Author: JP

Thinking about the web with respect to good and bad news

I was born into a journalistic family in the fifties. My father was a journalist, as was his father. The family business was journalism. Financial journalism. Their models of vertical integration included owning a printing press and shares in ad agencies and restaurants. Which meant that as a child, I was pretty used to hearing (and later taking part in) discussions about various aspects of journalism. And some of it intrigued me then, and continues to intrigue me now.

Take the phrase “Bad news sells”. I’ve personally never really liked the phrase. It was brought home to me as a 13 year old when I first heard 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night by Simon and Garfunkel.  Was it really true that people prefer bad news? Why should that be? It didn’t make sense to me.

The Deadhead free-thinking folk-rock loving tie-dyed longhaired tree-hugging Sixties child in me never let that phrase settle in me. I never wanted to believe that people preferred to hear bad news.  And you know something? I still don’t want to believe it.

A few years ago, the Pew Research Center For The People and The Press published something called The News Interest Index, 1986-2007: Two Decades of American News Preferences. The entire study is worth reading. From my perspective, three key points emerged:

  • One, people appeared most interested in news about disasters, then about money, then about conflict. Political and “tabloid” news followed, while “foreign” news elicited the least interest.
  • Two, that interest in “money” was growing, it was the fastest-growing topic.
  • Three, the topic of lowest interest was that related to “foreign” news.

Sean Park, an old colleague and close friend, used to start to explain many aspects of the more esoteric workings of investment banks with the phrase “fear and greed”. And the Pew report seemed to indicate that he was bang on the money as usual.

My perspective on the role of fear in news was at least partially informed by reading two books in recent years: The Science of Fear and Scared to Death ; George Lakoff’s anchors and frames were probably also a key influence, building on the seeds planted in my brain by erstwhile colleague James Montier.

It didn’t matter what I did, I still didn’t want to believe that people preferred bad news to good; I still wanted to believe that given the choice, people would prefer to hear good news.

Very recently I came across an intriguing paper published in 1996 by Chip Heath who was then at the University of Chicago and is now at Stanford. It raised the question “Do People Prefer to Pass Along Good or Bad News? Valence and Relevance of News as Predictors of Transmission Propensity”. I quote from the summary:

…..People typically prefer to pass along central rather than extreme information (i.e. news that is less surprising rather than more surprising). However, when confronted with extreme information, the results support a preference for congruence, that is, people prefer to pass along news that is congruent with the emotional valence of the domain in question. This means that in emotionally negative domains, contrary to some theoretical predictions, people are willing to pass along bad news even when it is exaggeratedly bad. At the same time, however, people transmit exaggeratedly good news in emotionally positive domains…..

I find this whole concept of domain-specific emotional valence fascinating. I start asking myself questions like “What is the emotional valence of the web?” “What about slashdot?” “And what about Twitter?”. For many years now, I’ve taken part in many discussions about the nature of the web, and, influenced heavily by friend and mentor Doc Searls, I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea that the web is a place. A place made up of places, places that are zero distance apart.

The web has places of light and places of extreme darkness as well. I like spending time in places where people build each other up, say encouraging things to each other. I like spending time in places where people pass along tips and recommendations about people they like, books they like, music they like, food they like, restaurants they like. Positive things.

There’s an abundance of bad news out there already, in all shapes and colours and sizes. So why add to it?

I think that places like Twitter are good-news places, with a positive emotional valence. More accurately, the subset of Twitter that I inhabit, made up of the people I follow and the people who follow me, that subset is a place with a positive emotional valence. So we tend to pass on good news, not bad.

It doesn’t mean that bad news does not get passed by Twitter, or by my subset perspective. Of course there’s bad news in Twitter. But there’s also humour. And satire. And old-fashioned good-neighbourliness. And a whole lot of good news.

