Monthly Archives: December 2002

Things to worry about

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One of my relatives used to have a poster on his icebox enumerating a master list of things to worry about. Global Warming, Nuclear War, Killer Bees and many other examples. People love to worry about these. Some people pick one and adopt it. Like a pet.

In some circles your not pulling your conversational weight if you don’t have a pet worry to talk about – over beer and such.

Silly guy that I am I adopted a somewhat essoteric pet worry some years ago.
Missing Neutrinos.

Now I’m sure you all know that the sun ought to collapse, but it doesn’t because the nuclear furnace at the center is throwing up a torrent of neutrinos, and these rattle around and keep the shell of the thing from imploding.

The models of how the thing works implies that the neutrinos rattle around for quite a few years before they finally manage to dig their way out to the surface.

Which brings us to the problem. Apparently the Sun isn’t leaking enough neutrinos! One possible explanation would be that the reaction at the center has stopped and in a few years the thing will implode. Pretty good thing to worry about don’t you think?

Well those darn physicists have changed their minds. Apparently the sun is just fine, but the standard model looks like it is in trouble. People at cocktail parties care if the Sun might implode, they just don’t really care if the standard model is going implode. I’ll need to find another pet worry.

.03%

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The word community get’s tossed around a lot these days,
particularly when it comes to the Internet. For example consider
these page counts for various queries at google. 

  "online community"      -- 1.4 million pages
  "my online community"   -- 521 pages
  "their online community" -- 986 pages

Millions of people are talking about it, but very few (521)
actually will publicly declare that they are members of one. 521 is
.03% of 1.4 million! In fact people are almost twice as likely (986)
to ascribe membership in a community to somebody else.

Amazon will offer to sell you 15 books about online communities.
Only one or two of these are a narrative account (a case study) of an
actual online community.

Something is wrong here. There is something strangely wrong when
there is more material about constructing an online community than there is
about the actual experiences of people inside of them. It is as if
the entanglement a participant has:

  • the stories he tells of the community,
  • the community rituals he engages in,
  • his sense of moral obligation to the community,
  • his self identification with the community,
  • his skills at identifying other members

are less important than the acts that outsiders might take to engineer that entanglement.

Public Good

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   Public Good (n.)
     Goods that are nonexcludable and nonrival.
     Example: Meteor showers are a public good.
   Good (n.)
     Another word for commodity.
     Example: A cheeseburger is a good.
   Nonexcludable (adj.)
     Impossible to fence in.
     Example: air polution is nonexcludable
   Nonrival (adj.)
     Valuable independent of who is using them.
     Example: Good manners are nonrival.
   Club Good (n.)
     A good that is public for members of the club
     is otherwise private.  This usually requires
     some kind of fence around this semi-public good.
     Example: A the recreational facilities of gated
     community.

The classic example of a public good was the Lighthouse. One ship’s use
of the lighthouse takes nothing from another’s. It is not practical
to selectively provide/deny access to the lighthouse signal.

A more modern example is the GPS, or Global Positioning System. No
one is excluded from using it, nobody’s usage degrade’s it’s quality for
another user.

Truth be told; there are few pure public goods.

Typically there is some club good action going on. The club will deny
access past the lighthouse door except to lighthouse members to avoid
the risk of teenagers or pirates hacking the lighthouse signal. The
defense department can encrypt the GPS signals and shutter the lighthouse
in desperate times.

I have a friend who – a member of a ‘change ringing’ society – who
tells me there are churches in England where the bell ringers have
the only keys to the church tower.

The puzzle when engineering public/club goods is how to design
the tower door.

Joel Mokyr has written a book that sounds very interesting after
reading

Virginia Postel’s review. It would appear that his argument
is that in the 17th and 18th somebody lost the keys to the
ivory tower. Knowledge discovered on the street, in the field,
and the workshop started flowing both horizontally and into the
elite ivory tower and back. From this emerged the last two
centuries of industrial revolution. 

  Open Source (n.)
    A kind of source code, software or knowledge that is managed as
    a limited club good with the goal of maximizing the natural public
    good nature all information goods.

BlogApp, Movabletype, mod_perl

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Humm… movabletype’s mt-xmlrpc.cgi and mod_perl’s good buddy apreq don’t play well together. For example you might find this in your server’s error log. 

 ... [libapreq] unknown content-type: `text/xml'

What to do?

If you disable mod_perl for mt-xmlrpc.cgi then, happy day, you can post from BlogApp. For example you might make a script like:

  #!/bin/sh
  exec .../mt-xmlrpc.cgi $*

Of course you can only suffer from this problem if your clever enought to have installed mod_perl. Mod_perl is, by the way, God’s gift to performance.

