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Another unfinished thought:

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about 'the new capitalism' in a post-global-crisis world. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's BizDaily team talk about this a lot and recently reported on the tension between bankers who want to 'redistribute' wealth and those who feel that capitalism should create wealth. (Approximate quote, full story here:

At the same time we have a parallel discussion about open-source, GPL, etc vs for-profit services. (Or should I say 'for-agenda' servces?)

The common strand is the conflict between those who are trying to make things better, however they may define better, and those who are motivated by the money. The former group includes, say, the postman who goes out in the pouring rain to make sure you get your gas bill even though he could make more money churning out widgets in a factory as well as the group that came up with the Apache web server. The latter includes, say, the guy who sells you a mortgage even though he should really know that you can't afford the repayments, and the people who want to endure that you can't copy CDs you have paid for and listen to them on your MP3 player.

The battle between these forces is probably one of the most pressing issues of our time, and I think the boundary between the two is often blurred. But a very interesting observation I came across recently is that extrinsic motivations (eg money) apparently lead to poorer outcomes than intrinsic motivations such as the joy of doing the task.

Quote: Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of paid for performance plants, inside of companies. Here's what the economists there said, "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." (

If he's right then the truly-free offering out there on the web will eventually surpass the for-profit equivalents in quality and usefulness. People see problems and they solve them because they need to be solved, not just because people can make money by solving them.

Does this mean that "real-life" practises will be influenced by the movements that have flowered with the internet? Sites like Kiva.org and prosper.com suggest that traditional financial institutions may one day find themselves fighting the same kind of desperate rearguard action as the music industry is today.

Just a thought.

Caveat to the above: people need to make a living first and foremost, but once the basic needs are taken care of... well why do nerds live in bedsits and create fantastically useful new applications? Or why do they hack into the Pentagon looking for flying saucers when they could be making big money working for the establishment?

Next: If it is possible for 'the truth' to be redefined by the winner-takes-all nature of the web, eg by promulgating a story that becomes universally accepted despite not being true, then what does that mean for our ability to make the rational informed decisions on which our democracy rests?

If advertisers are able to use their understanding of human psychology to manipulate us into believing whatever they want us to believe, and those beliefs can become universally accepted due to the viral nature of ideas, then why are we allowing people to "provide information about new products and services" to us in exchange for access to 'free services' like gmail and facebook? All the evidence so far is that we are losing the power/ability reason through the onslaught of 'information' that the web offers, so we are increasingly susceptible to manipulation.

Most 'free' services are offered by people with something to sell, making use of their knowledge of how our minds work to change our behaviour. This much is verifiable fact. putting this together with the above post, we consent to be manipulated by people who want to redistribute wealth in their own favour, in exchange for services that are probably inferior to those that could be provided by by people who just want to make the world a better place. Crazy.

Perhaps the government (UN?) should enable some means by which the OS movement could create applications which provide the same/better services without the advertising? How much of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's budget would be required to hold everyone's personal data and make it available (by permission only) at no cost? Brief outline here:

Some thought on privacy. Take a look this to get an idea of how personal information can be collected and presented.



Add to this capability the idea of an organisation with resources comparable to Google, and imagine them crawling the web building up a database of individuals. This includes images. Imagine this data being shared with organisations that you buy things from.

So you're walking down the street and someone with a camera relays your image to his company database where it is matched with your online photo gallery, and entire online persona. Suddenly, someone is walking next to you and knows what you spend your money on, where you live, what your interests are, how you responded last time one of his colleagues accosted you, and much much more. Soonner or later he's going to sell you something.

Or worse, you're waiting for a bus in the rain and the bus shelter starts targetting ads at you personally, or even talking to you.

Here's something a bit more solid:

How are computers and the internet being used in education? How could they be used? Are we making the most of this resource? My feeling is no.

You could also take a look at the rationale behind the One Laptop Per Child project, and revisit it to see if it's successful.

Random thoughts:

I think I read somewhere that Ben & Jerry's ice cream used to operate on the principle that everyone knew what needed to be done and nobody had a pre-defined job, so everyone just did whatever they felt like doing. I have no idea if that's true though.

If I'm stubbly, it's usually because I choose to be. Do you think I would be unaware that I'm stubbly? Would I need to be reminded to buy razors? Would I need to be reminded that I need anything? Who is to decide what I need? "You're walking kind of slowly there, Dan, you need a spring in your step. Why not treat yourself to a Red Bull? That redhead you're dating will really appreciate the new supercharged you." Or "Take the wight off your feet and recharge your battteries by spending an insane amount of money on overpriced crap coffee at the place across the street. They have chewy caramel on special offer - you're favourite variety. No, really, you're not OK. You need to take it easy. Just look at yourself. You're a walking train-wreck. That party last night really took it out of you and you said yourself that you're not getting any younger. You look really old in those pics Aleks posted of you dancing naked." Etc.

Someone, I think it was Justin Webb, wrote about drugs advertising in the USA a while back. Can't find it now, but the point for me is that advertising is all about making people do something they wouldn't do otherwise. What happened to informed choices? If advertising doesn't change your behaviour then why do companies spend so much on it?

On that theme there was a podcast recently (Material World, I think) about scientists measuring brainwaves to see which advertising was most effective - ie most likely to produce a change in behaviour. One of the things they said was that today's younger generation respond to very different stimuli. It might be worth looking into that for Prog 4.

The aspirant light: hmmmm. I used to have a friend at high school who was always strumming away on his guitar. Like many other people, he had dreams of being a famous musician, and later on he was in a band. Of course, he never got famous, but how many mature adults continue to play music for small audiences? The drive to be creative may be encouraged by the possibility of great wealth, but it exists even when common sense tells us that we are unlikely to be the lucky one. Expert opinion told JK Rowling there was no market for Harry Potter, but she wrote the book anyway. Thousands of other books are written by people who know that the chances of being the next bestselling author are minimal. (More Black Swan thoughts here!)

And why do some of us spend our time putting ideas on your blog? I don't recall being offered any money.

As for 'open is good,' try 'open may be inevitable' and then ask do we want open to exploitation or openness as an expression of our freedom. Try Arthur Clarke's The Light of Other Days -

Finally, you never replied to my email about the experiment to try on the web.

Seriously, if computers are changing the way we think then surely this has an impact on how we use computers in education. How do we use computers in education anyway? Maybe you should talk about this?

The OLPC project doesn't sound like a shining example though. It seems to have lost its way completely, despite all the hype about how web access would transform peoples' lives.

My email didn't say anything other than 'drop me a line', so feel free.

I'm interested in how we can better use computers in the classroom, whether connected or not. I haven't looked very hard, but have heard it said that we teach students how to use computers without using computers to teach, for instance, history. I'd love to see examples of how people are using computers to teach real-life skills as well as computing skills.

The OLPC was interesting because it promised to provide people in poor countries with access to the net, and help them solve their real-life problems. I want to know how exactly that works. As far as I can tell, it hasn't and the reason appears to be that it was all about technology rather than about education. Someone was in love with his own idea.

Using computers to connect is one approach. I'm starting classes at a couple of high schools in Taiwan this week. (In 30 mins, actually.) Do you want to hook me up with schools in the UK that want to collaborate? I'm also associated with the main teacher-training university in Taiwan.

But what about the whole virtual reality field? As a very simple example, I play Third World Farmer with some of my classes. It teaches awareness of the issue, gives students a new perspective, and it's all about economics.

I haven't ventured into Eve online, or Second Life, yet but I see occasional reports (hype) about the educational benefits of these sites. (You might also consider looking at them for program three too. Virtual currencies are an interesting topic.) What can we do with the internet to teach something other than computing?

Are any schools using stuff like the virtual Pompeii simulation to bring history to life?

Are there any facilities like this in existence, or planned, for schools?

Robert Ballard, the guy who found the wreck of the Titanic, goes into schools and lets kids drive ROVs exploring the deep ocean via satellite link.

And on a sillier note, there are 'educational videos' out there created by well-meaning ameteurs. You might try talking to Zefrank, who for a short time was the most famous man on the internet after accidentally spawning one of the first viral campaigns with his 'how to dance properly' video:

Ze is a brilliant speaker (look him up on TED.com) and also has some profound observations to share about the economy of the web.

Another application is the use of computing in language-teaching. Take a look at MyET (, which helps students visualise what they need to do with their mouths in order to get the right pronunciation.

I have to run now, but there was someone recently on TED.com talking about training the brain in order to combat dementia etc. He uses computer 'games' to reverse neurological decline and also to help kids with difficulties.

More stuff;

1. Maybe you should have a 'general' page somewhere for people to leave comments that are not related to the most recent blog entries?

2. The easiest way to experiment would be a simple google-bombing campaign. It took me two weeks to get listed as "the sexiest man in Taipei" last year -

3. The more I think about this series, the more I think about the Meidocristan vs Extremistan example used by Taleb in Black Swan. Most of our real-life endeavours are examples of Mediocristan, where averages are important because distributions are normal. Online distributions, of popularity or wealth, are not normal and the important bits are not average, hence the term "Extremistan." This seems to apply to everything. For instance, the recycling clicks entry is an example of someone cornering the market in a particular application and getting millions of free person-hours as a result. If someone else wanted to do something similar, how would they get a look in?

