From Andy Carvin’s blog:

Move over YouTube debates, now for something meatier! A coalition of blogs and news organizations is using Web 2.0 tools to create another exciting experiment in interactive presidential debates. It might even be a chance for your students to pose the perfect question to them.

This week, techpresident.com teamed up with the New York Times, MSNBC and a whole slew of blogs to launch 10Questions.com, an online presidential debate that’s a fascinating mix of video blogging, tagging and user-generated content. Joanne Colan, My colleague at the video blog Rocketboom put together this video to explain how it works:

Andy also provides a clear text-based explanation if you don’t want to watch the video.

Here’s my question:

[Tags: politics video techpresident andy_carvin edemocracy ]

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After years to talking about our move to “good enough” information, I’m just a little late to learning that Herbert Simon coined a term for this phenomenon in 1957. Yes, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of “satisficing.”

I found this via a very interesting blog post at Just Communicate by a knowledge management grad student who, in the course of discussing the wisdom of Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap article, also points to a post by Steven Bell at the Association of College & Research Libraries blog, on using social sites to move good enough research beyond good enough. [Tags: satisfice herbert_simon everything_is_miscellaneous cory_doctorow just_communicate ]

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Michael Wesch, who did the incredible info-visualization YouTube, The Machine Is Us/ing Us, has now done the same to explain the change from paper-based information to digital information. In just a few minutes, he explains the thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous (which he credits, thank you). It is a brilliant piece of work. And totally delightful. [Tags: wesch everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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You know what’s not helpful? A bill from AT&T that spreads across 56 pages of tiny print the information that explains why my bill is twice as high this month as usual.

You know, if they organized their information in a useful way (which is actually what my sense of the miscellaneous is about), I might even be able to tell that I should up my plan and pay AT&T more money every month. So, how about fewer lists of data — I don’t really need to know about each and every text message our children send — and perhaps some notifications of where my usage has swerved off the norm?

Who designs these bills? Squirrels? [Tags: information_architecture, whines]

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Oliver Goodenough, a fellow at the Berkman Center, is leading a lunchtime discussion on the topic “Modeling Cooperation for First and Second Lives: Suggesting a General Case.” [As always, I’m live blogging, typing quickly, missing some points, paraphrasing throughout, getting some things wrong. Sorry. But you can always see the presentation itself at Media Berkman. (This talk was particularly over my head, as you’ll see.)] [The paper is available here.]

Oliver says: Cooperation is “a key element of our existence.” Economically, biologically, we are cooperative. But we haven’t understood it well. And neoclassical economics assumes that cooperation is easy (e.g., contracts) and that it’s impossible (the “rational actor” model). And biology’s “selfish gene” assumes that we’re selfish.

“Outcomes that vary from Nash equilibriums have not been well studied.” “Many of the opportunities for cooperation come in defection-prone contributions.” E.g., I can offer to pay you, get the goods, and then not pay you. “Cooperation is likely to occur in circumstances where it is the dominant game strategy.” We’re not stuck in bad games. “We can choose and shape the games we want to play in.” The Mechanism Design approach (its creators just won the Nobel) lets us evolve the game. We can cooperate in the design of the mechanism we’re building. We can have deals and create institutions.

The mechanism design toolkit for constructing institutions and mechanisms includes reciprocity, hierarchy, partnership, contract, property, fairness… And these mechanisms can be located in various institutions and mechanisms, e.g., dual key lock box, genes, psychological values, law, culture, code…

Examples of mechanism design: A Coke machine in a college dormitory is made reliable to the Coke company via physical armor. It is made reliable to the buyer via Coke’s reputation, the big sign, the history of transactions. eBay has a different set of mechanisms. YouTube is making it possible for copyright owners to give permission for the posting of their material in return for advertising revenues from those postings. These are all mechanisms.

So, we are making progress in understand cooperation. Some of the progress is coming from outside of economics.

Q: How about non-monetized projects like Wikipedia?
A: There are lots of motivations other than money.
A: [andrew] There’s a literature on why people contribute to open source software.

Q:(wendy) What about DRM? It is an institution written in code to keep us from “misusing” copyright works. But we are not free to refuse it.
A: Individuality rationality says that we don’t accept the best deal we could design, but we take the deal that’s the best we can get. Between the quicksand and Nirvana of cooperation is a continuum. We could even look at politics as the renegotiation of distribution rules.

Q: (doc) What about generosity?
A: That would be in the realm of my psychology of values. One wants to avoid becoming mechanistic about human attributes. E.g., love plays a highly evolved biological role, but it’s also splendid. Generosity is either a gift from above, or it is the result of material processes that we can understand. If the latter, we should try to understand it.

