Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism

Understanding the economic crisis

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Lots of material out there to read to understand what is going on. Here are some of the more interesting ones I’ve found:

The Money Meltdown – a set of links that attempts to summarize the situation and how we got here.

Slate.com: Subprime Suspects: Puts to rest the idea that poor homeowners are somehow to blame for this.

60 Minutes: A Look At Wall Street’s Shadow Market

Megan McArdle: How did it all happen? – some cognitive science behind this.

Forbes: The Economics of Trust – Capitalism requires trust. Break the foundations of trust between people and institutions and something like this is inevitable.

And the best two explanations I have heard so far were on This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Some ummm… presidential links for today

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In software engineering we have a concept called ‘Duck Typing’. Basically, some languages trust developers more so than others (lets say Python versus Java), and you can trust that if an object ‘walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck’.

You end up writing far less code due to the trust you have that things are what they appear to be.

In this year’s Presidential campaign, you have a candidate that looks like a normal Joe, walks like a normal Joe, and talks like a normal Joe, but whose income is anything but.

Can you guess who?

CNBC.com: Warren Buffet explains the credit crisis to Charlie Rose

FREE FOR ALL! the movie – watch it online. Roger Ebert’s review.

Andrew Sullivan: Confronting Racism Against Obama (Powerful video)

NYTimes: Tom Davis Gives Up

YouTube: SNL VP Debate (via akkamsrazor)

YouTube.com: 5 Friends Uncensored – Don’t Vote

YouTube.com: Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

“a Manual for our Kids to Save the Future”?

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That’s what John Baichtal at his Wired Blog “Geek Dad” called Cory Doctorow’s book sci-fi novel “Little Brother”, in his glowing review posted last week.

While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I’m going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf – it’s a great book so far.

One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series “Futuristic Tales” from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.

Truth, the Web, and the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

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Ben Kenobi, when he told Luke, “the truths we cling to are greatly determined by our point of view”, is looking pretty good right now.

And as Google is apt to promote the democratization of data rolls on.

As a software engineer and as a person with an interest in sociology and communications, it’s clear this presents a set of opportunities to be explored, problems to be solved. How do we learn of ‘truth’ when our echo chambers (our social networks, our friends, family, co-workers) are the best tools to keep us from the noise of modern media?

In a presentation at TED.com, Jonathan Haidt explains why Tim Berners-Lee’s new foundation is both timely and has such a hard fight ahead. The presentation reinforces that the questions I’ve been asking in some latest posts aren’t that invalid, and there is something more here to explore.

Shout out to Shelley Powers for posting about this (even if so few seem wanting to discuss) and to Antonella Pavese for the heads up on the video.

TED.com: Jonathan Haidt: The real difference between liberals and conservatives:

There are big echos of Dave Rogers in that presentation.

Bottom line – if we want to change the world, we need to start with ourselves.

Related and new at Salon today: Robert Burton: “My candidate, myself”: “Even when faced with new facts and insights, most voters don’t change their minds about their favorite candidates. A neurologist explains how they might.”. Timely.

Tim Berners-Lee new foundation the W3F is timely

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The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.

arstechnica.com: WWW creator Berners-Lee launches ambitious Web Foundation

BBC.com: Warning sounded on web’s future

The Register: Berners-Lee backs web truthiness labelling scheme

Wow. Talk about timing!

Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?

Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on ‘truth’ be the prevailing ‘truth’ as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).

Marc Ambinder: What We Learned This Weekend:

The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It’s all a struggle for power.

ScienceBlogs.com: Cognitive Dissonance And Politics:

…dissonant facts made them double-down. It would be too painful to be wrong, and so they convinced themselves that they were right.

USNews: The Campaign, “The Matrix,” and the GOP Offensive Against Truth:

Among historians, there’s a raging Great Debate about the question of Truth.

Wall Street Journal: The Triumph of Culture Over Politics:

For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like “politics,” “spectacle” and “entertainment” barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack Obama:

In my book “True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society”, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”–the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio–lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then ‘truth’ is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.

I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual ‘truth’.

Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common ‘truth’ ?

YouTube: Stephen Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor

Google Video: Colbert Roasts President Bush – 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner

What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we’ve come to a core reason why computer programming is so… flawed – that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?

And if it seems odd that I am making connections between tech, media and politics, well Dave Winer posted yesterday “People thought I stopped writing about technology but the technology and politics are all one and the same.”.

I’m just asking questions here, I have no answers. And probably need to drink less coffee in the morning.

Who is Clay Shirky?

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For coworkers (you know who you are…):

Jeff Atwood says, It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It

Hugh Macleod says there is only Clay Shirky’s Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.

Ted: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration:

Clay Shirky is author of the recent “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” (on my must-read list), and from his bio:

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist’s Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his “After Darwin” column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O’Reilly’s bioinformatics series. He helps program the “Biological Models of Computation” track for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conferences.

Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Power Laws, Weblogs, , and Inequality

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Shirky, to me, is noteworthy for his balanced views on the Web and its applications to and effects from society.

Far more here.

YouTube: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style: