The End of Cyberspace

links for 2009-07-02

• Using Forecasting Markets to Manage Demand Risk
  "[D]ata sets themselves do not really convey any specific meaning. Meaning can be inferred from how the data compare to expectations or previously published data, but numbers in enterprise applications or spreadsheets cannot explain the strategies Intel and its customers are employing or the uncertainties they are facing. Decentralized organizations must find a means of transmitting business context; in other words, instead of transmitting mere data sets, they must transmit information and intelligence from employees who have it to employees who need it to make decisions and plans."
  (tags: prediction predictionmarkets decisionmarkets forecasting)
• Review: Scott E Page, The Difference — Crooked Timber
  (tags: psychology creativity diversity groups)
• Review of Scott Page, The Difference
  "The main conclusion of The Difference can be easily summarized: problem-solving talents and perspectives come in many different varieties, so if one wants to assemble an effective problem-solving team it is usually a good idea to combine people of diverse talents and perspectives rather than those displaying a single type problem-solving ability, even if that ability in each team member is at the very highest level."
  (tags: diversity psychology groups productivity creativity)

links for 2009-06-27

• ScienceDirect - Journal of Systems and Software : Better sure than safe? Over-confidence in judgement based software development effort prediction intervals
  "The uncertainty of a software development effort estimate can be indicated through a prediction interval (PI), i.e., the estimated minimum and maximum effort corresponding to a specific confidence level. For example, a project manager may be “90% confident” or believe that is it “very likely” that the effort required to complete a project will be between 8000 and 12,000 work-hours. This paper describes results from four studies (Studies A–D) on human judgement (expert) based PIs of software development effort. Study A examines the accuracy of the PIs in real software projects. The results suggest that the PIs were generally much too narrow to reflect the chosen level of confidence, i.e., that there was a strong over-confidence."
  (tags: psychology planning future)
• Roger Buehler | Psychology | WLU
  Bibliography of Roger Buehler.
  (tags: planning future psychology)
• Biases and Fallacies, Memories and Predictions: Comment on Roy, Christenfeld, and McKenzie (2005)
  Planning, personality, and prediction
  (tags: psychology future)
• Planning, personality, and prediction: The role of future focus in optimistic time predictions
  "The present studies examined cognitive processes underlying the tendency to underestimate project completion times. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people generate overly optimistic predictions, in part, because they focus narrowly on their future plans for the target task and thus neglect other useful sources of information. Consistent with the hypothesis, instructing participants to adopt a ''future focus''-in which they generated concrete, specific plans for the task at hand-led them to make more optimistic predictions about when they would complete their intended Christmas shopping (Study 1) and major school assignments (Study 2). The future focus manipulation did not have a corresponding effect on actual completion times, and thus increased the degree of optimistic bias in prediction. The studies also demonstrated that the optimistic prediction bias generalized across different task domains, relevant individual differences... and other contextual variations."
  (tags: future planning psychology)

links for 2009-06-26

• The Return of Amateur Science | GOOD
  [P]eople are natural scientists and tinkerers, and that this 30-year lull we’re waking up from was just a quiescent period of incubation. As W.H. Auden said, “We were put on earth to make things.”
  (tags: science amateur DIY)

links for 2009-06-25

• Space For All - The HobbySpace Log » Yuzoz your program
  "Yuzoz is a unique space-themed entertainment company that delivers access to the randomness of outer space through its proprietary Outer Space Random Number Generator. The new site includes the company’s APIs and detailed documentation."
  (tags: space games)
• Social Life of Information
  "We are who we link."
  (tags: blog library information)
• SPACE.com -- GeneSat-1: Small Satellite Tackles Big Biology Questions
  Small, fast, cheap: these watchwords meld together to shape the idea behind GeneSat-1, a 22 pounds (10 kilograms) nanosatellite that's actually the product of three smaller "cubesats" fastened together. While diminutive in size, GeneSat-1 would be a fully-automated, miniaturized spaceflight system that provides life support, nutrient delivery, and performs assays for genetic changes in E. coli--that's the abbreviated name of the bacterium Escherichia (Genus) coli (Species).
  (tags: cubesat space science)
• Smallsat Pioneers Clash at COnference Over Future of the Technology
  "Two very different notions of the future direction of small satellites collided at an otherwise collegial conference here, with Cubesat inventor Bob Twiggs pushing for increasingly tiny spacecraft and NASA engineer John Hines advocating the use of double or triple Cubesats to increase payload capacity."
  (tags: cubesat space design)

links for 2009-06-23

• The experience of using Google docs and the future of collaboration (IFTF's Future Now)
  Google Docs "may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table."
  (tags: collaboration writing)

Paul Miller on government and cyberspace

Paul Miller has an interesting piece in The Independent on government and cyberspace:

The relationship between government and the internet has always been tense. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel”, typed John Perry Barlow in 1996, “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter and there is no matter here.”

His Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace spread quickly among the libertarian digerati of the time. For those who craved a space over which governments could have no influence, it was an appealing idea. They also believed that the internet age would herald an era when decentralised technology could do away with the need for government at all.

John Perry Barlow and his friends, of course, were wrong. The internet hasn’t swept away government, neither has the internet completely escaped government intervention... But we’re still just at the beginning of understanding the relationship between government and the ways that the internet can help deliver public goods – sometimes through government itself and sometimes through new lightweight public service start-ups. As we attempt to understand what might be possible, we need to replace Barlow’s black or white ‘cyberspace versus government’ with a new understanding of the way that online tools could help us to live the lives we want to lead....

What Meetup and the hundreds of other online businesses that facilitate real world activity show is that the real power of the net in the future won’t be about information or content – although that’s what we use it for mainly these days – its real power is organisation away from the computer itself. The most successful services will be those with a ‘Why Don’t You’ ethic, which encourages us away from the screen and to be active participants in the world outside....

There was a time when digital technologies were about a new space, detached from the physical. The digerati took William Gibson’s word ‘cyberspace’ and made it their own. This was a place where the pioneers would be safe from governments or corporations or anybody impinging upon their freedom. It didn’t quite turn out like that. Actually, there’s no such thing as cyberspace. Cyberspace is dead. But I don’t think we should mourn it because what we should be working on is much more exciting. What we’ve realised is that the power of the internet is in changing the real world.

Those last three sentences summarize about half of my book.

links for 2009-06-17

• Innovators , Imitators , and the Evolving Architecture of Social Networks [pdf]
  "Progress, whether scientific, economic, or social, is driven by innovation – which serves to produce a diversity of ideas – and imitation through a social network – which serves to diffuse these ideas. In this paper, we construct an agent-based computational model of this process, in which the agents in the population are heterogeneous in their abilities to innovate and imitate. The model incorporates the three primary forces: the discovery of new ideas by those with superior abilities to innovate, the observation and adoption of the ideas of others by those with superior abilities to communicate and imitate, and the endogenous development of social networks among heterogeneous agents. The objective is to explore the evolving architecture of social networks and the critical roles that the innovators and imitators play in the process."
  (tags: innovation modeling simulation science)

links for 2009-06-12

• Communications in the 21st century: Ubiquitous Communication in an Intelligent World
  "In the coming years communication chips will routinely be embedded in a great number and variety of everyday objects. Also, ever more segments in the world surrounding us become tagged with digital information. In what ways, from the point of view of the social sciences and philosophy, will the pattern of life change when ubiquitous communication extends to our inanimate environment when information exchange, and the coordination of activities, involves not only person-to-person connections, but also person-to-object, object-to-person, and indeed object-to-object ones? It is to be expected that philosophical notions like tool, agent, and even consciousness, will undergo radical changes."
  (tags: conference endofcyberspace ubicomp scholarship culture digital-physical digital_culture)

links for 2009-06-10

• Do you suffer from Internet fatigue? - CNN.com
  "Do you ever get sick of your phone ringing? What about Facebook fatigue? Does Twitter sometimes give you stress headaches, making you occasionally wish you could just yank the plug on your online life?

  "Well, you're not alone, according to a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group in Washington.

  "The report, written by John Horrigan, the project's associate director of research, says 7 percent of Americans use the Internet as their primary means of social communication and also feel conflicted about that fact. These online social network users, which Horrigan calls "ambivalent networkers," are so connected they feel like they can't quit."

  
  
  (tags: endofcyberspace internet technology health zeroing)
  
  

links for 2009-06-02

• Online, ‘a Reason to Keep on Going’ - NYTimes.com
  "Among older people who went online last year, the number visiting social networks grew almost twice as fast as the overall rate of Internet use among that group, according to the media measurement company comScore. But now researchers who focus on aging are studying the phenomenon to see whether the networks can provide some of the benefits of a group of friends, while being much easier to assemble and maintain."
  (tags: endofcyberspace aging community psychology)

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

links for 2009-05-28

• Vodafone | receiver » #22 | Seizing the moment
  (tags: mobility digital-physical digital_culture cellphones)
• Vodafone | receiver » #21 | Space is the place!
  (tags: geoweb mobile mapping internet)