Bandwagon

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Bar none the hardest problem in standardization is getting the community of users to adopt the standard. This is a social engineering problem. This is an economic problem. It is not, mostly, a technological problem.

Here is a beautiful example of that. An example I like because it so nicely complements another standards making example – i.e. why people drive on the right.

When you pass another person on the road at night his headlights tend to blind you. There are social conventions about that, drivers know to disable their high beams. I’ve even driven cars that had clever electronics to automaticly dim the high beams (technology displacing good manners).

There is a much simpler solution. If cars and wind shields were both polarized approprately then the lights of an oncomming car wouldn’t bother you at all. All that’s needed to make that happen is to get the approprate standard widely adopted.

This idea was championed for years by Edwin Land of Polaroid. You might say that his inablity to get this simple technological fix widely adopted drove him to try his hand at a simpler problem. Instant photography – that at least was meerly a technically hard problem rather than a hard social engineering problem.

It would be facinating to revisit this standardization failure again. For example I wonder if you could get this bandwagon started in some ways that Land didn’t try. For example what if you made a kit and sold it to car buffs, they would then be able to recognize their fellow car buffs when they pass on the road. What if you gave them away free to some small communities and then sold them at cost to all the neighboring communities?

It would be an interesting experiment to see if there are tools available
to spin up cooperation that we know about now that we didn’t appreciate
back in Land’s day. Axelrod book suggests that maybe we do know some new things.

Principled Negotiation

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I’m a huge fan of “Getting to Yes” by Fisher, Ury, and Patton. An amazing book! Particularly if you believe, as I do, that cooperative organizations are the dominate lifeform of the internet.

The link above is a reasonably complete outline of their short book. An even shorter summary is:

  • Seperate the people from the problem.
  • Focus on interests, not on positions.
  • Invent options for mutual gain.
  • Use objective criteria

While those are very helpful rules to keep at hand. I’ve gotten as much and maybe more help from thier outline of how to handle various problems that arise as you negotiate.

Gluttony of ideas

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I’m a fan of the hard labor that goes into attempting to parse out the structure of the world. Even more so I love a big complex model that results from that work. I like to collect them.

For example here’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

  • Self Actualization
  • The Esteem of one’s peers.
  • Love
  • Safety
  • Physiological – food, air, warmth

The theory goes that your need for the ones low on the list will trump your seeking the ones high on the list. E.g. if your starving, then you don’t seek safety.

I like having a big bag of these to help bust out of the trap any one of them creates when thinking about a problem.

I’ve probably got about a hundred of these rattling around in my head, maybe a few hundred. For example here’s the top few means to manipulate or influence others:

  • Recoprocity
  • Commitment
  • Social Proof
  • Liking
  • Authority
  • Scarcity

These very brief version of these frameworks can’t due them justice. You really have to pick them apart. Think about them for a few months – each!

One of my “issues” is that I tend to rapidly toggle from one of these to another, maybe it’s an attention problem. Often when working on a problem with others I project their statements into one of these, and then page in an alternate model and inject it into the discussion. Sadly this confuses people.

These are all analogous to Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns. They are different too. His patterns fit on a page. These tend to fit in a book, a career, a movement, a religion – bigger things. That’s what makes them so interesting.

I guess I should remind myself at this point that that gluttony is a sin.

Sharehold Value

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Back in the late 1970s I worked for an venerable research firm. BBN, a lot of smart folks doing interesting work. The firm was generally profitable. It never managed to make any big money.

That firm was wiped out in what Fligstein in Architecture of Markets describes as a shift in how we as a society conceptualized firms. In 1970s firms were measured by how effectively they leveraged their assets. In the late 1970s that model was thrown into chaos by high inflation rates.

Chaos often results in changes of self concept, and so it was with society’s model of firms. Two complementary ideas arose in the early 1980s. One was that the right measure of a firm was ‘shareholder value’; i.e. the amount of money a firm returns to it’s investors. The second was the creation of a siginificantly more fluid market for the control of firms (e.g. Regean era reductions anti-trust enforcement, and reduced corporate taxes).

BBN thrashed around for a while after that. Finally it got senior management that understood the new rules; even if the smart guys never did. Finally it sold out to a telecomm company. The shareholders made some money and the firm was destroyed.

Today in my inbox I have email from the alumni mailing list of BBN. One of the last remaining bits of the firm recently went bankrupt. Some of those smart folks are now losing thier health insurance. Cobra coverage is one of those pesky liablities a bankrupt firm can shed.