Q: (corinna) The more close knit the network, the more likely you are to cooperate. How do you transfer this to the digital world where you’re unlikely to know the person directly, e.g., eBay.
A: When you’re designing digital mechanisms such as eBay, you’re combining a reputation system, a repeat transaction history, network reputation, access to Paypal, a trusted intermediary, etc. These are mechanisms.

(gene) If you were doing the mechanism design for record companies, what might be a mechanism that would work?
A: The record company was a mechanism. The technology is destroying their role as middle broker. They’re desperately hanging onto a IP position to maintain what was a market position?
Q: So, would your model suggest that Radiohead will succeed?
A: That asks what mechanisms a band can use…

Q: (me) What domain is this theory in? What do we have to stop believing to start believing this?
A: Economists will tell you they explore behavior. Biology and psychology also explore behavior. The most serious formalizations in economics and biology don’t get how this works. Now institutional and game theoretical economists have advanced this. People like Martin Nowack (sp?) are undoing the blockages in biology. My one contribution is perhaps to turn it around to mechanism design and see that there’s a general case there.

Q: How does your theory view law? Is it something that can bring about good outcomes for everyone? Or does it always involve hard political questions?
A: In a mechanism structure, there are people who getter better or worse deals. Is being part of that mechanism individually rational is a different question than “Would I redesign the game if given the opportunity.”

Q: You sound a bit like early Douglas North: Institutions fix the problem. I think the really new stuff in what you say has to do with the technology piece. Tech can constrain where you put the mechanism.
A: I have taken a bunch of ideas from North, but he doesn’t take the next step to mechanism design. The most I’m doing is putting the pieces together…

Q: (gene) Is it the monetization that undermines cooperative systems or the rational counting of it. E.g., at eBay, you can look beyond the numbers to see what kind of seller you are.
A: There’s a literature on impersonal vs. personal exchange. One of the problems in designing big markets is whether you want to strip away all the personal signals.

Q: (jp) You probably have most of us convinced of your critique of classical economics. We’ve all seen lots of motivations online. What is it about the digitally mediated environment that causes people to act differently? What are the strands you could pull together about what makes the digital world differently? Also, what is the institution you want to build? What problem are you trying to solve?
A: I take these as challenges. I’m working on the business instance. I’m trying to figure out how a constraint-space within which we could use the techniques of contracts combined with software to create a space where people can design something better. Can I help create a legal framework in a state that is friendly to virtual businesses?
Q: (jp) The contracts in the Web 2.0 space are a house of cards. E.g., 5,000 build FaceBook apps without good contracts underneath them. Your work could help in such cases.
A: Emergent is great when it works, but hierarchy has its place, too. [Tags: oliover+goodenough economics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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It might be sorta interesting to aggregate when people last saw a presentation that used an overhead projector (acetates, the heady smell of marker…) and in what domain.

And while I’m being trivial, we need a word for the sense that you keep getting the same captcha codes (the “Please type in this code so we know you’re a human” codes). [Tags: crowdsourcing overheads technology ]

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Gleen Greenwald has a great article at Salon on the indistinguishability of the telecommunications industry and the government. [Tags: ]

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I have a friend who is in charge of managing the peer review process at some serious scientific journals. It’s a tough job requiring a set of skills that includes dealing with sometimes ornery people, managing multiple schedules, and expertise in the fields in which she works. She makes a good case for peer review, and for the journals that rely on it. Peer review has value and costs money, she says. So, journals have to charge fees to support the peer review process, and they have to hold onto the rights at least long enough to recover their costs.

I recognize the value of peer review. It not only directs our attention to worthwhile research, it is part of an editorial process that improves articles before they’re published. But peer review doesn’t scale. There’s so much research being done. A lot of it is good work but isn’t important enough to merit the investment in a traditional peer review process (including the failed hypotheses that we were taught in school were not failures at all). Peer review is valuable, but it’s a choke point required because traditional publishing’s neck is so thin. And it may — may! — turn out that the combination of crowds and quirky individuals can replace peer review’s value. Of course, we’d want the crowd to consist of people with some standing for evaluating the research. And we’d want to be sure that the quirky individuals who buck the crowd are not delusional psychotics. I of course don’t know what the world will look like (or what it does look like, when you come down to it), but I suspect that we’re going to have a mixed research ecology, with peer reviewed journals making recommendations we trust highly, and a wide variety of other ways of finding the research that matters to us. With PLoS and PLoS, and arXiv, and Nature’s version of arXiv, and all the rest of it, we’re already well on the way to filling the important niches in this new knowledge ecology.