Twitter tells us about the miracle on the Hudson as quickly as it tells us about the crash over the Atlantic. Let’s keep it that way, let’s make sure we keep the web a place where good news is spread, not just bad. Where we help each other. Where we’re kind to each other. Where we build each other up. Maybe it’s because so many of the people I know are themselves children of the Sixties, maybe it’s why I get accused of being utopian and rose-spectacled. You know what? I don’t care.

There’s a whole world out there doing just the opposite. So let’s keep the web different.

gently musing about marginalia and related issues

Whenever Wimbledon comes along, I am pleasantly reminded of a question I was asked at school.

The question was simple. If you have 128 people playing in a knockout tournament, how many matches will it take to complete the tournament? Assume no draws or replays.

When we were asked the question, everyone knew the traditional way to get the answer. 128 people. 64 pairs. 64 matches in the first round. Then 32. Then 16. Then 8. Then 4, then 2, then 1. Giving us 64+32+16+8+4+2+1 or 127.

Later on that day, a few of us got into conversation with the teacher, and an alternative route was broached. 128 people. How many winners? One. So how many losers? 127. So how many matches will that take? 1 loser generated per match. 127 matches.

How I loved the simplicity of that approach. Just work out the number of losers and you will have the number of matches. I could have danced all night.

I felt the same way when I first learnt about decimals. Why some decimals “terminate”. Why others “circulate”. How beautifully they do this.

The way I was taught it was something like this. Think of a fraction. Convert it into a decimal. Think of another fraction. Convert it into a decimal. Do this a dozen times with different fractions, and observe the results.

It soon became clear that most fractions didn’t terminate cleanly, they “recurred”. Fractions like 1/3, 2/7, 3/11. Some fractions, on the other hand, ended cleanly, fractions like 1/2 and 2/5 and 3/10. It didn’t take too long to see that the only fractions that terminated were those where the denominator contained factors of 2 and/or 5.

2 and 5. In a base 10 world. Oh yeah. That bored me. So what did I find interesting about decimals? Again, it took a question.

And the question went something like this. Other than those with 2 or 5 as denominator, all fractions that have a prime number as denominator recur when expressed as decimals. The length of the recurring number or numbers is called the period of recurrence. So for example 1/3, or 0.333333…. has a period of 1, 1/11 or .090909…. has a period of 2. What is the maximum period of recurrence of any fraction where the denominator is a prime other than 2 or 5?

Which led to a lovely meandering journey. To convert a fraction into a decimal you have to divide the numerator by the denominator. You keep carrying the residue over until it is zero (in which case the fraction terminates). Or you keep carrying over and over and over.

When would a fraction circulate? When it hits the same residue again and starts the same sequence of residues as a result.

So how long before the same residue must be encountered? That depends on how many different residues can be had before that. What is the maximum number of different residues? One less than the denominator prime.

Discovering that 1/97 indeed has a period of recurrence of 96 filled me with glee. 96 different residues before the same residue is encountered. How beautiful.

There are so many others, little stories and techniques and tricks and tips that have helped me keep a passionate amateur interest in mathematics, particularly in the theory of primes.

The trouble with being an amateur like me is that you start getting idealistic about the subject. And you believe in things like elegance and simplicity. Which means that I’m one of those guys who still believes that there must be an elegant solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. A solution that could not be jotted down in a book about Diophantine equations, but a short and elegant solution nevertheless.

My love for mathematics exists because others put their love of maths into me first. They spent time with me and explained things to me and taught me and filled me with wonder and amazement.

It’s the same thing with so much in life. Whatever you love, whoever you love. Love has to be shared in order to grow.

So when I think about copyright and patent and stuff like that, when I think about music and art and stuff like that, I think about love. The love that a creative artist puts into his or her creation. And how love has to be shared in order to grow.

Thinking about teachers and learners

For some people, the internet, the web and social networks are all about A-lists and cabals and cliques and echo chambers. I don’t know about that, I’m not some people. I find the web very useful.

