upstate recording with the Sugarcubes. I was already a fan, and had always wanted to photograph her, and when I asked her if I could she said sure. Just like that. We’d been talking all night, she trusted me, and I guess that was all she needed to go on.

I am again binging on on her albums. Especially Vespertine.

Our ideas are considered subversive by the Chinese government! We must be must be doing something right (edit: see comments below)!

Any of our readers find their own sites blocked?

The Golden Apple:

The This American Life [...] document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. the next morning. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, various assorted drunks, and, of course, cops. Featuring stories from Radio Diaries producers Joe Richman and Wendy Dorr. And a story from Nancy Updike, funded with help from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a grant to Hearing Voices.

Kid Logic:

Stories of kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.

“This American Life” is also now a television program… I was suspicious at first, but they pulled it off! The first episide is really good! Watch it!

When Knut [...] was born last December, his mother ignored him and his brother, who later died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.

“Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws,” animal rights activist Frank Albrecht was quoted as saying by the mass-circulation Bild daily, which has featured regular photo spreads tracking fuzzy Knut’s frolicking.

“The zoo must kill the bear.”

Interference? But the mother, Tosca, was a performing animal in an East German zoo!

Luckily, the same activist who suggested we kill the cub elaborated:

Albrecht told The Associated Press his beliefs were more nuanced than reported by Bild, though he applauded the debate the article had started.

He explained that though he thought it was wrong of the zoo to have saved the cub’s life, now that the bear can live on his own, it would be equally wrong to kill him.

This got me thinking about relationship we have to our face. Our face is the most public representation of ourselves to society, yet is it also our most intimate and personal feature and it’s what we think of when we think of ourselves.

What happens if faces can be easily generated and replicated? What would seeing yourself mean?

For example, there is often an immediate outcry when a celebrity sex tape is leaked. But what if there is no the difference between the video being real or fake? Could we become detached to our own face if it’s no longer unique? I can imagine a future, with technology like this, where seeing a video of yourself doing something shameful, criminal, or embarrassing has little or no impact in the way you see yourself or the way you think people will see you.

In the the movie Gattaca there is a scene that reminded me of this scenario. A fugitive’s face was plastered everywhere, but no one noticed him; The face was just another part of the body. Biometrics was the only way to truly identify someone.

In the other side of the spectrume: I like the BSD-license the best, because it gives puts the burden on the developer to decide wether he wants to contribute back to the community. We should all be able to decide for ourselves… not everyone’s situation is the same. I know that this can be abused, but, I think there should be emphasis on teaching people why they should give back, instead of forcing them to. No one likes to be forced.

One of the (many) reasons I made this blog was to share my ideas as they came to me…. that’s not been the case and I regret it, but it’s not because of lack of desire or belief. It’s other things… and I often try and change that. You can see this post as one of these efforts. Here is an idea about giving ideas away:

A few days ago my father told me a story of a man who lived in a gated mansion in the Dominican Republic. Supposedly, he was kidnapped and held for ransom…even shot. I don’t know the details, but the thieves got what they wanted an he survived.

I realized something with that story: when you keep things to yourself, people will try to take it.

So i’ve been wondering: why do we horde? What do we think we gain from closing ourselves of? The idea of privacy seems old fashioned to me. Privacy requires a sense of shame. Liberalization has done away with many old ideas of shame and I think technology is helping bring down even more. What do we think we need privacy for? Are some of us not human? Do we all not hurt, love and go to the bathroom?

The thing that make us most unique should not be private! It should be shared!

This is also not support for Big Brother… far from it. This is the extreme opposite, and with no authority figure. People open themselves up because they want to and close themselves off because they want to. Very simple. The burden is on the individual to decide what they wish to share. But as I said before, we teach the benefits of sharing, but never force anyone to share.

And I don’t mean that we should never be alone. I think being alone is very important, and I think people be alone as much as they want, but it’s about traditional ideas of privacy that I am dubious of.

