Daniel Suarez: Bot-Mediated Realities

I enjoy exposure to new world views, the feeling of one's brain being stretched to fit a new frame. For that reason, I enjoyed Daniel Suarez's talk to the Long Now Foundation, entitled "Daemon: Bot-Mediated Realities". You can listen to the talk as I did, or read Paul Saffo's summary.

Suarez sees a world in which bots run everything from airplanes and cars to economies and financial systems, and we have decreasing control over them. The automated systems are good for us, enabling us to do more with fewer people, but Suarez reminds us of the downsides: the specialization of knowledge combined with exploitability of software and the easily-imagined situation of still-running code the workings of which nobody understands. It's certainly changed the way I look at the things around me: inside every intelligent object I wonder, "who knows how these algorithms work? How long will it live?". Not in a paranoid tinfoil helmet conspiracy way, just becoming aware of the fragility of the software I took for granted.

It was at this point that Suarez's talk took a turn for the wishful. His solution to the possible nightmarish future of mankind at the mercy of bots that can't be repaired or replaced was "let's recreate the Internet, only with strong crypto and human-vouched IDs, and we'll only permit bots that a quorum of humans have read and validated the source code to, and ..." and I had to ask, "dude, have you ever worked with security people?". The 9/11 terrorists had government IDs, and it's easy to imagine malicious code doing so in the future. Reading the source code is time-consuming, therefore expensive, and no panacea--bugs can still exist in code that has been audited. The solution to fragile technology isn't more fragile technology unless you can failover in a redundant array of inexpensive Earths.

I think the greatest value of his talk was from the long view of software: we're creating actors that live beyond us, and we (software developers and society, the users of the bots) aren't planning for succession or failure. Come for the world view, but leave early to avoid the questionable solutions.

Why We're Failing in Math and Science

Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone.

In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and science with a few simple stories.

Last week, Robert Bruce Thompson, author of An Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, wrote a guest blog post on makezine.com, Home Science Under Attack, which told the sad story of how a retired chemist was arrested and his lab confiscated because he was doing experiments:

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for ... doing experiments.

Authorities concede that the chemicals found in Deeb's basement lab were no more hazardous than typical household cleaning products. Despite that, authorities confiscated "all potentially hazardous chemicals" (which is to say the chemicals in Deeb's lab) from his home, and called in a hazardous waste cleanup company to test the chemicals and clean up the lab.

Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."

Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English: "Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals..."

I forwarded this message to Dave Farber's IP list (which is now searchable via markmail, the amazing mailing list search engine!), and got back some great stories that I wanted to share.

Armando Stettner wrote one story that illustrates just how much our culture has changed. His story also involves the cops, but here, they understand and support science. Too bad that was 40+ years ago:

When I was about 13 or so, I also had a chemistry set in my basement. I was living on Long Island - Freeport, to be exact. I also remember the hobby shop with ALL sorts of glassware and little labeled bottles of chemicals. I had some really neat stuff: all sorts of chemicals - I seem to remember potassium ferrocyanide with which I did some chemoluminescence (I think that's one of the ingredients), sodium in liquid form, various acids, a few rolls of magnesium - not to mention all the paraphernalia: lots of pyrex stuff, triple beam balances, etc. All the chemicals were neatly arranged in this cabinet.

One day, I had mixed a concoction and was carrying it (premixed!) in a tin coffee can. Myself and a friend were carrying the stuff to the train tracks to test it out (light it) where it was relatively safe. The stuff started getting warm but I thought it was the sun heading the can up. Then it started getting REALLY warm. As it got hot, I dropped it in the middle of the street. The stuff flashed over. It was VERY cool.

But, I decided I didn't want to stay around any more and left.

Unfortunately for me, this all occurred in front of the house of someone who knew me (she was a 'friend' of my parents). She called the cops.

The Freeport police came to my house questioned me and my parents, joined in a little while by some county detectives. They were very polite. We took them down to the basement where I showed them all the stuff. The uniformed police left and the detectives continued to look at all the stuff and ask questions. They called somebody to ask some advice. It turns out they called the county labs. The guy got off the phone and asked 'you're not making any drugs down here are you?" I said no!! He smiled - he winked at my parents. Then he said the most unexpected thing: he said the gang at the labs offered to give me a tour of the labs anytime I wanted.

Then they left asking me to be careful. For me, it was actually a positive experience.

Today, I'm sure I'd face a visit from the Hazmat teams and the DHS. And, because of the triple beam balance, my house (or my parents') would be confiscated under the forfeiture rules.

At Maker Faire earlier this year, Robert Bruce Thompson gave a talk (video unfortunately truncated at both ends) that highlighted how attitudes towards chemistry have changed since he was a kid, starting with a tour of the powerful chemistry sets available in 1964 (courtesy of the Sears Catalog), and tracing the dumbing down and rising fear of liability that doomed them, until, as Kevin Kelly noted in a recent review of Robert's book, we reached "the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain 'No Chemicals!'" (Review sent out in Cool Tools email, up on the Cool Tools site soon.)

Why are we failing at math and science? Because it isn't fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits -- not to mention fear of technology -- drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.

Web 2.0 Is From Mars, Enterprise Is Up Uranus

Jim brings a welcome "inside the firewall" perspective to Radar. We were talking about Web 2.0 vs SOA vs "Enterprise SOA" (which had us all reached for the barf bags) and Jim came up with this great line about the mindset that could coin the phrase "Enterprise SOA": "Their worldview is one of control over the enterprise". I agree completely.

The Enterprise and Web worlds use different frames, like Lakoff's political frames: one is the stern father (the IT department) with strict rules, transgressors to be punished; the other is the nurturing parent (the API provider) who encourages experimentation, self-development, and happiness. These two have trouble seeing inside each other's world-view.

By way of illustration, SOA reminds me of the engraving over the entrance to the University of Wyoming's engineering department in Laramie: CONTROL OVER NATURE IS WON, NOT GIVEN. That fits with the command-and-control mentality. Web 2.0 would never say "CONTROL OVER USERS IS WON, NOT GIVEN".

We could reframe all the Web 2.0/Internet rules as Enterprise rules quite easily.

Metcalfe's Enterprise Law: The security risk of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

Reed's Enterprise Law: The downtime of a network grows exponentially with the size of the network.

Moore's Enterprise Law: If you wait 18 months you can buy twice as much computational power for the same money, therefore you should never upgrade.

Torvald's Enterprise Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are exploited.

Godwin's Enterprise Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a lawsuit due to someone being offended approaches one.

Brooks's Enterprise Law: Adding more people to a late software project is the only way to appear to be doing something about it.

Enterprise Definition of Social Software: software that wastes more time as more people use it.

I appear to have left my point behind, but that's okay :)

Why search competition isn't the point

This morning, in response to my Microhoo: Corporate Penis Envy? piece, Michael Arrington wrote The importance of a competitive search market.

First, let's be clear. I agree with Michael that competition is a good thing, and that there's a real risk that, absent competition, Google will become "evil," as "absolute power corrupts absolutely." Nonetheless, I thought I'd take a few moments to explore why Michael got it wrong, despite the fundamental appeal of his assertion, especially to people who grew up learning the lessons of the Microsoft desktop monopoly.

1. To focus on search is to miss the big picture. Web 2.0 (or whatever the fullness of the Internet Operating System ends up being called) is far bigger than search. Yes, search is currently the most valuable and monetizable Web 2.0 application--or perhaps better-named, subsystem. But look back at 1984: Lotus was bigger and more valuable than Microsoft ($153 million in revenues to Microsoft's $100 million, and growing faster -- Lotus had tripled in size, while Microsoft had only doubled.) But we now know that Microsoft had the stronger position. As I've said in my Web 2.0 talks from the very beginning, a platform beats an application every time.

There is strong evidence that the platform that's emerging is more like Linux than it is like Windows. That is, no one player is going to own all the pieces. But that could change if someone owned enough of the pieces that everyone else became dependent on them. So I'd be much more concerned about a single player rolling up unrelated and complementary pieces of the larger internet OS till they owned critical mass in multiple areas than I would be about a single player owning a best of breed application in one area or another.

The sooner we start getting serious about interoperability between best-of-breed services (the next step up from first generation mashups), the safer we'll be against a single dominant player turning their subsystem into the "one ring that rules them all."

2. I think Google understands the need for interoperability better than Microsoft. When Eric Schmidt says "don't fight the internet," I believe he means it. Google seems to be doing their best to balance competitive advantage with giving back and the overall health of the internet ecosystem.