One of the things that distinguishes this continuing-to-emerge space from all that went before is in the context of learning. For anyone who wants to learn, the web is a wondrous place. I want to learn. So for me the web is a wondrous place.

Learners need teachers. On the web, this often means people who sacrifice incredible personal time and energy writing out what they’re thinking about, what they themselves are learning, so that they can teach others. And learn more themselves as a result; teachers need learners as well.

The best teachers are usually themselves lifelong learners; the reason they teach well is that they are learning as they teach, and they take care to do that.

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Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, the co-creators of Visicalc, are two such people. Lifelong learners, passionate about everything they’re interested in, selflessly sharing what they’re learning with anyone who wants to learn with them.

I discovered their blogs early on, and for a decade or so have been able to enjoy their teachings and learnings from a distance. Bob’s writings can be found here, while Dan writes here. If you haven’t already done so, start reading them today. I cannot recommend them strongly enough.

Over the years I’ve had opportunity to meet both Bob as well as Dan; they’ve always been willing to spend time with me. I now count them amongst my friends and feel privileged in being able to learn from them.

Recently Dan published a book, Bricklin on Technology. A solid two-handed read, 500 pages long. What he’s done is taken the essays he’s written, grouped them into logical sections, commented and enriched them here and there, and all in all produced a wonderful collection of essays and an eminently readable book.

Dan thinks very hard about everything he does, and it shows throughout the book. The principles that drive him are in evidence everywhere, principles that need propagating and embedding far and wide.

One, as technologists we are in the business of building tools. Tools that help people do things simply and easily. Tools that can be used in a variety of ways, in a variety of contexts, for a variety of reasons.

Two, the people that use the tools are also very diverse; they’re diverse in their ability to use the tools, the skills they bring with them, the environments and contexts they operate in and with. They’re diverse in the motivations that drive them to use the tools, diverse in the aims and objectives they have in using the tools. The tools we build have to support this diversity.

Three, our ability to build tools well is increasing. We’re learning more about building tools that others will use to build more tools; we’re learning more about building tools as open platforms upon which others can build over-the-top tools; we’re learning about building feedback loops that take the emotion out of many unnecessary discussions, ways of measuring what is happening easily and cheaply.

Four, all this is being done in a social context, in community rather than as individuals. So as designers we need to remind ourselves there are social and moral aspects to what we do.

There’s no point my quoting directly from his book; there’s too much I would want to quote, and my posts are long enough as it is. So I’m just going to quote one line from his summary:

It is usually the users of technology, not the inventors, who determine how tools are applied.

In some ways that’s what the book is about. Thoughtful, considered discussions on the user perspective. How to make sure we understand the motivations and context. How to build tools that work well yet are intrinsically “free”, versatile enough to let the user choose what to do and how. How to sidestep political/emotional debates by rigorous examination of the facts. And how to keep remembering that value is generated by the usage of the tools and not by the tools themselves.

An exhilarating read, well worth the effort. While I’d read many of the essays first time around, I was particularly taken with three sections: the discussions on what users will pay for; the views on the recording industry; the interview with Ward Cunningham.

I particularly particularly particularly enjoyed re-reading the essay on Book Sharing, a classic example of what happens when two clever and gifted people discuss important things. Thank you Dan, and thank you Bob for pushing him to write it and publish it.

So use your Saturday wisely. Order the book. Now.

[A coda. I’m looking forward to Bob taking a leaf out of Dan’s book and publishing a similar book. You listening, Bob?]

Rambling about creativity and capital and content and frames

In this context of creativity and web, Jonathan Zittrain, or JZ as he gets called, made a number of critical points in his excellent book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It cover.jpg One of those key points is to do with the “generative” web, the phrase he uses to describe the open and innovative and creative aspects of the web; JZ spends time articulating the rise of locked-down devices, services and whole environments as a direct response to the ostensibly anarchic nature of the generative web, with its inherent vulnerabilities and weaknesses. … ] The implied tension between “generative” and “secure” that is to be found in JZ’s book, resonated, in a strange kind of way, with some of the ideas in Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: 184376331101lzzzzzzz.jpg The book remains one of my all-time favourites, I’ve probably read it a dozen times since it was published.