A friend of mine told me that he doesn’t like to write in blogs because he don’t want to have his ideas stolen. Who gains what from this? Should great ideas be held until the moment when it is most beneficial to the individual? Is that the point of great ideas? To benefit from them? Isn’t the purpose of the a great idea to change the way things are? It’s like an artist to be heard but then limits who can see can hear him! And again, this does not mean you share everything without thinking it over or strategically save an idea until it can do it’s best work, what I am opposed to is exploiting an idea (and your comrades).

I often tell people my business ideas, intentions, “philosophies”, “discoveries”, etc… and I hope they take them and run with it. It would be an honor.

I think what people fear most is only being able to contribute one idea to the world, and they are saving that one thing for the day they can cash in. I think it’s best to believe that you can contribute more than just one idea to the world… and that those who create the most will be acknowledged as fountains of greatness!

At the Institute I keep pushing for more openness…. Lets do experiments and give away the results, I say. Let others become famous implementing our ideas! The burden will be on them on make sure they properly give credit where it is due. But they are more interested in processes.

I’ve always had feelings like these, and now that it is public, I want to think this through a bit more carefully. I wonder if it’s possible to lead by example. I don’t know. I am living in this time, and I’ve been instilled with contemporary ideas of what must be guarded. So I don’t know if it’s possible to shake that off… I know there are things that I would be ashamed to share. Can I overcome this? Should I share my bank activity, love letters, baby pictures, business ideas, projects etc? Should I do everything in public? After I share everything, what can people take from me? What could people gain from it? What could I gain or learn from people? What should I be afraid of?

Is this a potentially dangerous idea? Physically, emotionally or financially?

MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems and online documents for educational purposes. And, in most cases, each success story also has served as a springboard to create more open source projects.

This reminds me of something I have often wondered: Was the open source movement the catalyst for opening up education? Or was it simply the advent of instant communication and easy to copy digital media? Haven’t the ideals of open source long existed in academia?

Another amazing piece by alex.

While Moses was complicated man, and views on him vary a great deal, one thing that fascinated me about him was his use of social spaces. Here is a excerpt from a recent New York Times piece:

Perhaps the most powerful architectural expressions of that mission were the 23 public swimming pools with bathhouses Moses built in a five-year period beginning in the mid-1930s. A graceful colonnaded arcade shelters the shops and restaurants at Orchard Beach; the vivid geometric forms and intricate tile and brick work of the McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, celebrate the therapeutic value of communal exercise. For Moses, those projects were part of a broader strategy to reinforce middle-class neighborhoods and deter residents from fleeing to the suburbs.

Moses believed large landmark projects provided an anchor for communities to build around, like the McCarren Park Pool, in our very own Brooklyn, which at it’s peak held 6800 swimmers and served as a social hub.

But such projects could not work today. No one has the type of power Moses had during his reign, and communities are often now built with a Jane Jabobs-like philosophy in mind; that is, emphasis, on restoration, not on construction. But now technology is again changing the idea of a city, and the role of social spaces.

BusinessWeek recently ran a piece that looked at the transformation of the coffee shop into the modern age social office. Technology, especially wireless, is changing how people meet and work together. I wrote a post titled “Reading Buildings,” a few months ago, where I wondered what libraries would be like if accessing of information became even less centralized:

What I find bizarre about all this is that when you walk into a Barnes & Noble all the seats are taken, so it seems that “reading buildings” of some sort have some demand. Maybe it’s the social setting or maybe it’s the Starbucks. Actually, that could be the future of the library: a big empty building that people bring their electronic books to so that they can read and drink their coffee in a social setting… quietly.

While technology poses the potential problem of atomization, it does pose an interesting problem for organizers and builders of social spaces: what sort of emphasis should there be on technology? Does bringing in technology, especially wireless, defeat the purpose of common social spaces? Or is that the new goal? Many websites now encourage meeting offline, but what are they to do once they meet?

