Comments on: Give me a missed call

By: JP

JP — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:19:24 +0000

Hey thanks Steve, never knew that :-).

By: Steve Freeman

Steve Freeman — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:48:25 +0000

In case you didn’t know, this was why the British Post Office was founded. Roland Hill got into trouble by charitably paying the postage for a letter where the family used the return to report that everying was alright. He decided this wasn’t good enough and founded the penny post.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:48:12 +0000

:-)

By: JD

JD — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:40:01 +0000

oh man! wordpress killed my spaces and destroyed my ascii art. Damn. Well, it was an upward sloping line :)

By: JD

JD — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:39:16 +0000

OK, I’ll file the rebuttal to Malcolm’s point:

If some people (geeks, if you will) get joy (utility if you are an econ geek) from tinkering to find ways around things then these people will do this tinkering for very little reward. But some geeks really want some reward for their tinkering. The reward is often cost avoidance so as the amount of cost avoidance goes up, the number of people willing to tinker goes up. Some will tinker for no return, but most want some return, and if the reward is high enough many will tinker.

it looks like typical homo economist behavior… but with the understanding that some get joy from tinkering.

| /
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|/_____________

x axis = cost avoided by tinkering
y xis = number of tinkerers

So how big of a geek am I to attempt ascii, econ, geek art?

By: malcolm

malcolm — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:35:15 +0000

I don’t actually think it is all about affordability although this is an important driver. Even if there were to be affordability the geek would still find the challenge of bucking the system something that could not be foregone. Also, the desire to take something and make it something which it is not is deep-rooted and independent of affordability. Now – when you put the two together, affordability driver and the drive to tinker then that is when some interesting action happens :)

By: Mike Seyfang

Mike Seyfang — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:06:51 +0000

JP, superb insight into something I was discussing at a conference last week.

http://gwegner.edublogs.org/2007/07/21/cegsa07-notes-and-reflections/

Some very ingenious workarounds to internet connectivity were employed (including the use of butchers paper and videoconferencing by Stephen Downes in his keynote), others were thwarted by firewalls and other security measures.

Fang – Mike Seyfang