Disqus - Latest Comments for phbradley

Re: Hacking Education (continued)

fredwilson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:12:21 -0000

Why have you given up on this community? We've missed you

Re: Hacking Education (continued)

phbradley — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:16:20 -0000

Hi Fred - long time since I last posted here. Plenty of food for thought in this post for my long bus journey to Sao Paolo tonight! It leaves soon so I can't go into my initial impressions with adequate depth, but the post as a whole does bring up vivid memories of a book I'm extremely fond of, by an author I very much recommend for a totally leftfield approach to various sociopolitical issues. Who knows, Ivan Ilich may even have come up at the conference. Here's a pointedly relevant extract:

*
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1973: 9)
*

Re: India - a summary

phbradley — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:19:07 -0000

approve

2008/11/21 Disqus <>

Re: Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water — is this for real?

Neil Ferguson — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:03:05 -0000

Still willing to bet?

I refer you to "BLP Announces Rowan University Validation of New Energy Source" and "Water Flow Calorimetry Experiments, Validation Tests and Chemical Analysis of Reactants for BlackLight Power Inc." Both documents have links at http://www.blacklightpower.com/new.shtml.

Re: Change I'd Like To See

phbradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:29:43 -0000

if there's one thing to hope (I'm a brit, I'm not the one doing the hoping! asides from no more master-and-dog escapades in the middle east...) it's that this 'change' campaign gives him the extra political capital to do it.

the flipside, of course, is that this extra leeway is just a much looser leash for a dangerous dog to wreak havoc! I guess how you see it depends on how much faith you have in the man and the team he will build around him

Re: Change I'd Like To See

aarondelcohen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:24:36 -0000

Phillipe:

Absolutely right. That said, I worry about the practicality. A new president has a finite amount of political capital. What's the most important thing? Campaign Finance Reform, Iraq, Energy, or the absurd tax structure? Where should Obama (when he is elected) allocate this capital?

Re: Change I'd Like To See

phbradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:12:17 -0000

I think the tacitness of western citizens to financially-driven special interest lobbying is truly obscene. We put governments in place for a number of reasons, but two main ones are, in my mind:
1) to complement free market mechanisms where they fail or don't belong
2) to be a reasonably impartial arbiter in the relations between fellow members of a society - elected, so as to reflect (as well as possible) the prevailing mores and opinions of the majority as to those arbitrations

so for it to be possible to curry favour with the government by making a bigger donation than another component of society is obscene on both counts! it's corruption, pure and simple, and here we are discussing the best way to handle it, rather than how to eradicate it! any proposals? free TV airtime, like in the UK, might be one. public funding would be another.

might the US public be better off if the money saved from Iraq funded, amongst other things, political (rather than military!) campaigns, rather than universal healthcare?

Re: Change I'd Like To See

fredwilson — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:39:10 -0000

good point. i was thinking that the individual donation amounts would never get reported to the campaign. they would be made through the government and aggregated.

Re: Change I'd Like To See

phbradley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:03:40 -0000

total enforced anonymity has to entail restricting donations to various levels - or else information can be encoded in the bid itself (hey John - we were the ones that gave you $1,234,567,890 for your campaign!

Re: The Human Piece Of The Venture Equation

phbradley — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:39:51 -0000

You've effectively been doing this job for as long, if not longer, than many of my age cohort have been alive - and here we come, asking for your backers' money. There's a fascinating differential there and it'd be good to hear more about it in later posts; I don't feel Jessica Livingston covered it that well in Founders At Work - the founders back then weren't typically this young

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

albert — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:30:11 -0000

The ecosystem is *not* diverse when it comes to search, where Google alone accounts for 70% and the top three engines cover 90%+ of search. Also, the google search algorithm allows for "manual" changes already (I believe "discretionary" would be a better word), for instance to eliminate or demote google bombs from the results. This and other tuning of their algorithm rightly involves human judgment and google to date has shown great judgment. A big point of the whole discussion is that these judgment calls that need to be made get a lot harder as more of the content is on google owned services.