We met the other night at the Institute to discuss the upcoming relaunch of the blog. Some of the discussion turned technical (which is to say over, or under, or around my head) so I started shooting things. Later, the evening devolved into food and drinks and jazz at Zebulon where we got onto a wide ranging discussion of politics, digital media, dj culture, and life during wartime. The animation is from the note book we used to illustrate our points, or lack there of. There was also a lo of prat falls and slap stick which only further convinced me that digi cinema needs its Buster Keaton.

Note: Everyone has commented on my hair. I know! It was long! When straight, it touched my lips! I wanted to see how long I can hold out, and hold out I did. But I caved, it’s now all gone… even worse, I am shaving again.

As always, Tim O’Reilly has a very good description:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mash-up, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

While undeniably exciting, this technology reminds me of a concern I had and wrote about just a few months ago: the ethics of software in the networked world.

The basic problem is that having data spread across large and unreliable networks can lead to a chain reaction of unintended consequences when a service is interrupted. For example, imagine Google Maps changed the way a fundamental part of its mapping tool worked: Since the changes are applied immediately to everyone using the network, serious problems can arise as the necessity for these tools increase.

Also, the responsibility for managing problems can become a lot harder to track down when the network of dependencies becomes complex, and creating a new layer of abstraction, like in Yahoo! pipes, can potentially exacerbate the problem if there is not an clear agreement of expectations between the parties involved.

I think that one of reasons that licenses, like the GPL and the Creative Commons licenses, are popular are because they clearly communicate to the parties involved what their rights are, without ever having to explain the complexities of copyright law. I think it would make sense to come up with similar agreements between nodes in a network on the issues I raised above as we move more of our crucial applications to the web. The problem is, who would ever want to take responsibility for problems that appear far removed? Would there be any interest in creating a network collective of small pieces, closely joined?

But something interesting is happening in the field of computer science:

Computer science has lost its mystique. There is no longer a need for a vast army of computer scientists. The applications, games and databases that students once built laboriously in final year projects are bought at bookshops and newsagents.

If the gap between public knowledge and academic curriculum isn’t large enough, the gap between academia and industry practice is a gaping hole. While academic departments concentrate on developing new computer systems in an ideal organisational environment, a lot of industry has moved away from in-house development to a focus on delivering a service.

The field that has helped create most the of technological change in the past 50 years is going through a demystification process, and the ability to ‘compute’ has become so ubiquitous that it is no longer reserved for the highly trained. So what should we expect? Well, at the other end of this spectrum, meaning economics, if we’re to believe my model, there should surge and there has been. Here is some evidence from Harvard registration:

Ec 10, the popular name for Social Analysis 10, “Principles of Economics,” packs Sanders Theatre this semester with 736 undergraduates, despite a drop-off of more than 200 students from first semester. The course still has more than two times the number of undergraduates registered for the next largest course, Historical Study B-49, “History of American Capitalism.”

With 355 undergraduates, “History of American Capitalism,” previously History 1651, is a newcomer to the top of the list. When it was last offered in Fall 2003, only 77 undergraduates enrolled in the course, and before that, 30.

Now, I expect that the field of economics will probably go through it’s own demystification process, probably very soon, brought on by technology, where economics will become an automated model that philosophers and politicians can tweak to build their ideal societies (and for you pessimists out there, this doesn’t necessarily mean utopian societies).

So what does this mean for the surge in interest in economics? Well, I expect an over-saturation of economists in the coming years, of which few will be good at, and a purge, reminiscent of computer science. But that’s the cycle of things eh?

I would hope not, but I recently read Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book, The Anarchist in the Library, and I encountered a curious quote from Time Warner CEO, Richard Parsons:

This is a very profound moment historically. This isn’t just about a bunch of kids stealing music. It’s an assault on everything that constitutes cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve out intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And the corporations wont be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: the country will end up in a sort of Cultural Dark Age.

The idea that “artists will have no incentive to create” without corporations’ monetary promise goes against everything we know about the creative mind. Through out human history, self-expression has existed under the extreme conditions, for little or no gain; if anything, self-expression has flourished under the most unrewarding conditions. Now we that the Internet provides a medium to share information, people will create.

