Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Felton Earls’ term for the single most important determinant of a neighborhood’s violent crime rate is “Collective Efficacy:” “Trust, reciprocity, and a willingness among people to look out for one another.”

“Our national ideology gets spun off in the direction of individualism,” says Earls. “But maybe the survival of our country demands that we balance that strong ethic with the admission that we’re in it together.”

It’s nice when $50+ Million of public health research returns something that’s solidly useful (example article: Science (pdf)}. “It is far and away the most important [crime] research insight in the last decade,” said Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice from 1994 to 2000. “I think it will shape policy for the next generation.”

This same research program has finally shown the Broken Windows to be just a bunch of fuzzy thinking. Broken Windows was a very popular hypothisis that crime arises from disorder; for example the unrepaired broken window. It’s popular with authoritarians since it licenses them to demand that other people clean their desks and gives them an excuse to arrest the shabby or homeless. It confounds cause and effect.

This nice peice of research (pdf) both fails to substantiate the silly idea but also demonstrates that collective efficacy is a much more valuable predictive variable. Meanwhile the research is delightful because they collected so much data so very carefully.

(See also this:NY Time’s Article).

Catagories are a kind of precursor for violence. In Tilly’s book about violence he enumerates three precursors for violence one of which is to invent catagories. All three means are used sharpen the boundry between groups. Before you can get Canadians to fight with each other you have to sharpen up a catagorical division. What to start a fight? Invent a category, say French Canadians.

You can see Dave Winer playing this game when he writes:

Sifry must think weblogs are like television. Shirky sure does. What is it about people with two-syllable names that begin with S and end with Y. I think I’m going to publish a law about this and go on the speaker’s circuit.

I’m willing to give Dave the benefit of the doubt that he’s only trying to be cute when he does that. Given my last name and Dave’s last name I think I can say that it’s a tacky ploy. That cute device obscures what is a more important dispute. He writes:

You know what’s always bothered me about Technorati? I don’t care about millions of blogs. I’m going for quality not quantity. Sifry must think weblogs are like television. Shirky sure does.

Is the blogging universe “like television”?

Dave attempts to dismiss the question by framing it as obviously false. But is it? The presumption in his statement is, of course not. I can be cute too: Dave’s the man that brought us a product call Radio.

The real question in dispute here is about concentration of power (or wealth). What the power-law distributions in blog linking and traffic suggest is that even with an architecture that is peer to peer (one that doesn’t treat the distribution channel as a scarce resource) you still get extremely high concentrations of power.

The few to many audience topology found in the 20th century broadcast media is emerging in the 21st century peer-to-peer media! We certainly didn’t see that comming! But denial is a mistake. Our presumption was that a peer-to-peer network architecture would assure an highly egalitarian outcome. Compelling data to the contrary makes clinging to that optomistic bit of logic a mistake. A dangerous mistake.

This is the arguement at hand. One side, the power-law fans, have noticed that what we want is not what we are getting. That side thinks we should be worried. The other side - the build it right and we won’t need no stinking regulatations side - is sticking to it’s design principles; if not it’s goals.

I’m in the first camp. So, I think the otherside is mostly engaging in denial and minimization. While I think the design principles are good, their outcome seems quite unfortunate. We need to think deeply about why, and what to do next.

One last point. Dave’s Scripting News is #15 on technorati. Does anybody think that’s because Dave’s got the one of the best blogs on the entire planet? It is beyond ironic to realize that Dave has become a vested interest. “I don’t care about millions of blogs.” Who’s the television now?

The user gives commands by pointing the cursor at graphic symbols on the screen, such as a paint brush and an eraser to enable the user to draw a picture, or a trash can to destroy a document.

…

Because the machine now has one drive and 128K of RAM, several sources said users might have to “swap” diskettes in order to move information from one program to another.

…

The user also will be able to divide the screen into a variety of compartments, or “windows,” that each can be used to perform different jobs. For example, the user could be writing a letter on one part of the screen, then create a window and begin another.

…

Within the next few months, Microsoft Inc., a Bellvue, Wash. software publisher closely allied with IBM, is scheduled to introduce a spreadsheet package for making financial projections, a graphing package and the Basic programming language.

    — San Jose Mercury News

Each Apple dealer got three. They all sold out immediately. I got mine at a boating electronics store. The boot blocks were layed out on the disk so that it played a little tune as it booted. The audio was stored in gaps in the display’s RAM. Microsoft never did ship that Basic implementation, but they did force Apple not to ship the one they had ready to go at launch. The 128K!

“The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will
turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and
corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will
laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

    - Reverend Billy Sunday on the Prohibition

Photoshop Tatoos - Hehe, the media office at BYU decided to hide the tatoos on their basketball players.

Longhorn - Good reasonably short overview of longhorn by a VC.

I’m Above Average (pdf) - An amusing essay about the puzzle presented by reading the liturature that shows that people tend to rate themselves above average. Given that knowledge how do you adjust your own self evaluation? If depressed people have less of problem with this are faced with a choice between being depressed and being accurate, etc.

Columbia Report - Murder! We apparently learned nothing from the Challenger Report. Kafka!

Normal Accidents - One of the best books on how hard it is to build high reliablity systems in some situations.

Future of Shopping - Neat fash demo of a tool that helps search the universe of cameras.