Bay Area weather - perfect, with earthquakes

I read this article by Virginia Postrel before moving here, nearly 6 years ago now; it seems appropriate today.

Silicon Valley's perfect weather means you don't need backup plans, just in case it rains. It means you don't resent spending a beautiful day inside at work, because tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will be just as gorgeous. It means you have more energy, sapped neither by sleep-inducing clouds nor enervating heat and humidity. It means fewer days dragging into the office with a brain dulled by allergies and winter colds. It means you have more life.

BUT AGAINST THE BEAUTIFUL blue skies of the valley sprawl its tawny hills, their curves clearly visible beneath a bare wisp of foliage. In the dry landscape of the West, the earth is not camouflaged by trees and vines and underbrush. In the valley, the ground itself is omnipresent.

And, as everyone knows, it is also unstable.
[...]
Good weather plus earthquakes creates an utterly different environment. On a day-to-day basis, you can concentrate on your goals, with no need for contingency plans. Your softball game, your picnic, your wedding won't be rained out. But everything could change in an instant. You can't anticipate earthquakes, can't plan for them, can't even predict when and where they'll strike. Instead of providing the certainty of seasons, nature promises a future of random shocks. All you can do is develop general coping skills and resources. There is nothing familiar about the aftermath of an earthquake, and no one survives it alone.
[...]
Once they hit the light, no one can anticipate just where innovations will lead--or whether they will in fact succeed. It is by trusting the search, permitting experiments whose results no one can know, that we allow advances to occur. In a 1979 paper, Wildavsky prefigured his discussion of anticipation and resilience with a meditation on the sources of progress. It depends, he suggested, on spontaneity and serendipity, on discoveries no one can predict or foresee: "Incessant search by many minds...produces more (and more valuable) knowledge than the attempt to program the paths to discovery by a single one....Not only markets rely on spontaneity; science and democracy do as well....Looking back over past performance, adherents of free science, politics, and markets argue that on average their results are better than alternatives, but they cannot say what these will be....The strength of spontaneity, its ability to seek out serendipity, is also its shortcoming--exactly what it will do, as well as precisely how it will do it, cannot be specified in advance."

Nowadays it seems that every place wants to be like Silicon Valley--to discover its secrets and copy them. Here, then, is a secret that can be copied, even in places with lousy weather and stable ground: Don't ask for answers in advance. Don't try to create a life without surprises. Trust serendipity.

The opposite of mediAgora?

How instant IM criticism tanks over-hyped movies:
The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

How I emailed myself into a job and blogged my way out of it

Joi and Ross have been talking about finding work through 'weak ties'.

I came to Apple in 1998 through just such a route - I had been a regular contributor to the QuickTime-API and QuickTime-Talk mailing lists, so when I was interviewed and hired, many of my new colleagues were people I'd been sharing software hacks, hints and jokes with for many years. The trust I had built up in them meant that I was ready to leave the UK and my successful software publishing management career to become an engineer in the US.
I had been hired with the same kind of trust, rather than with any specific job in mind, and so I always had a broader set of contacts than the org chart implied, and we would help one another out.

I carried on as before, talking about my work on mailing lists, and joining ones relevant to the areas I worked in - video editing and streaming media, among others. I had found another group of people with common interests to talk with. Gradually, however, constraints became tighter.

When you are a hardware company, you really need to keep new hardware secret to avoid the Osborne effect - that customers won't buy today because they are waiting for your newer model. Apple's secrecy and PR policies are shaped with this in mind, so when I started arguing in the abstract against DRM, I was warned not to do so using my Apple account, as it might be taken as a corporate position, or foreshadow future products.

I stopped using my Apple email address in public, and began to avoid talking about the technology I worked on - after all there are plenty of other fascinating subjects, and I didn't want to inadvertently reveal something confidential.

Gradually, almost insensibly, my interests changed. While following up on my mediAgora ideas, I got more and more involved in the details of small world networks and catastrophe theory, and different kinds of social software.

I brought some of these ideas back to work - using a wiki to describe and discuss my ideas for how to improve QuickTime. My manager liked the idea of the wiki, subsuming it into corporate processes to the point where we had meetings to discuss wiki pages, but the ideas were deferred from release to release. My work was ongoing maintenance of the existing code to keep pace with the OS and hardware changes below it, and minor feature requests for the Apps above it.