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

phbradley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:00:01 -0000

their reputation for not manually altering their search results - and thus returning only unbiased, objectively-determined 'quality' results, is worth infinitely more to them than Knol ever will be. It would be brand suicide.

qdub, i think you're more on the mark with your comment made 2 levels up - they have an inherent knowledge of SEO, and they'll never get blacklisted, they'll be fully aware of what path their spiders take through the site, what it sees, what it likes, what it dislikes, etc. Expect Danny Sullivan and co to pay very close attention to Knol's design features and to extrapolate good SEO practices from it. This may not be all bad for clever content publishers...

as for the CPMs (and the ROI corollary - as I said, it'd be interesting to see how much google has staked on Knol - doubt it's much)... it would seem unlikely that, with the insider's perspective we just agreed they have, they would be putting low CPM content up; after all, doubtless they have a sandbox environment that they can run a knol page in and see what CPMs it would likely fetch, and what it would displace in the rankings, no? Besides, is there any reason to presuppose that these will be low-CPM pages? The emphasis is on authoritatively put together, highly-useful, zero sales-pitch quasi-encyclopedic content, with high-interest visitors... sounds like for a given topic it ought to tend to a naturally high (relative) SERP, and for high CPMs too (again relative to others in the niche), over time. I can't quite see it displacing higher-returns business, especially further down the line.

It may kick the crutch from out of a single-keyword reliant publisher but is there anything inefficient about that? This ecosystem can heal itself extremely well - it's one of the most diverse ecosystems of human activity, and low low low barriers to entry mean something else, better adapted, will just flow into the virtual space left by it.

spam and content scraping is an interesting question: will anyone risk google's fury by copying their content or trying to insert your own links into it?

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

albert — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:27:08 -0000

There is another comment thread here that captures well why this is very much an issue for long tail content.

Re: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations

phbradley — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:50:17 -0000

But is it really a threat to the Internet ecosystem? If the Internet has ever proved anything, it's that its ecosystem *doesn't* rely on professional content producers. So will the ecosystem be worse off if Google forces professional content producers to shut up shop?

Google is merely yet another nail in the coffin for professional online producers - the main driving force, bigger even than Google, is the amateur-empowering basic nature of the Web. And that nature may burn Google's fingers if it tries its hand at professional content with meaningful stakes (I'd like to see figures on investment into Knol but I doubt it's a big bet) - there's no reason why Google should be immune in this arena when nobody else has been so far.

Re: Manifesto for Microphilanthropy

Crosbie Fitch — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:11:18 -0000

I prefer the term micropatronage. This isn't a donation in support of a favoured cause, but a commission contingent upon the production of art.

That's what I'm working on anyway, a mechanism to enable people to reward artists for their art rather than publishers for producing copies. I call it the contingencymarket.com - commission similarly voluntary.

Re: Manifesto for Microphilanthropy

gregorylent — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:46:28 -0000

i think what you are saying is that with microphilanthropy i could start a charity for the five village women in my neighborhood who have alcoholic husbands and no food for the kinds, small targets ...

sometimes i have trouble with academic language, and i apologize for my lack of clarity ...

micro transactions of any sort seem to be in our future, through mechanisms as yet uninvented, it seems

Re: Manifesto for Microphilanthropy

phbradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:58:36 -0000

Pure commoditisation - which ultimately, is what needs micropayment - is almost the exact opposite of microphilanthropy! It leads to donation requests getting so micro as to make the donation they ask for so small that potential donors can't be bothered to do it - it's too much effort to get your wallet out, type in the card details, etc (hence the need for micropayment systems to get over this).

Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it's about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity perhaps more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)

There's no reason why average donations can't stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it is based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, highly niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (because it's highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.

Re: Paradoxical lifestyles

phbradley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:29:59 -0000

if you really care about the methodology, which upon a quick scan seems sound, here's the direct download link: http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp151.pdf

Ultimately the utility of these findings, and of the field itself, is in providing us with an awareness of inherent decision making biases, such that we can rationally address/redress the biases and make better decisions. Scientifically elucidated, codified and distilled wisdom. The above finding is an example of empirically-derived wisdom - but I agree with you about the dangers of correlation and causation - its like any science in that only when you go deeper (more micro) can you get really useful knowledge, and thus technology, out of it. Just like Mendel's "discovery" of inheritance in biology, it took more precise "wisdom" - e.g. DNA (i.e. molecular genetics) before it became a truly useful tool in the lab.

There's clear and present danger of abuse as it gets more advanced (more 'micro') - it could dramatically enhance propaganda, giving it precise and powerful rules/techniques for how to frame issues/prime audiences to be more receptive/accepting of a statement/policy. As behavioural science attains the advanced level (and thus increased utility) of other sciences such as physics, chemistry or medicine, with their highly informative precision tools giving their users ever clearer pictures of cause & effect in the systems they observe, we get uncomfortably close to informing - and thus empowering - brainwashing.