3. Even if Google does achieve true monopoly status, that monopoly will be short-lived. Just as Microsoft stumbled at what appeared to be the peak of its power, so too will Google. The pace of technology is increasing, and it's rare for a company that led with one generation of technology to also win at the next. Take mobile, as hopmojo notes, or as I wrote myself in Static on the Dream Phone, mobile is going to be a make-or-break transition for Google.

4. Many Web 2.0 applications tend naturally to monopoly, precisely because they harness network effects. In fact, one of my short definitions of Web 2.0 is the design of systems that get better the more people use them. Network effects apply to the Web 2.0 system as a whole as well as to any individual subsystem. In What is Web 2.0?, I wrote:

   The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

   The critical point is whether or not, having achieved critical mass, you take the next step and turn that aggregated data into a system service. If Google doesn't do that, and the rest of us have done their homework, then someone else will beat them in search because the network effect of the entire system will be greater than the network effect of the search ecosystem alone. If Microsoft understood this, they'd be competing with Google by making search services that are more open, re-usable and re-deployable than Google's search services. Since they aren't operating this way, they ought to throw in the towel.

5. We're still so early! There's so much yet to invent. Take what Amazon is doing with S3 and EC2. They broke new ground and took a leadership position in an emerging category, while A9, their attempt at incremental innovation in search, got them nowhere. If Microsoft and Yahoo! want to compete with Google, go where they aren't!

True search innovation will come from something that doesn't look like search. Google's video search efforts foundered, while YouTube took off. (Google was smart enough to buy YouTube quickly.) Facebook took off in an area that could be characterized as "people search." Tweetspace is becoming a hidden transmission channel for information, one that Google doesn't yet search. Everything Microsoft (and other explicit search competitors, including most specialized search startups) is incremental innovation. Google's search dominance will be toppled by a disruptive innovation that changes the game, not by playing catch-up at the same game. The challenges that keep Google on their toes, innovating in search, will come from outside the current system.

Wattzon.org - How much energy we consume and what to do about it

Saul Griffith has published a version of his talk at ETech as a website, wattzon.org.

Saul's key points: Solving global warming is an engineering problem. We know the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming, and can determine just how much carbon we're allowed to put into the atmosphere to give us the temperature we can live with. The answer isn't pretty. He looks at it from both a personal point of view (how do I need to change my lifestyle to use only my fair share of the global carbon allowance) and from a global policy point of view (what are the available sources of clean energy, how big are they, and what is the scale of the industrialization effort required to harness them?)

From Wattzon:

The average American uses 11400 Watts of power continuously. This is the equivalent of burning 114 x100 Watt light bulbs, all the time. The average person globally uses 2255 Watts of power, or a little less than 23 x100 Watt light bulbs.

What are the consequences of us all using this much power?

What is the implied challenge of global warming in terms of how we produce power?

What are the things we do as individuals in terms of using power that we might change?

Wattzon.org hosts a document that gives us a framework for thinking about these challenges, and how we might change our behaviours as individuals as well as our collective behaviour as societies and global citizens, if we are to meet the great challenge of the 21st century - how to live in a world where we increasingly understand the resources to be finite, and the consequences of our actions complex & inter-twined.

What temperature do we set climate change at? What CO2 concentration does this imply we need to aim at? How much power can we get from fossil fuels while still meeting this goal? How much power do we need to install and produce from non-carbon technologies? What does this mean for countries, corporations, and individuals?

Click a lightbulb to continue.

(See also Ethan Zuckerman's great summary of Saul's talk and the video interview done by TechwebTV.)

@TED: Best of Day 3

The joke among TEDsters is that, around the third day, it becomes an endurance sport. It's one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It's another to be doing so for half a week. Nonetheless, part of the experience you get from being at events like TED is that feeling of being overwhelmed: someone just said what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard -- and then the next speaker says what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard -- and then ... well, you get the idea. It's intellectually exhausting, but it's also thrilling.

Here are some of the best moments of Day 3:

* The "What's Out There" series of talks was pretty, er, out there. Particle physicist Brian Cox walked us non-particle-physicists confidently through the importance of the Large Hadron Collider, soon to open near Geneva. It was one of several talks in that section in which the enthusiasm of the speaker was so great that we all thought about dropping our careers and becoming particle physicists.

* The "What's Out There" panel was especially strong, but there were two talks that knocked me out. Joshua Klein, an animal behaviorist, talked about species that have adapted to human behavior. In particular, he talked about crows. He described his project to build a vending machine for crows and he showed short films about ways crows can take advantage of civilization: for example, dropping nuts onto boulevards so cars can crack them open. And author Richard Preston reported on his (and others') adventures high in the Redwoods, the unexpected ecosystems discovered up there, and the ecological threats they face. I don't want to simplify his rich argument -- his book The Wild Trees is a must-read -- but he does a great job of connecting the fate of the Redwoods and the fate of us.

* During the "What Will Tomorrow Bring?" session, the other Chris Anderson spoke not about his provocative "Free" thesis (on the cover of the new Wired) but about his less-than-$100 blimp, which he showed off, the product of his desire to make a "minimum unmanned aerial vehicle." Chris and the blimp will also be at ETech on Tuesday.

* Peter Schwartz argued that Wikipedia is a leader in the battle against poverty: it brings knowledge and possibility to places not getting them any other way.

The series of talks that most engaged me was the first one of the day, entitled "How Do We Create?"

* Designer Yves Behar urged us to question basic assumptions in out work. "Why do we have a CapsLk key on our computers"? he asked. "As a designer, I don't want to just slapping a new skin over existing technology." He certainly didn't do that when he designed the XO Laptop, which, among other delights, doesn't have a CapsLk key.

* Robert Lang, origami artist and mathematician, talked about how creativity depends on learning from those who came before us, even if we're taking lessons in ways the originators never intended. His best of many aphorisms: "the secret to productivity is letting dead people do the work for you."

* There was one particularly moving presentation during that session, from MIT's Tod Machover, which I'll give its own post after I have a bit more distance from it. (Benjamin Zander's great climax last night will get a shout-out, too.)

About that that anti-TED meme flying around the blogosphere that I mentioned last time...

Some of it has been cranky (such as a high-profile tech blog publishing the attendee list and vetting it), but at least one post -- from the usually very thoughtful Umair Haque, deserves to be addressed. His argument is that TED does more harm than good. I disagree. There are some things a reasonable person could argue against TED -- the inevitable elitism that comes with the high entry fee and the occasional self-congratulatory tone come to mind -- but by adopting a web-centric "ideas worth spreading" meme, I believe curator Chris Anderson has worked hard to make the ideas expressed at TED as available as possible. Most TED talks are available for free on the TED website. An official blog is reporting the events of the conference in near-real-time, as are a dozen or so unvetted ones. Haque's argument seems to be that TED does more harm than good because it hasn't saved the world (he denies that in the comments, but it seems to be his argument). Sure, it hasn't. No mere conference can. (Indeed, the even more elite Davos conference this year seemed to be full of leaders just throwing up their hands.) But while I suspect Anderson's goal is transformational change, the simple act of sharing transformational ideas -- first to a room of elites and then to the growing percentage of the world with Internet access -- lets them take root in unexpected places. That is definitely far more good than harm.

And now, off to the final day...

@TED: Best of Day 2

It was a day of extremes at TED, ranging from an extended session examining the pervasiveness of evil to an evening celebration of some of the most life-affirming ideas possible. It also ranged from the sober (how to survive a nuclear attack) to the self-referential and self-congratulatory (a brief sit-down with TED's originator, Richard Saul Wurman). Here's a quick rundown of some of the long day's many high points:

* There was a late-morning series of talks on the topic "Is beauty truth?", but it was in another session that we saw how truth brings with it some sense of beauty. Alisa Miller, president of CEO of Public Radio International, used the remarkable information visualizations of Worldmapper to illuminate what news stories get covered and what don't. (You can see her slides and hear her talk here.) In the end, she notes, "covering Britney is cheaper" than considering the more important stories.
* While interviewing Craig Ventner, TED curator Chris Anderson remembered an exchange they had a few years back. Anderson had asked, "Can you be accused of playing God?" Ventner's reply: "We're not playing." It was a joke, but Ventner took is as an opportunity to deliberate on how we're "supposed to use our knowledge to improve humanity." He also contrasted the optimism of TED with the pessimism of Davos
* In a brief talk, Dean Ornish gave his standard talk on why "our genes are not our fate," detailing the importance of lifestyle change. It was an interesting complement to Ventner and others showing how our fate could be in creating new genes.
* Philip Zimbardo, top researcher of the classic 1971 Stanford prison study and an expert witness for Abu Ghraib guard, showed some photos from the Iraqi prison that were more graphic and troubling than what's been in the mainstream press, and hammered on the parallels between his landmark study and what is happening today. Countering the "bad apple" theory of people who behave terribly when placed in unsuperivised positions of complete power over others, he stated, "it's the barrel that's bad, not the apples." As intense as that session was, it kicked off with a brief clip about the just-ended next-generation DVD wars that managed to be both hilarious and offensive.
* While accepting their TED prizes, novelist David Eggers delivered a tour-de-force tour through his 826 writing and tutoring project, and Neil Turok shared his double life as a physicist (he's not so sure the Big Bang started everything) and as a founder of the African school for math and sciences.

And that doesn't even include Samantha Power's stirring talk about diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello ... or Susan Blackmore's sharp application of Darwinian principles to everything ... or Isaac Mizrahi's star turn ... or 100 other fascinating moments. And the best news is that this event is only half over.

Finally, I've noticed an anti-TED meme flying around the blogosphere this morning. I'll address that tonight, when I write my post about today's events.

Rating the ratings, and the end of neutrality

When I search for my name on major search engines, I'm satisfied with the results. (I hope this modest admission doesn't spur any readers to change that situation.) But many individuals and companies can't make the same claim. Scads of self-help sites advise them to take deliberate action to raise their profiles, and SEO firms as well as others offer paid services to take such action.

Meanwhile, Wikipedians castigate individuals and companies for changing their own Wikipedia entries. No other behavior could reasonably be expected. Passive participation in the online reputation game is not an option.

The operational adage in this game is: "If I am not for myself, who am I?...And if not now, when?" to cite the over-cited Rabbi Hillel. (Now, that was a dude with some reputation. Too bad his Golden Rule isn't observed in cyberspace.)

Could another level of indirection--a rating of ratings--improve this situation? Probably not. But thought experiments are worth considering--especially since the stakes are even higher than I've indicated. Now only are we increasingly forced to take part in the ratings game, but we are prevented from being neutral.

(continue reading)

One Laptop Per Child will succeed even if it "fails"

The way people are dismissing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project this week reminds me of how people were treating Hillary Clinton during the five days between her Iowa defeat and her New Hampshire comeback. To many observers, the inevitable has become the disaster in record time.

Some of the anti-OLPC notes that have appeared since Intel was kicked out of the project have been well-reasoned (read the Economist's near-obituary and Nikolaj Nyholm on Radar) -- but much of the anti-OLPC opining has deteriorated to personal attack on OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte. There are plenty of forces that want OLPC to fail commercially. And, for a variety of reasons, it might.

But what does "fail" mean in the market OLPC is trying to serve? Regardless of whether it's the XO laptop, Intel's Classmate, Pixel Qi, or some other endeavor, it's now far more likely that ultra-low-cost PCs are going to be made available in quantity for a developing world that needs them. (It needs clean water and vaccines more, of course, but it needs inexpensive and efficient IT as well.) And, most important, even if the XO laptop fails in the marketplace, none of this activity -- commercial and otherwise -- would have happened without the breakthrough OLPC project to start it.

P.S. To learn more about the XO laptop's technology, I recommend this post from "Bunnie" Huang. To understand an unexpected example of its utility, see Mike Hendrickson, here on Radar.

Marcel Proust, Alpha Geek

Tim recently sent around a recommendation for The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's enjoyable look at a decidedly pre-Silicon Valley tech boom, although the inflated promises of that period (i.e., the telegraph will bring about world peace) remind us of some of the more outlandish dotcom-era claims.

Tim's note about Standage's book (which I recommend as well) provides a good reminder of how each new generation brings new technologies, but each generation seems to recreate older technologies as well. Streaming media, for example, reminds me of a service I enjoyed as an elementary-school student in the '70s, when I would dial a phone number (and I mean that literally; touch-tone dialing had yet to come to my part of New Jersey) and listen to a radio station on our hard-wired AT&T-owned phone for as long as I could get away with it.

Turns out I was no trailblazer, as I've learned from my holiday-week reading, William C. Carter's generous and rigorous biography of novelist Marcel Proust. In Marcel Proust: A Life, Carter writes that, in 1911, "Proust subscribed to a new service that brought opera, concerts, and plays into the home. For a fee of sixty francs a month, the subscriber received a theatrophone, a large black ear-trumpet connected through telephone to eight Paris theaters and concert halls... Although the sound quality was often poor, the instrument was a great boon to someone like Proust, who loved opera and the theater but who rarely felt well enough to attend performances. He often listened, even when the sound was so bad he could barely hear the words." Sounds a bit like RealAudio 1.0, circa 1995.

So, gentle readers, do you have any thoughts on what from 100 years ago might be the hot new technology of 2008?

Dollars for nothing and your LiveJournal (almost) for free

LiveJournal was bought by a Russian company, SUP. As I pointed out earlier, the weak dollar makes foreign investment much easier. For the sake of math, let's assume LJ is worth $1M. That's 25M rubles now, but would have been 29M rubles two years ago. Don't be surprised to see a few more of these international deals go down as the dollar continues to plunge. If OPEC pulls out of the dollar standard for oil, US companies will only be more attractively priced for overseas investors.

Value of Public Data

It's long been known that the US Census Bureau's TIGER dataset bootstrapped the booming US geospatial industry. Many other countries haven't had free access to their public data, and this has correspondingly retarded their local geospatial industries. There was a fascinating article in The Guardian about the value of public data, containing this great line: The government's chief adviser on the subject has told ministers that the archive could be worth hundreds of billions of pounds to the national economy, rather than hundreds of millions previously estimated.

We've been watching and working with Carl Malamud, Larry Lessig, and projects like public.resource.org as they fight to free public information that's senselessly behind paywalls. We've felt for a long time that efficient markets require ubiquitous information and it's good to have respectable institutions (unlike we scurrilous Internet companies who obviously just want to push our hippy agendas or our own businesses) like the British Government beginning to realize that opening public data creates large amounts of private and public value.

We're only at the start of opening public data. The British Government is still to take substantial action to open public data—significantly, the Ordnance Survey still have their clammy greedy fingers on the public geospatial data. There will be dozens (hundreds) of exciting business built when this and other public data are opened, delivering value that wasn't possible from the closed data.

CO2Stats: Measuring a Site's Impact

CO2Stats is a widget that tracks and calculates the CO2 emissions of a website. The emissions add up with each pageview (the widget below is starting at 0.000198).

The widget tracks all pageviews on its installed websites and currently reaches one million uniques a month. As mentioned in the San Jose Mercury " It works on the assumption that three minutes on a Web site generates three grams of CO2 - roughly equal to the amount one person generates by breathing for 4.5 minutes."

CO2Stats was sent to me by its creators after I posted about Dopplr Offsettr (Radar post). Like Dopplr Offsettr its an attempt to make people aware of the environmental impact of their actions.

Tribute to honor Jim Gray on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley

A tribute to honor Jim Gray will be held on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley. The general session is open to all, followed by a technical session reviewing a small fraction of Jim's lasting contributions. Registration is required to attend the technical session.

General Session Program 9:00am - 10:30am, Zellerbach Hall

• Opening Remarks - Joe Hellerstein
• A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss - Pauline Boss
• The Search Effort - Mike Olson
• Jim's Impact on Berkeley - Mike Harrison
• Jim as a Mentor: Colleagues - Pat Helland
• Jim as a Mentor: Faculty and Students - Ed Lazowska
• Why Jim Got the Turing Award - Mike Stonebraker
• Jim's Contributions to Industry I - David Vaskevitch
• Jim's Contributions to Industry II - Rick Rashid

Technical Session Program 11:00am - 5:30pm, Wheeler Hall (Registration is required)

• IBM/Transaction Processing - Bruce Lindsay
• Tandem/Fault Tolerance -
• Development & Effect of TPC/A Benchmark - David DeWitt
• DEC, Architecture, Memex and More - Gordon Bell
• Writing the Transaction Processing book: "Is There Life After Transaction Processing?" - Andreas Reuter
• The Adventure in Russia and the Terra Server - Tom Barclay
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey - Alex Szalay
• World Wide Telescope Project - Curtis Wong
• Undersea Data Collection & Sharing - Jim Bellingham

Global Venture Capital

Continuing on from my post on the effects of the USD slump on Silicon Valley, I see today that Russia is creating a state-run VC fund. Leaving aside the inefficiencies of a state-run capitalist enterprise, this represents a huge pool of cash that may let Russian entrepreneurs stay at home instead of coming to the US. And as the US dollar falls in value, US workers can earn more by moving offshore. It'll be interesting times ahead!