Now, when compiling on my ageing hardware took too long, or reinstalling the OS every 2 days ate into development time, I spent some downtime on my new interests, as well as helping other Apple employees as before. The work continued, but the passion was gone.

My corporate manager fired me on Friday for not meeting his goals.

Rather than fight it, I am going to take this as a cue to follow a new direction. I'll look to my new 'weak ties' for inspiration.

And I'll still be using hardware and software from Apple and QuickTime - there are a lot of good people still inside.

Old Hollywood looking for rebirth

Frank Pierson's commencement address to USC Film School is stirring, but has more rhetoric than answers:
We have to remind ourselves that this viewer is only another aspect of ourselves, that we have also in us-as he does-a better part, that needs to be cultivated and to express itself. There is no single audience with a single personality. There is the larger audience-currently under-served-that has vast variety of appetites that we can, we must, satisfy. [...]

Our defense is the farmers' market, the yard sale, the auctions. We had hopes for the Internet, but that's being turned into a marketing tool. In the field of entertainment and the arts our last defense may be Tivo and the remote control.

Liberal critics have raised the alarm over corporate censorship, the exclusion from theaters and TV of anything except what seems marketable and the eliminations of anything that might offend somebody anywhere. But the danger of censorship in America is less from business or the religious right or the self righteous left, than to self-censorship by artists themselves, who simply give up. If we can't see a way to get our story told, what is the point of trying? I wonder how many fine, inspiring ideas in every walk of life are strangled in the womb of the imagination because there's no way past the gates of commerce? [...]

You are now our future, and this is the challenge you face. It is a bigger challenge than it seems because you cannot recapture something you never knew. It is your gargantuan task to create this spirit out of thin air, in the face of resistance and lack of interest, in your own style and out of your own imagination. Something new and as yet unknown.

I'm ready when you are

Email experiments confirm six degrees, Milgram didn't

Joi points out a new scientist story about Duncan Watts' experiment that shows 6 degrees of separation, even though Milgram didn't - most of his messages didn't get through.

As well as getting this backwards, the article says:
The researchers were surprised to discover that message chains did not rely on a few highly connected individuals, so-called "hubs". Previous research by Watts and fellow Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz had suggested that such "hubs" were important to all social chains.

This is a common misunderstanding - the hubs are a simplifications, and don't really exist; with enough elements, power law distributions are fairly smooth, and the variety of scales of connectedness is important.

Beware implicit gaussians

I've discussed Power law distributions in the context of music, box office and other charts and the danger of modelling them with gaussians - you over weight the 'top ten' hits, and ignore the 'long tail' of many smaller creators.

The stock market has a complementary problem. Options pricing is done using a model known as Black-Scholes, that has as a key parameter historical volatility, and the variance of price fluctuation is used for this. Now it has long been noticed that Stock market price fluctuations are not distributed as a gaussian - Mandelbrot pointed out they follow a scale-free Power law distribution decades ago..

However, gaussians are still used all the time in quant analysis. In this case it is the other end of the curve that fails - they see the small fluctuations and model them, but the big disturbances are far more common than is predicted. It is essentially this error that caused the LTCM collapse. The quant's dismiss this effect as acts of god, and unmodellable, but these are exactly the events that destroy your portfolio.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a profile of Nassim Taleb, one trader who does use power laws rather than gaussians, and does well out of it.

Social Fisking

Xeni picks up on it

Fisking is normally more one-sided than this - I call the QuickTopic twist 'Social Fisking', as it can become a conversation.

The best classic Fisking I've seen was Lawmeme vs Francis.

Fisking Xeni

Xeni Jardin points to an article she wrote for Grammy magazine on compulsory licensing.

I've fisked it using QuickTopic.

If you want to join in, please do

Happy Birthday Doc

Doc for California Governor!

