Thinking about badges and how people reveal their membership in things…
This power adaptor claims to be very conformant.
If I had a EAN.UCC Company Prefix of my very own (only $750 dollars!) then I could assign all my relationship partners a unique GSRN or Global Service Relationship Number (pdf). This would be very useful when I need to quickly retrieve the details of any given relationship. In some cases I might want to hand out multiple GSRN to the same person, since our relationship is framed in different modalities; friend/coworker, wife/mother/helpmate. I could then mark up all my correspondence so it might be quickly associated with other aspects of the relationship. Membership cards! Better yet jewelry with RFID chips embedded. Then when they drop by the house I could dynamically customize their visit to my home.
Bar codes? Not just for tangible items anymore! Label the intangible. This is going to be big!
These results are just delightful! Twenty years ago people started running a tournaments to find the best algorithm for playing a repeated prisoner dilemma game of random length. Pretty quickly the winning strategy (nice is better than mean) emerged and nothing much has changed since them.
This year one of the entrants found a new approach!
Instead of entering one algorithm they entered 60. In the metaphor of they game they didn’t send one criminal to be repeatedly arrested; they sent a gang. Members of this mafia were very loyal to each other and they methodically ganged up on the other players and the police. When matched with an opponent in the game these gang members would try to puzzle out if they were playing against one of their own or not. In the real world you identify others of your kind with various signalling devices: secret handshakes, gang tags, etc.
In this game they can only signal to each other via the game. Using patterns in their game play mafia members recognize each other. At that point they can game the police in ways that to raises the gang’s overall score.
It’s just wonderful. This is the classic model of all game theory! And even in this tiny little dishpan model collaborative groups form and once they form they out compete the players that fail to collaborate. As Dave Weinberger once pointed out, we are a species that will form communities even if it means tapping out the alphabet on the wall of our cell.
The chart at the right shows has a dot for each of the most popular languages spoken on the planet. It’s plotted on a log-log graph; the vertical axis is millions, the horizontal is rank. The top language is Mandarin, though there are seven other Chinese langages in the top 30. English and Spanish are neck and neck for second place. The data is from here, though originally from here.
This posting is the complement to the posting on the cost of free trade born by the subordinate culture using which side of the road you drive on as well as the argument being made in my recent advocacy posting regarding RDF/N3 v.s. XML that translators can gloss over the difference.
As global barriers fall this distribution will grow more severe. Like an industry condensing toward a monopoly. Smaller languages will expire; larger languages will thrive. Rankings will shift because there are other forces in play; like control over economic exchanges. Anybody got a babble fish?
Stefano brought N3, or Notation 3, to my attention – it’s a good thing!
I hate XML. It’s a mess. Wrong on so many levels. But getting the industry to switch is now nearly impossible. XML has played almost all the cards you can to make a standard sticky and lock-in users. For example it’s extreme complexity. Just like that of the Window’s API. That makes people extremely reluctant to abandon their sunk costs after learning it.
That said I keep hoping that something better will emerge.
One possibility is that something will emerge that provides overwhelmingly improved UI. Making users smile can be a powerful force for change. So cool UI might be the lever. Things like SVG and Lazslo are examples of folks making a run for this exit. On a lesser scale the evolution of HTML/Javascript just keeps on hill climbing.
A less plausible possibility is that we will all rendezvous around one standard from for storing our documents, our data. This idea has been a fantasy of the ivory tower crowd since beginning of time. There has been a cool up and coming normal form at every stage of my life. I still have some stacks of punch cards. I wrote programs to convert IDL databases into suites of prolog assertions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve forced some data structure to lie down in a relational database or a flat file that sort/awk/perl would swallow.
After a while one becomes inured to hearing the same tune, the old enthusiasm returned again new clothes. You wish them the very best of luck because of course you remember how hopeful one once was that this could all come together. As a result I’ve have been treating the Semantic Web work with a kind of bemused old fart’s detachment.
But! Step past all the self indulgent ivory tower talk of one world data model. Skip the seminar on how soon we will compute the answer to everything. You don’t need to know from reification, or Mereological Ontological.
This stuff is actually useful.
Look at this:
:dirkx foaf:based_near [
a geo:Point;
geo:lat "52.1563666666667";
geo:long "4.48888333333333" ].
That tells us where something named here as :dirkx is lives. That’s it! No wasted tokens. Easy to parse. That’s why I like N3. Easy for humans, easy for computers. XML is neither.
<foaf:based_near>
<geo:Point rdf:nodeID="leiden">
<geo:lat>52.1563666666667</geo:lat>
<geo:long>4.48888333333333</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
</foaf:based_near>
XML is good if your getting paid by the byte.
I’d love to see XML displaced by something more practical. Something that lowers the barriers to entry so that you don’t need a few meg of code just to fool around. I believe that XML’s complexity is good for large players and bad for small players. I want to see the small players having fun – and frustrating the large players.
N3 is neat, but what about RDF?
RDF is just fine. You need to clear way all the overly serious ivory tower presentation. get past all that righteous marshmallow fluff and down at the core you find a nutritious center of practical and simple useful good stuff. How nice! It’s going to drive the marshmallow men in their tower crazy if this thing takes off!
When I look at RDF I notice two critical things. It is much easier to stack up new standards in RDF than it is in XML. Look the example above. It’s using a standard called geo and one called foaf. Click on those links to see how straight forward they are.
In XML if you want to define a new standard it takes extremely talented labor. Only a handful of people can both understand XML Schema and think in practical terms about real world problems. In RDF any fool can do it; which means that anybody with some data to move can get on board without having to go thru some gauntlet of heavy industry standardization.
The second thing I notice about RDF is actually a blind spot.