Exchange Rate and Silicon Valley

What does the ever-declining value of the US dollar mean for Silicon Valley?

The US dollar has been emulating a brick lately. With housing prices plummeting, subprime fallout ongoing, and oil prices soaring, the general economic news is grim but for the occasional "the investment environment is still sound" noises.

What does this mean for Silicon Valley?

At the moment there's not a lot of effect. The valley still has critical masses of experience, capital, and enthusiasm. This means that it's a great place to start a company, turn an invention into a product, and build tomorrow's technology. The valley's investors, from angel through VC into capital markets, have so far largely been or become American. Foreign entrepreneurs are still coming to Silicon Valley to start their companies. So far, innovation has been born, bred, and retired in the US but this may change.

Scenario 1: an influx of foreign capital. It's cheaper than ever for foreign companies to take a flutter on US startups. It's easy to say the US VC market has too much money in it already given the YouFaceSocialTubeBookr clones being funded. The right question is: what could Silicon Valley do with more money that it couldn't do with the money it already has?

Venture capital is often compared to an ecosystem. Just as natural selection rewards those who best fit a niche, the inexorable invisible hand of the market feeds those companies that best meet customer needs. The more companies there are, the more and better the niches (needs) will be filled. This scenario has the benefit of building on the Valley's strengths. Ultimately, though, overseas investment in US startups comes down to a bet that expected returns (probability of success * payoff) outweight the exchange rate losses and the exchange rates aren't a happy bet at the moment.

Scenario 2: US startups seek VCs in booming markets overseas. In the past, companies and entrepreneurs moved to America to have access to US VCs. Savvy entrepreneurs may now move to Sao Paolo, Hong Kong, or Moscow to respond to the relocation of capital. Brazil, China, and Eastern Europe are all housing huge pools of developer talent.

As a contra argument, however, the US is home to almost all the people who have been through startups and learned what succeeds and what doesn't. International capital sources don't have to just lure the enterpreneur, they need to lure the management team as well. That's a higher barrier. We are seeing foreign-born entrepreneurs and execs returning from the US with their skills and knowledge. The long time it takes to share that knowledge (the lifetime of a startup or two) means foreign startup centers won't organically grow into Valleyesque hotspots any time soon.

Scenario 3: successful (and growing) companies look to IPO in booming markets. Hong Kong has seen a huge upswing in IPOs, as has Brazil. It's becoming the case that you can still IPO for great profit, just not on NASDAQ and NYSE. Even little old New Zealand has American firms going public there. This is the best scenario for Silicon Valley (remain the feedlot for companies, merely with exits that happen in more favourable currencies), requires no change, and thus is already happening.

What do you think the falling USD holds in store for Silicon Valley, startups, VCs, and entrepreneurs? The comments hold your feedback ....

Facebook Kremlinology

As word comes out about other investors in Facebook, I find myself still thinking about the significance of the Microsoft investment. Steve Ballmer admitted at Web 2.0 (video, jump to about 20m in) that the advertising deal with Facebook doesn't make them money. So is he doubling down on the bubble? The valuation is staggering. Not yet AOL-level ludicrous, as Facebook hasn't suggested buying Microsoft. But, you know, give it time.

Facebook is very much an AOL closed garden and vulnerable in the same way that AOL was vulnerable to the Internet. It may yet suffer a riches-of-the-niches death-by-a-thousand-web-cuts. I'm glad in many ways that Google didn't win the bidding war, if indeed there was a bidding war. Were they really actively bidding? Did they only find out today that they lost? Were they only doing it so Microsoft would have to pay ZILLIONS more than Facebook's really worth?

Google can create the riches-of-niches world by promoting and implementing Fitzpatrick and Recordon's ideas, and thus set fire to the big pile of money that Microsoft and others just put on the table.

I'm also thinking about where Facebook might be weak. Facebook aggregated users with a killer app. They're now pimping those users out to third party application writers for hits (and thus revenue). Nobody's been thinking about the user experience, except for Facebook's cutback on emailed invites from apps. I think it's critical.