A fundamental misunderstanding in the relationship between media industry and the artist has produced an environment that has led the industry to believe that they are the reason for creative output, not just a beneficiary. However, the Internet is bringing the power of production and distribution to the user. And if production and distribution — which are where historically media companies made their money — can be handled by users, then what will be left for the media companies? With the surge in content, will media companies need to become filters and editors? If not, then what is there?

The current media model depends on controlling the flow of information, and as information becomes harder to control their power will diminish. On the internet we see strong communities building around very specific niches. As these communities get stronger, they will become harder to compete with. I believe that these niches will develop into the next generation media companies. These will be the companies that the large media companies will need to compete with.

The challenges that the current media companies face remind me of what happened to AT&T in the 1990s. After being broken up into “baby-bells”, AT&T was left providing only long distance. It was just a matter of time before the “baby-bells” began eating away at AT&T’s business from below, and there was little AT&T could do about it.

I think Richard Parsons’ quote shows a misunderstanding not only in the reason why people share information, but also in the direction of new technologies. For that reason I do not have much hope for the current media companies to adjust. Their only hope is to change and change represents their demise.

Case in point: Apple’s new cellphone-camera-browser, the iPhone, uses Mac OS X.

A few days ago I came a across, Ways of Seeing, by John Berger; A short book I read an art class in college about the way we look at the world. Reading the book now I am a bit more critical of it than when I was in college, especially in the way that it lays out inherently complex idea with so much certainty. My current gut reaction tells me that world cannot so easily be grouped into tidy categories, but even I acknowledge that that maybe it’s genius. The simplicity hints at the core of so many things, which are obstructicated by the complexities of life. Art, especially in fiction writing, for me, is capable of hinting at such truths.

Anyway, I’d not seen this book in years and I did not recall many things from it, but I knew that there was passage in that book which had framed the power dynamics between people in a way that made complete sense to me, especially in relationships between people of opposite sexes. I flipped to the book, and almost as if I had known exactly where it was I found the passage:

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presences is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and creditable his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretense is always towards a power which he exercises on others.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surrounding, tastes - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or small or aura.

Alas, there were no real screenshots and there was no search engine… yet. Yesterday, unable to make any sense what was going on by reading the blogs, I looked through the developer mailing list and found this post by Jimmy Wales:

The press coverage this weekend has been a comedy of errors. Wikiasari was not and is not the intended name of this project… the London Times picked that off an old wiki page from back in the day when I was working on the old code base and we had a naming contest for it. [...] And then TechCrunch ran a screenshot of something completely unrelated, thus unfortunately perhaps leading people to believe that something is already built about about to be unveiled. No, the point of the project is to build something, not to unveil something which has already been built.

And in the Wikia search webpage he explains why:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken. Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.

So there is no Google-killer just yet, but something is brewing.

From the details that we have so far, we know that this new search engine will be funded by Wikia Inc, Wales’ for-profit and ad-driven MediaWiki hosting company. We also know that the search technology will be based on Nutch and Lucene - the same technology that powers Wikipedia’s search. And we also know that the search engine will allow users to directly influence search results.

I found interesting that in the Wikia “about page”, Wales suggests that he has yet to make up his mind on how things are going to work, so suggestions appear to be welcome.

Also, during the frenzy, I managed to find many interesting technologies that I think might be useful in making a new kind of search engine. Now that a dialog appears to be open and there is good reason to believe a potentially competitive search engine could be built, current experimental technologies might play an important role in the development of Wikia’s search. Some questions that I think might be useful to ponder are:

Can current social bookmarking tools, like del.icio.us, provide a basis for determining “high quality” sites? Will using Wikipedia and it’s external site citing engine make sense for determining “high quality” links? Will using a Digg-like, rating system result spamless or simply just low brow results? Will a search engine dependant on tagging, but no spider be useful? But the question I am most interested in is whether a large scale manual indexing lay the foundation for what could turn into the Semantic Web (Web 3.0)? Or maybe just Web 2.5?