Complementary currencies

Stephen Hill, on the pho list, points to a great interview with Bernard Lietaer on complementary currencies (ignore the rather schmaltzy new age design; this is deep stuff about monetary theory, clearly explained).
First, let's define what a currency is, because most textbooks don't teach what money is. They only explain its functions, that is, what money does. I define money, or currency, as an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange. It's therefore not a thing, it's only an agreement—like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal. And most of the time, it's done unconsciously. Nobody's polled about whether you want to use dollars. We're living in this money world like fish in water, taking it completely for granted.

Now the point is: there are many new agreements being made within communities as to the kind of medium of exchange they are willing to accept. As I said, in Britain, you can use frequent flier miles as currency. It's not a universal currency, it's not legal tender, but you can go to the supermarket and buy stuff. And in the United States, it's just a question of time before privately issued currencies will be used to make purchases. Even Alan Greenspan, the governor of the Federal Reserve and the official guardian of the conventional money system, says, "We will see a return of private currencies in the 21st century."

I think Heinlein once wrote that money should be an adjective, not a verb, that we should talk bout the moneyness of things.

Company Stock is in effect private currency, with a fluctuating exchange rate tracked by the Stock Market, and much of the net runs on non-monetary exchange.

Bridging these complementary currencies into the dollar economy is an interesting challenge.

Markets and Antimarkets

Abe Burmeister, on the Emergent democracy list, points to an interesting 1996 essay by Manuel DeLanda
called Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy.
It reminds me a bit of my father's 1985 Two Kinds of Order paper.

Delanda talks of how bottom-up emergent meshwork markets compete with top-down hierarchic anti-markets, discusses historic exmples, and ends on this note:
Computers, in the form of embedded intelligence in the buildings that house small firms, can aid this catalytic process, allowing the firm's members to reach some measure of self-organization. Although these efforts are in their infancy, they may one day play a crucial role in adding some heterogeneity to a world-economy that's becoming increasingly homogenized.

As David Weinberger succinctly put it -'Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy'

Good music, good cause

Shannon & Scott must be sleeping the sleep of the just by now.

Conference attendance by proxy, continued

The hecklebot is currently winging it's way to Aspen with Joi, so I may get to heckle at Brainstorm.
Scoble's chums are suggesting autonomous robots, some of which have been built, but it's more fun to be carried around by someone really there, and pop up on the screen of the presenters to correct them.

Micro-content - Macro discontent?

Joi explains his interest in micro-content
It's a good summary, but it misses a key point. By emphasising the difference between commercially produced 'content' and user-created 'micro-content' he is ignoring the enormous area inbetween.
The current content publishing model is only efficient for large-runs of sales - sell under a few thousand books, a few hundred thousand CDs, or a few million cinema seats, and you won't be welcome in commercial publishing.
This gap is gradually being bridged by innovative companies, such as Cafepress and Customflix, but both of these are still creating physical goods.

I think there is a huge opportunity here to be the eBay of digital media, and I think mediAgora is the way to go about it.

Microsoft extrapolates

Jakob Nielsen explains why people hate PDF's:
For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go. [...]
Here's a quote from a customer who shunned those parts of the site that were in PDF:
"It looks like I'm going to have to go to PDF, which I'm dreading."

Scoble explains how jealous Microsoft is:
Let's see, Adobe makes money off of Acrobat. About a billion a year (Acrobat is funding an entire additional Silicon Valley skyscraper, Adobe's CEO said in a recent magazine article I read). Macromedia makes money off of Flash. Borland makes money off of tools. One of Microsoft's biggest buildings (#42) is full of guys writing tools.

The Palladium/NGSCB information locking is what Scoble is getting at here - he argues that stopping people reading things is the glorious future of profitability for the no-longer-growth-stock MSFT.

Ballmer explains what is really going on here.
A senior partner in an accounting firm needs to send email to his partners with a confidential contract proposal attached. Besides specifying who may read the proposal and that they may not copy, paste or edit the information, he specifies that the email itself cannot be forwarded. The recipients' email and word processing applications transparently enforce these policies. All partners worry less about information leaks that might damage ongoing negotiations.

Ballmer's key mistake here is assuming you can rely on computers when you don't trust people to trust you.

Why are Microsoft so obsessed with this?

I think they still bear the psychological scars from having their internal emails spread all over the papers, and are subconsciously trying to fix this with code...

Personally, I'm all in favour of anyone who thinks this way having their writings made unreadable by others.