The tragic death of Michael Jackson has dominated much of the news this past week, even overshadowing the Iran situation in some quarters. Strange but true. Jackson’s death has had some unusual consequences, as people try and deal with their own reactions in different and creative ways. While the original story broke, I believe, on TMZ, Twitter was the river that carried the news to the world.

And Twitter was overwhelmed. Which meant the arrival of the much-loved Fail Whale:

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Which led someone to come up with this:

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This concerned a small number of people, who were worried that the image may cause offence. Which in turn led someone else to this:

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And so it went on, as people sought more and more creative ways of expressing their emotions and paying tribute to Michael Jackson. Wallpaper downloads. Posters. Photographs. Videos. Collages and montages. All in double-quick time. For me the most creative was this mashup:

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BillieTweets. Where someone has taken a Billie Jean video and made the lyrics visual using tweets where the relevant word has been highlighted. Follow the link to see how it works. [Thanks to the Scobleizer for the heads-up. And safe travels.].

All this is part of the magic of the web, the value that is generated when people have the right access and tools and ideas. Human beings are so incredibly creative.

In this context of creativity and web, Jonathan Zittrain, or JZ as he gets called, made a number of critical points in his excellent book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It

cover.jpg

One of those key points is to do with the “generative” web, the phrase he uses to describe the open and innovative and creative aspects of the web; JZ spends time articulating the rise of locked-down devices, services and whole environments as a direct response to the ostensibly anarchic nature of the generative web, with its inherent vulnerabilities and weaknesses. [If you haven’t read the book, do so, it’s worth it. ]

The implied tension between “generative” and “secure” that is to be found in JZ’s book, resonated, in a strange kind of way, with some of the ideas in Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital:

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The book remains one of my all-time favourites, I’ve probably read it a dozen times since it was published. And given away many many copies, something I have done with a very small number of books, including: The Social Life of Information, The Cluetrain Manifesto and Community Building on The Web.

The resonant piece was this: One of Perez’s seminal findings was the difference between financial capital and production capital.

In Perez’s view, financial capital “represents the critera and behaviour of those agents who possess wealth in the form of money or other paper assets….. their purpose remains tied to having wealth in the form of money (liquid or quasi-liquid and making it grow. To achieve this purpose, they use …. intermediairies …. The behaviour of these intermediaries while fulfilling the function of making money from money that can be observed and analysed as the behaviour of financial capital. In essence, financial capital serves as the agent for reallocating and redistributing wealth.

Perez goes on to say that “the term production capital embodies the motives and behaviours of those agents who generate new wealth by producing goods or performing services.

Through these distinctions, she clearly delineates the differences between the “process of creating wealth and the enabling mechanisms”; these distinctions are then played out through a number of “surges” or paradigm shifts. An incredible book.

For some time now, I’ve been wrestling with the connections between Zittrain’s generative web and Perez’s production capital, and formed my own views of the progressive-versus-conservative tensions that can be drawn from such a juxtaposition.

All this came to the fore again in the context of copyright and content, as I read Diane Gurman’s excellent First Monday piece on Why Lakoff Still Matters: Framing The Debate On Copyright Law And Digital Publishing

I give the abstract of the article here:

In 2004, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff popularized the idea of using metaphors and “frames” to promote progressive political issues. Although his theories have since been criticized, this article asserts that his framing is still relevant to the debate over copyright law as applied to digital publishing, particularly in the field of scholarly journals. Focusing on issues of copyright term extension and the public domain, open access, educational fair use, and the stewardship and preservation of digital resources, this article explores how to advocate for change more effectively — not by putting a better “spin” on proposed policies — but by using coherent narratives to frame the issues in language linked to progressive values.