Above I mentioned two ways that XML might get displaced. One on the supply side (data normal form) and one on the demand side (presentation). There is a third – data exchange. Exchange is where the powerful network effects are – always! RDF is better for data exchange than XML. It’s easier, it’s simpler, and it is far better for layering, mixing, and creating new standards.
This trio, and the standards around them, are key to making anything happen in the net.
The RDF folks think that the demand side is where the leverage is. That’s wrong. Content is not king! Exchange is king. In the world of ends, the middle rules.
Here’s a little model, a kind of cargo cult mimic of something an economist might do. The point of this little exercise is to illustrate a point about free trade and freedom. These two ideas get confounded with each other. The primary benefit of free trade is that it increases total efficiency and that’s presumably a social good. My take: when you let loose the dogs of efficiency it displaces diversity of practice. That forces switching costs born disproportionately by the weaker side. Traditional models emphasis the weaker industries bear the switching costs. That seems ethical. This model suggests that the costs are born by innocent victims of displaced platforms of standards.
Consider two economies North and South divided by a river which precludes trade between them. In a brilliant act of engineering and social enlightenment a bridge is built that links the two. Trade happens, economic growth is unleashed. All is well with the world.
But wait! The economy on the South side of the river drives on the left side of the road; while the economy on the North side drive on the right side of the road. In all other ways the two economies operate using the same standards. Is this situation stable?
I don’t think so. It seems to me that as the two economies grow increasingly linked one side will be forced to switch their driving standard. The cost of that switch will weigh very heavily on one economy. Which one will be forced to switch?
I think it’s clear that barring exceptional facts the smaller of the two will be forced to switch.
What would this switch cost the smaller economy? We have plenty of stories of switches like this – always a smaller or conquered land switching to gain compatibility with the standards of a dominate power. For example the Germans forced the Austrians to switch during the second world war.
Driving side is a good example because it carries no credible argument for one choice being better than another. The switching costs concrete. Other examples, like switching currency or language are rife with subjective subtexts.
We know that much of happiness arises from relative position. If you know the other guy is better off than you are then that makes you sad. Consider some hypothetical numbers. The Southern economy is 80% the size of the Northern one. The bridge raises both economies GDP by 5%. The Southern economy is then forced to take a -4% hit to switch to new driving standards. But after the bridge is build and the dust settles everybody is “better off” but relatively speaking the Southern economy is now even worse off compared to the Northern one.
This is not a scenario likely to make the population of the Southern economy desire that a bridge get built. From their point of view this is a scheme on the part of the Northern economy to force them into a more subordinate position. The bridge makes the southern economy richer, but less more subordinate and less happy.
nano-century: “…On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent,seconds is a nanocentury.”
— more
I’m extremely sad not to have gotten to go to this conference. Open Source, Open Standards. Sigh.
I can temper my grief a bit by making fun of the venue though. Definitely sends a mix message.
I’ve been looking for years. A beehive! 
An example in nature of a two sided network effect! It provides brokage, exchange, or agency between two classes (pistil and stamen). It draws off a tax (honey) for the maintainance of the hub (hive). Since these kinds of hubs become more valuable as more and more particpants rondevous around the standards set by the hub I think we can assume that the flowers of the client population evolve to fit the exchange standards made manifest in the hub. I.e. they evolve to interface well with bees of a certain size et. al. of the dominate bee population. Overtime that should drive other polinators out of buisness.
Conventional wisdom holds that standardization is a means to create increased competition. This is not always the case. Conventional wisdom holds that deregulation is a means to increase competition. This is not always the case. Regulation and lack of standards are two ways that can frustrate the consolidation of small firms in an industry into larger firms.
This graph is an output of a simulation of an industry undergoing consolidation. The lines show the distributon of firm sizes in the industry. Each line on the log-log graph is one step toward a more consolidated industry. The line along the bottom shows the industry at the start of the simulation; a ten thousand firms all of size one. As the simulation proceeds firms merge; each merger creates a larger firm. Each line show the distribution of firm sizes after another hundred firms have been absorbed until there are only four thousand firms left; but notice that one of these firms has captured three thousand of the original firms in the market! Now that’s a way to concentrate wealth!
You can see the power-law distribution of firm sizes emerging spontaneously as the consolidation takes place. I.e. this is another means to create a power-law distribution.
Let’s peel back a bit more what’s going on here. This model is based on what graph mavens call a random graph. Each of the original firms is a node in this random graph. To start their are no links at all between them. The simulation proceeds by creating random linkages between these original firms. As links are introduced groups of firms are consolidated into now merged firms; or in graph theory terms you get connected components. Clearly if we do this long enough we will get one giant firm. That is often referred to a a phase transition; in which case we might say that the industry condensed or froze rather than consolidated.
Note that this model creates links between the original firms, so that a firm that is consolidated out of 100 of the original firms is a 100 times more likely to get a random link than one of the original firms is. That creates the usual rich get richer as well as the advantage to the early mover found in the power-law scenarios. The random nature of the linking also reminds us that there is no “merit” revealed by the distribution other than size and luck. Consider what that implies for the sleepy members of an industry the moment that the regulatory (or technological) barrier to consolidation is repealed and suddenly what was impossible before; mergers, are now key to the firm’s ongoing survival.
In the last step in the simulation graphed here you can see that the power-law distribution is on the verge of failing to provide a good fit; the industry is about to freeze up into one giant monopoly.
Both regulation and a lack of standards make it harder to create the random linkages that encourage this kind of consolidation. Something to keep in mind when chatting with the advocates of standards, deregulation, and free trade. Something to think about when large firms argue that deregulation and standards are good for small business. Something to think about when free trade advocates argue that free trade is an unalloyed good for small countries. It is more complex than that.
