April 2007
Datamining: torturing data until it confesses… to anythinh
A worthy data mining and privacy guru, Jeff Jonas of IBM (check out his fine blog), adds this humorous take: “Data Mining, noun, 1. Torturing data until it confesses … and if you torture it enough, it will confess to anything.” Therein lies the conundrum for privacy advocates
Yo-Duh on Son of Total Information Awareness
Global problems I don’t even worry solving any more
1> Global energy supply.
Why? Far too many news stories about solar panel breakthroughs and far too much money on the table.
By extension, hydrogen- or battery-storage etc. electrical cars, and decentralized electrical grids. Assuming that we get the 20 years it takes to make this happen globally without civilization collapsing, this is a cooked goose.
2> AIDS.
Why? Two reasons. Firstly, if AIDS awareness hasn’t taken strong hold in Africa and Asia after 20 years - one entire generation - there is precisely nothing I know about human nature that can help. Secondly, vaccine or cure, it’s not that far off. 20 years, again, is a reasonable window. More likely 5 to 10.
I’m not gong to post the list of things I do worry about more than I did in the previous post. But I work very, very hard.
Baby duck feeds carp
Yeah. I know. But you spend your days thinking about global poverty and starvation, digital identity management and how, if we screw up, we get digital/biometric totalitarianism, and how it’s up to individuals to act…
And you need this from time to time <laughs>.
Appropriate technology and Libertarian Politics
Karl Hess written up at Reason. With Youtube links to a movie about him.
Important: Japanese (120m speakers) is the #1 blogging language
Zolli, using a study from Technorati
Looking at those numbers it’s probably fair to say that there are 4 times as many potential English language bloggers as Japanese, so in light of that the Japanese are by far more active in blogging than English speakers.
So, that’s interesting… what’s going on with that? Otaku? School kids? A flat medium in a hierarchical society? Any ideas?
Dreampolitik - reimagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy
The website for this new book is all in Flash and has no blog, so they’re clearly retarded in terms of internet marketing, but the idea is quite clever: that Democrats have forgotten how to weave myths and dreams to tell their story and get their message across.
While (my addition) the Republicans have become masters, indeed, of the art of fantasy.
Kind of brilliant…
Teachers notice kids fighting about lego distribution, institute socialism. National Review responds.
Neither side seems to have a satisfactory answer unsurprisingly.
The depth of the wrongheadedness of both sides is unnerving, but would you or I have done better in this situation I wonder?
The Economic Lives Of The Poor
A little light reading - 40 pages of details on how they spend their money, and how they get by.
the economic lives of the very poor.pdf.zip
The propensity to own a radio or a television, a widespread form of entertainment for American households varies considerably across countries. For example, among rural households living under $1 per day, ownership of a radio is 11 percent in the Udaipur survey, almost 60 percent in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and above 70 percent in South Africa and Peru. Similarly, no one owns a television in Udaipur, but in Guatemala nearly a quarter of households do, and in Nicaragua, the percentage is closer to a half.
Only 4 percent of those living under $1 a day own land in Mexico, 1.4 percent in South Africa; 30 percent in Pakistan, 37 percent in Guatemala, 50 percent in Nicaragua and Indonesia, 63 percent in Cote d’Ivoire; 65 percent in Peru; and 85 percent in Panama. In the Udaipur sample, 99 percent of the households below $1 a day own some land in addition to the land on which their house is built, although much of it is dry scrubland that cannot be cultivated for most of the year
I can see this is going to keep me busy for a while.
Second Life economy actually a pyramid scheme?
What should have been a relatively small SLL/USD exchange trades given media claims about millions of dollars flying around per week in 2006, in reality caused the exchange markets to distort tremendously. We could not effectively move sums of more than a couple thousand dollars out of SL without the exchange market confiscating most of our returns (through rate reflectivity). Example: in July 2006 USD/SLL was 293.0/279.2 bid/ask on the primary open exchange. Our attempts to trade resulted in settlement bids of more than 350. Interestingly, these trades tended to net returns of right around 4%, which was the prevailing dollar deposit rate.
This didn’t make sense. After all, the liquidity supposedly existed to support these simple, smallish trades. Well, when the guys running the banks and the exchange trading floor are the guys with most of the SLLs, it’s no surprise that outsiders are not permitted to extract any significant returns.
We concluded that we weren’t playing in a market at all. We were suckered in by a classic pyramid scheme, albeit one with a pretty new user interface. New entrants plow real money into the game. Only the guys at the top can extract that money with any volume (and in excess of the risk-free rate of return). Attempts to move anything more than token amounts out of the game generally result in real-returns of almost exactly the prevailing USD deposit interest rate.
It is my conjecture that the perpetrators of this scheme are themselves utilizing the mispricing of USD to SLL vis-à-vis in game rates (whether implied rates or explicit rates) to arbitrage everyone else. Or in other words: a financial ponzi scheme. Each new sucker is encouraged to bring in more new suckers, supposedly helping the economy to grow so that they can start cashing those SLL checks. And if you’re really successful and even more lucky, you’ll get about 4% real return for all that effort and risk.
So given that:
• One cannot profit at greater than the risk-free rate of return for investments into Second Life;
• “Virtual labor” performed by the denizens of the game on their various Second Life business projects is always compensated far below the real-world USD equivalent;
• SLL are effectively illiquid beyond small volume trades –What you’re left with is lots of people putting USD in, and a small group taking those USD out, leaving the rest with no financial claims on anything - just an imaginatively sexy avatar.
Open Source Car Projects
C,mm,n (aka Common.)
The Theos Car has a much wider remit for a re-examination of the fundamentals of car design. Much better shot at coming up with a revolutionary breakthrough. Seriously thinking of getting involved with that one.