The most obvious and most difficult challenge for Wikia, besides coming up with a good name and solid technology, will be with dealing with sheer size of the internet.

I’ve found that open-source communities are never as large or as strong as they appear. Wikipedia is one of the largest and one of the most successful online collaborative projects, yet just over 500 people make over 50% of all edits and about 1400 make about 75% of all edits. If Wikia’s new search engine does not generate a large group of users to help index the web early on, this project will not survive; A strong online community, possibly in a magnitude we’ve never seen before, might be necessary to ensure that people-powered search is of any use.

I’ve been an adjunct member of the Institute for the Future of the Book for the past few months now and to be perfectly honest, it has been great, but now, it now looks like I will now be an official member of the Institute. This is a very dynamic place and heavily dependent on grants, so I am not certain how long I will be around, but my bio recently went up on the website and we have some pretty exciting projects lined up…

This blog has been a place for me to post — what I thought at the time were — fully fleshed out ideas, but my desire to post fleshed out ideas severely effected the pace at which I posted. Now I plan to speed it up and share ideas that I am currently wrestling with, while more fully developed ideas will go at if:book. I don’t think  this means that I will post crappy ideas (I hope), but I want to start posting ideas that I am not so certain about but still want to discuss.

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This Christmas I bought a few books for people, but after having them in my possession for a few days I became attached to them and I don’t think I will be giving them away anymore. This means that I have lots of reading to do. So for the next few months I will be reading and hopefully writing about Robert Levine’s “The Power of Persuasion”, Carl Sagan’s “The Varieties of Scientific Experience”, Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancentor’s Tale” as soon as I finish Jame Joyce’s “Dubliners” and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, both which a good friend recently gave me.

That is just a hint of where my mind will naturally drift in the following months.

Lets see…

Here is a sample why:

When I was 14 I saw the movie “Contact” and for the first time in my life realized that it was okay to admit I was an atheist.

So it is nice to read this:

Fans and bloggers are planning a worldwide blog-a-thon to commemorate the life and legacy of Carl Sagan — consummate scientist, communicator and educator — on Dec. 20, the 10th anniversary of his death. Sagan was Cornell’s David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences.

The event, organized by New York City fan Joel Schlosberg, encourages bloggers of all stripes to discuss the Cornell astronomer’s influence in their lives. Schlosberg plans to compile a meta-blog — a blog of blogs — following the event to link Sagan bloggers to one another.

Here is a blog celebrating Carl Sagan.

We are planning on releasing this tool as a Wordpress theme, and that suggestion has been getting some attention, but we need to do some serious clean up so to make sure that things do not break with complex text formating (as it does now).

One of the more interesting problems we’ve spent lots of time discussing at the institute is what we like to call “holy grail of commenting.” This system will, theoretically, of course, allow text and discussions surrounding it to flow seamlessly in a common interface, while not taking away from the vanilla reading experience. But as it turns out, this is quite a complex issue.

This is due to technological constraints but also mental ones. In order to make reader contributions line up with the original text, you have to start breaking things up into boxes and columns and tabs — all legacies in one way or another of the printed page. In the electronic environment, we can do cool things like have boxes and columns overlap, or hide areas of text behind other areas, or make windows within windows that scroll up and down, but we’re still thinking in two dimensions. How many two-dimensional spaces can you pile up on one page before the whole thing collapses? How far can we stretch Word Press — how much hacking can it endure — until we rip open a worm hole that takes us to a reading/writing space where different rules apply?

One of the challenges with a system allows anyone to comment on anything is that the distinction between different types of comments is difficult to show, and often that is very important. But having arbitrary comment distinctions makes the user interface a lot more complex and inflexible.

For example, some comments, like author footnotes, don’t always lead to a threaded discussion, but such comments currently have the same weight as comments that ask questions. Also, comments that discuss specific words or phrases are at the level of someone who comments about the entire paragraph. So suddenly we are thinking about not only weaving together comments into text, but then also weaving the comments into themselves, and