Reading the article took me back to Perez and to Zittrain. Our Lakoffian frames of “strict father” and “nurturant parent” are in many ways congruent with the generative-versus-secure and production-versus-financial continua described by JZ and Carlota. As Gurman says:

Lakoff’s nurturant parent embodies values of equality, opportunity, openness and concern for the general welfare of all individuals. Under the progressive economic model, markets should serve the common good and democracy…. The strict father frame, on the other hand, centres on issues of authority and control. The moral credo expresses the belief that if people are disciplined and pursue their self-interest they will become prosperous and self-reliant. The favoured economic model is that of a free market operating without government interference.

A free market operating without government interference. Hmmm I remember those.

Despite the credit crunch, the economic meltdowns, the rise in fraud, despite the socialisation of losses and the privatisation of gains that ensued, many things have not changed. And they must. We need to move to a generative internet production capital world. And for that maybe we need to think about what Diane Gurman is saying.

We need to frame our arguments around our values rather than just on the facts and figures; we need to weave a coherent narrative based on public benefit via empowerment and access.

We can see the implications of this divide in many of the arguments that are being had in the digital domain. For example, the recent announcement by Ofcom of its intention to enforce regulated access to premium (and hitherto exclusive) content is a case in point, where the same arguments prevail.

The response of the incumbent, while understandable, is benighted. You only have to look at the public benefit implications, particularly those to do with human progress and innovation.

The returns expected from production capital differ from those expected out of financial capital for a variety of reasons; the most important reason is that when you’re in the business of creating value and wealth, rather than redistributing it, the returns tend to be somewhat less than astronomical.

Thinking about complexity in the world we live in today

A few decades ago, I read a book called AI: The Tumultous History of The Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier. In it, the late and brilliant Donald Michie is quoted as saying something like this:

AI is about making machines more fathomable and more under the control of human beings, not less. Conventional technology has indeed been making our environment more complex and more incomprehensible, and if it continues as it is doing now the only conceivable outcome is disaster.

More recently, when I wrote about complex adaptive systems, a colleague of mine, Reza Mohsin, pointed me towards another Michie quote:

If a machine becomes very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it has a mind of its own or not. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.

Last month’s tragedy involving the Air France flight over the Atlantic really brought this into stark relief, as I began to understand the implications of what may have happened. I quote from a Wall Street Journal article a few weeks ago:

A theory is that ice from the storm built up unusually quickly on the tubes and could have led to the malfunction whether or not the heat was working properly. If the tubes iced up, the pilots could have quickly seen sharp and rapid drops in their airspeed indicators, according to industry officials.

According to people familiar with the details, an international team of crash investigators as well as safety experts at Airbus are focused on a theory that malfunctioning airspeed indicators touched off a series of events that apparently made some flight controls, onboard computers and electrical systems go haywire.

The potentially faulty readings could have prompted the crew of the Air France flight to mistakenly boost thrust from the plane’s engines and increase speed as they went through possibly extreme turbulence, according to people familiar with investigators’ thinking. As a result, the pilots may inadvertently have subjected the plane to increased structural stress.

I stress that investigations are continuing, that the comments above are nothing more than theories at this stage.

Thankfully, not all events arising from the behaviour of complex adaptive systems are as tragic as the Air France crash. Some of them are downright comic. Take the accidental ‘takedown’ of YouTube by Pakistan early last year, where much of the world’s YouTube traffic was directed towards a page from the Pakistani ISP saying that YouTube access had been blocked; or the Skype meltdown in August 2007, where a large number of Skype supernodes were rebooted, after downloading Vista patches, at a time of very high activity. Others range from the Northeast Blackout to more recent gmail outages.