A longer one, still in need of refinement.

There has been a lot written recently about the idea that our perceptions, ways of thinking, and reactions are the result of evolution that has left us predisposed to make certain mistakes. An easy example would be the way we 'see' faces in natural phenomena such as pieces of toast or volcanoes on Mars.

This has been researched a lot, mostly from the perspective of understanding the mechanisms or causes. Applications of this knowledge range from misdirection by stage magicians to tricks which help politicians, orators, salespeople, marketers, etc achieve their aims. Try Malcolm Gladwell's Blink as a starting point, although this topic is not really important for the shows you're making.

The sum of our perceptual processes is, on balance, in favour of our continued existence. At least, it has been until now. But the modern world is very different from the one in which we evolved. So, according to some, we're now more prone to error than previously and the impacts of those errors can be greater. Taleb's Black Swan is probably the best reference here, but again it's probably not all that relevant to this series.

But there is an interesting implication.

The basic idea is that when we evolved in the trees, on the savannah's, and (according to some), as aquatic apes, we lived in fairly simple environments where cause and effect were closely related and the relationships were discernable. Everything made sense and the instinctive reaction was probably the right one because it was the one that had worked for millions of years previously. Humans evolved the ability to plan in the short-term and pay attention to what was visible - or visualisable.

In the modern world, the most important things are often hidden and not easily visualisable. We are constantly challenged by statistics we don't understand, jobs that don't have clear beginnings and endings, social networks that are far larger than our brains are wired to handle, dangers we can't predict or understand until it's too late, the elusiveness or apparent randomness of success, and so on. The world is very big, complex and difficult to some to terms with.

Some research talks about how we construct simplified realities in our own heads, we rationalise to explain things when we shouldn't, we ignore key facts that don't fit our preconceptions, etc. This is worth noting, but probably not important for your purposes either.

The important thing is that millions of people take refuge in new worlds that are much easier to understand. In online games, cause and effect are once more readily apparent or at least decipherable. Tasks are more like hunting expeditions or river-crossings than endless days sitting behind desks. Gamers are usually 'in the zone' and not subject to the distractions of phones and emails, other people's meaningless deadlines, poorly-defined dangers as described by scientists.

I've always felt that gamers were losers, people who couldn't handle living in the real world. I'm not a gamer, but I'm starting to feel that these things may play a huge role in helping peple stay sane. Obviously some people do develop problems because they neglect their physical needs while spending all their time in artificial worlds, but is this dependence a reaction to the inapropriate human environment we have created in real world?

Or is scientific knowledge of human pschology and neurology being exploited to create experiences which are designed to get us hooked?

There was a story recently about a game-addiction clinic in Holland having some radical things to say about the nature of gaming addiction. I can't find it now, but it may be related to this place:

A few more thoughts related to the above:

If right-brain 'holistic' thinking is related to interdependence, and left-brain is generally associated with individuality, then an increase in right-brain thinking across the population should presumably lead to more of a herd mentality.

Is there a case for arguing that the web is self-organising into some kind of system in which the individual components are increasingly less individual? And what are the wider implications for the way things are done?

Left-brain thinking is associated with systemising, analysis, the processes that underpin the way we write computer programs or design other systems. Will this skill become less prevalent?

Alternatively, is left-brain thinking natural? We've discovered that Asian people don't seem to favour this approach, and ancient European texts are not clear or structured in the way that we expect engineers, scientists, philosophers, or even high school kids to write today. I have this theory that the scientific method is a construct that has changed our neurology, language and culture since we invented it.

There are people who argue that it's an approach that actually limits our ability to see the truth or reason things out because we are betrayed by our own propensity to seek data that confirms our preconceptions. In other words we define the problem in such restrictive terms that we're not open to new information, and also we tend to argue to prove/disprove something without allowing for alternatives we haven't thought of or don't wish to accept. Scientific method is compatible with binary logic, everything is yes/no or black/white.

If it's true that the holistic nature of the web is changing the way people think, then maybe we're seeing the start of a 'return to' more natural ways of thinking? Perhaps the rational scientific approach will fall out of fashion?

Or perhaps the rational scientific method is an evolutionary response to the pressures of an increasingly complex world? In this case, the internet is a trap for those who can't make the leap. You can learn to override your instinctive responses in favour of knowledge-based responses, and hope to thrive in the brave new world we have created. Or you can retreat into online games and the safety of the herd, and try to pretend that everything's OK out there in the real world.

I wish I knew what was true, what was right!