In fact, peer review generally establishes two characteristics of a piece of work: It was performed properly and it is important enough to merit throwing some ink at it. Those are important criteria, but hardly the only ones. “This hastily performed work uses a flawed methodology but turns up an interesting fact worth considering” is the type of criterion researchers use when recommending articles to one another. There’s value there, and with research that has good data that it misanalyzes, research that is promising but incomplete, research that inadvertently demonstrates a flaw in some lab equipment, etc. etc. etc. And, as always, the value is in the long tail of et ceteras. [Tags: peer_review open_access science publishing everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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J. Kristin Ament has been writing sarcastic recaps of episodes of the AMC show “Mad Men.” They’re hilarious. For example, here is one from the week before last (the one with the erotic washing machine).

I’ve been enjoying Mad Men, but find myself holding back from utter and complete enthusiasm because, I think, there’s something too mannered about it. It’s still in thrall of its premise. But there’s so much to like: The acting is terrific, the writing is pointed and funny, the sociology is exhilirating if a bit overdone, the art direction is fantastic, I care about the characters. It’s on its way to becoming an unreservedly great show in its second season, especially if the writers can stay away from the big, melodramatic arcs; the writing is better in the details than in the big strokes. IMO, of course. [Tags: mad_men j_kristin_ament humor tv]

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I’m just back from the Veerstichting symposium in Leiden, the Netherlands. I know I’ve made several references to it i (1 2) without explaining what it is. Now that I’ve been there, I have some idea.

It’s an annual two-day conference, by the Dutch and for the Dutch, that’s been around for about 25 years. About 600 people attend, half of them students. They emphasize the presence of students. For example, at one of the dinners, you’re seated carefully at the long tables in a student-nonstudent sequence. And each speaker is assigned a student host who stays with you throughout the two days.

The program itself consists of a series of thirty-minute presentations (20 mins of talk, ten of Q and A) by an eclectic set of speakers. This year, they included a former high official of the UN who talked about the nature of Indian identity, the coach of the winning Dutch women’s hockey team, a guy who writes about why management sucks, a leading biologist explaining the evolutionary basis of herd behavior, Naomi Klein on “shock therapy economics,” the head of the Rwandan courts punishing those who participated in genocide, and the star of a popular sex-and-drugs interview show on TV. The attendees seemed to favor senior business folks, government officials, and the occasional Queen of the Netherlands. (The Queen brushed by me on her way to talk with one of the speakers. I was this close to the back of her head!)

Unlike most American conferences, Veerstichting incorporates cultural events. For example, to kick off the afternoon session, there was a ten-minute modern dance routine, and there was a longer dance about freedom or something — all I know for sure is that the dancer pulled the head off of a large stuffed sheep — where Americans might have had an after-dinner speaker. Also, there’s much more drinking than at American events, not even counting the party at the student union where I lost my voice and 45% of my senses in a large packed room where the beer flowed like good, cheap beer.

The venue itself is gorgeous. It was held in a cathedral that now is a public space. And Leiden itself is a snow-globe version of Amsterdam. My student host Ben Zevenberger, who is studying IP and Net law, took me on a walking tour. The architecture is highly reminiscent of Amsterdam, but lowered a few stories, while the streets are (or seem) wider. Bicycles rule the streets, and cars are the interlopers. What a beautiful place.

And here’s one more way it’s beautiful. At a speakers dinner, I sat next to a senior business guy who was also one of the event’s sponsors. He told me that after Katrina hit, he spoke with the manager of his company’s facility in New Orleans. It had been destroyed. “But don’t worry,” the manager said, “We’ve already stopped the payroll, since obviously no one’s coming in.” The Dutch executive was appalled. “Pay them twice their normal salaries. They need our help!” The Dutch sense of social obligation — the “we’re in this together” attitude — is remarkable, but really only what it should be.

The event itself is a bit like PopTech or TED in its eclecticism. Add to that the focus on students, the beauty of the surroundings, and the fact that you get to spend time among the Dutch, and you have yourself a unique event.

I asked Ben if the Dutch were ok with having English-speakers call their country “Holland” instead of “The Netherlands.” It’s fine, he said, adding that the Dutch call it “Holland” (although I thought Holland was a region of the Netherlands). Since “nether” has unfortunate connotations in English (we can just stick with the “nether world” if you want), I was happy to have permission to refer to the country as “Holland.”

And while we’re on the topic, if it’s ok to call the country “Holland,” can we call the Dutch the “Hollish”?

PS: Here’s some info on the various terms.

[Tags: veerstichting holland leiden ]

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