I spent some time yesterday evening with Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd and @defrag_ami, after the end of reboot11. The evening’s valedictory keynote had been given by Bruce Sterling, and I’d found it somewhat darker and more cynical than I would have preferred. Stowe felt that I should have seen it in a more satirical light, and he’s right. He reminded me that he himself taken a similar tack the previous year at reboot10, suggesting to the Utopians in the crowd that not all problems have solutions.

[Incidentally, I will always remember the Bruce Sterling talk as the one where he introduced the comic device of “my dead grandfather”, exhorting us not to concentrate solely on climate change ideas where our efforts will always be beaten by the relative performance of our dead ancestors.]

Understanding when and why a problem becomes intractable is an art not a science, something that two close friends (and erstwhile colleagues) Malcolm Dick and Sean Park have managed to teach me over the years. Neil Gershenfeld, alluded to something similar in his book When Things Start to Think. While discussing the work of Ed Lorenz, Neil says:

The modern study of chaos arguably grew out of Ed Lorenz’s striking discovery at MIT in the 1960s of equations that have solutions that appear to be random. He was using the newly available computers with graphical displays to study the weather. The equations that govern it are much too complex to be solved exactly, so he had the computer find an approximate solution to a simplified model of the motion of the atmosphere. When he plotted the results he thought he had made a mistake, because the graphs looked like random scribbling. He didn’t believe that his equations could be responsible for such disorder. But, hard as he tried, he couldn’t make the results go away. He eventually concluded that the solution was correct; the problem was with his expectations. He had found that apparently innocuous equations can contain solutions of unimaginable complexity. This raised the striking possibility that weather forecasts are so bad because it’s fundamentally not possible to predict the weather, rather than because the forecasters are not clever enough.

Which brings me to the kernel for this post. Tunguska. For those of you who’ve never heard the word, the Tunguska event is something that happened over a hundred years ago, in a part of the Tunguska river region in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, Russia. There was a massive explosion, a large swathe of forest was destroyed, trees were reduced to matchsticks.

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Recent research suggests that “clouds that form at the poles after shuttle launches are due to the turbulent transport of water from shuttle exhaust”. The ‘two-dimensional turbulence” model put forward by Michael Kelley and his team at Cornell is fascinating, insofar as it suggests a plausible reason for the Tunguska event.

I’d already been intrigued by the connection between aviation and clouds. I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Doc Searls, who has taken pains to try and educate me on the relationships between some of the cloud formations I see today and the contrails of aircraft.

So I did some personal research. Nothing significant, just a little digging around, mainly through Wikipedia. In the Tunguska event article, there’s alist of ten other events in the last 100 years where the symptoms suggested significant meteorite airburst. Of the ten, two had an explosive yield in excess of 10 kilotons.

We had the “Eastern Mediterranean Event” on June 5, 2002, and the Lugo, Northern Italy event on January 19, 1993. So I tried to correlate this with any significant space activity. And this is what I found. STS-111 was launched on June 5, 2002, with a UTS time remarkably close, and on the right side of, the eastern Med event. Earlier, STS-54 splashed down on January 19, 1993, again remarkably close to, and on the right side of, the Lugo incident.

Intriguing. Not conclusive, but intriguing nevertheless.

We live in a world where things seem to be getting more and more complex, as we represent physical things as virtual abstracts, then use software to operate and manipulate the virtual models.

We live in a world where things seem to be getting more and more connected, as devices and sensors proliferate while being reduced to nothing more than nodes on a network.

We live in a world where people are happy making snap decisions on limited and superficial information, where conclusions are drawn and propagated on the flimsiest of bases.

We need to be careful. Careful to make sure we do our root cause analysis correctly. Careful to ensure we have the right feedback loops in place for learning, so that recurrence is properly and sustainably prevented.

For all this we need patience and tolerance like we’ve never had before, and an avoidance of judgmental behaviour.

Maybe the continuing advance of complex adaptive systems means that we need to increase our understanding of the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

[While reading the wikipedia article on the prayer, I could not help but enjoy the reference to a Mother Goose rhyme with similar sentiments:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.