Behavioural science will lead to behavioural technology (in the true sense of the word - I don't mean gadgets, I mean largely immaterial 'tools' - like framing [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(economics) ]), with potential for good and bad use, like any other technology. It'll be interesting to spot the development of that technology; most other technology you can put in your hands, or at least put under a microscope, and examine. We may not yet realise just how important humanities will be in the 21st century. And this is coming from a biochemist!

Re: A lesson learnt

phbradley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:55:05 -0000

Two primary decision vectors when deciding whether to hit the 'publish' button:
a) Does it add value (i.e. does it avoid repetition of other material already generally available, and will anybody coming across it find it interesting or valueable?)
b) Is it 'safe' - i.e. free (within reasonable bounds of probability) of negative repercussions for the writer or anyone associated with the text. In this case there's a chance of negative repercussions on myself, being a public, self-redacted slur on my own character, that may put others off wanting to work with me etc. But I'm aware of the threat, weighed it up and decided that its utility/potential value to myself as a personal 'scarecrow', and to readers in a similar situation - and the probability of getting some great comments that I would find useful - outweighs that risk.

Certainly other 'dirty laundry' situations I have seen others airing on the web would easily fail at least one (or even both) checkpoints.

Re: A lesson learnt

EthanBauley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:38:08 -0000

Very cool, I have seen that explanation of the benefit of transparency
(reduced cognitive load) elsewhere.

I think you're the man for writing about this but it also is very
personal so I'd be careful in the future about airing "dirty laundry"
in the future. I don't think this comes even close to that line but I
do think that merits being said for the record and your own benefit.
Since we're being all "open and transparent"...

I'm sure you know what I mean ;-)

Re: A lesson learnt

phbradley — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:25:11 -0000

The specific companies are not relevant to the post - asides from the 'long term' one dragging its feet, they are largely faultless in the affair, so are totally irrelevant to the scenario (though the startup, by being open about its feelings in the matter, really helped in my understanding of what just happened - kudos). I wrote this mostly as a permanent reminder to myself of a lesson learnt the hard way, and partly in the remote hope that someone will avoid it entirely after reading this. This comment thread, full of wisdom, is an unexpected bonus.

I think your point about transparency being the simplest strategy is spot on. I'm reminded of the late John Peel's quote: "I don't know what people mean by âintegrityâ. Iâve always found it easier to tell the truth because that way you donât have to remember what youâve said. So, for purely practical reasons, it is the best thing." - I think the same goes for transparency. If you're not a bastard, by and large there should be no reason to not be clear about your actions and intentions. Oddly for me, that's usually a principle I stick to with ease - why I haven't applied it to this jobseeking process I haven't a clue.

But yes, it is easier said than done to tell a startup - that has and will be making sacrifices to extend you an offer to join the team - that you're soliciting other offers (though in this case, not necessarily mutually exclusive ones - but as a way of unlocking working for the startup, not as a replacement - though I'm not sure what I'd do if they conflicted; in the text I said I'd err towards the long view; maybe, maybe not). That's what I struggled with here, and failed to take the right course of action in response to the challenge.

[As regards the related posts, they're automatically generated, I have no idea what's coming up (I write this remotely) - apologies!]

Re: Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water — is this for real?

phbradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:26:03 -0000

I'll take those odds!

Re: WTF-of-the-day: Friday 30th May ‘08

phbradley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:23:04 -0000

I suppose I could rephrase - rather than say something along the lines of 'his maths is bad' to 'his maths isn't good enough for quantum physics and was riddled with errors', would that be more appropriate? I thought that was close enough.

The optimist in me desperately hopes that despite the valid cause for scepticism here, the guy is right (and so are his backers), and the physics world needs to update its theory; this technology could be absolutely fantastic for humanity. Sadly though I think for the time being my cynicism has the edge on my general view of Mills' claims.

Re: Your food has… software?!

phbradley — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:49:04 -0000

There's certainly a lot of room/potential for innovation in the micro-/p2p agriculture sphere, however it really doesn't fit into our current society and infrastructure, so I suspect if it does happen, we'll see it coming from South America or Asia (maybe the African continent) - whichever is the most innovative/least reliant on developed countries for urban/social planning direction

Re: Energy

phbradley — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:32:03 -0000

Ah, the problem of externalities. Turns out economics does have the answer, but politics is lagging. Putting taxes on tires or road users comes across as "yet another stealth tax"... when really all it's doing is forcing people to compensate society for the bad effects of their behaviour. Sadly politicians don't have the willpower to make that happen.