Facebook apps seem to be microcosms of the Internet—photos, games, movies, pointless wank—with friends. In other words, Facebook brings the user and their buddy list and the app developers bring everything else. Down this path lies Facebook as a smaller-but-social Internet, the hub for all these social apps.

Facebook's Achilles heel is the user experience of this micro social Internet: how do you find the useful and interesting apps in the ocean of zombie dross that has already emerged?

In the real Internet, people use brands ("Flickr", "Amazon", "Addictive Games") to go straight to sites and Google to find those they haven't dealt with. Will they really turn to Facebook instead of going to a photo/movie/game/pointless site instead? Not unless Facebook makes the user experience of finding stuff better than both Google's current experience and the experience of a web of social apps powered by the Fitzpatrick-Recordon decentralized social network. I think this is the biggest weakness and threat to Facebook.

If volunteer communities increasingly add value to business...

The bookstore business shelves used to be weighed down with books telling readers how to manage rank-and-file workers. Then, as the information age progressed, the books described how to manage executives and knowledge workers. The distribution of knowledge led further to books on how to manage relationships with vendors and customers, and finally on how to manage relationships with everybody in the world.

If value increasingly comes from communities of volunteers outside the compass of corporate management, isn't it only right to shift resources to support these communities? I have to deal with that question in my own field of computer documentation, where the shift to community production is as happening as fast as it is anywhere. (I examine this trend in a series of articles about community documentation.) But many industries could ask the same question I explore in this article: how can society shift its resources to support the important new source of value in communities?

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Long Now: The Arguments for Nuclear Power

On this past Friday night, the Long Now Foundation's Seminars on Long Term Thinking offered a provocative session from Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson entitled "Power To Save the World". According to Stewart Brand's email writeup of the session:

In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and also participated in ban-the-bomb rallies. After 15 years of deepening familiarity with nuclear power, she says she still would ban the bomb, but she now regrets that the Shoreham reactor was shut down.

Who changed her mind was a nuclear expert at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, D. Richard Anderson, known as "Rip." "Here was someone who thinks in thousands of years, about climate, about nuclear waste storage," she said. "He applies to nuclear issues the same probabilistic risk assessment that helps us understand what we're facing with climate change."

One concept that altered Cravens' perspective was realizing what "baseload" requires. Rip Anderson, on the stage with her, explained that baseload is the fundamental currency of grid power. It is massive power constantly available 24/7. It comes from only three sources--- fossil fuels, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear. Hydro is maxed out. Fossil fuels have to be cut back to slow global warming. That leaves only nuclear growth to handle the expected doubling of energy demand in the world by 2030.

Anderson added that his first scientific discipline was oceanography, so one of his greatest concerns about CO2 loading of the atmosphere is that the resulting carbonic acid in the oceans is dissolving the calcifying organisms and could effectively end the crucial carbon sink that oceans provide.

Cravens went into detail about the harm brought by coal, which currently provides 51% of US electricity (while hydro is 7%, nuclear 20%). Estimates are that coal pollution causes 24,000 deaths a year in the US, 400,000 a year in China (not counting the 5,000 who die annually in Chinese coal mines).

She also mentioned the still-incomplete science of the effects of low radiation--- the amounts below 10,000 millirems. People encounter much higher levels of natural radiation at higher elevations and in some radon-rich areas, but there is no indication of higher cancer rates in those places. The fears of long-lingering cancer effects in the Chernobyl region have not proven out.

Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quanities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person's lifetime of energy use.

There is said to be no geological repository for nuclear waste yet, but Rip Anderson pointed out that the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in a deep salt formation in New Mexico has been operating since 1999. It now handles only military waste, but there is no reason except political that it could not take all of our civilian spent fuel.

Two questions from the audience addressed possible limitations on fast growth of nuclear energy in the world. One was, "Won't we quickly run out of uranium?" Anderson said that 10% of US electricity currently comes from recycled Soviet nuclear warheads, and we haven't begun to draw the energy from decommissioned US warheads. The price for uranium ore has been so low in recent decades that mines closed and discovery stopped. Now that the price is rising, mines are reopening and new reserves are being found. (They're mostly in Canada and Australia, some in the US.) Meanwhile, spent fuel in the US still has 98% of its energy in it. Once we reprocess the spent fuel the way the rest of the world does, we will extract more of that energy, and the final amount of waste will be drastically smaller.

Second question: "Are there enough nuclear engineers in the pipeline to deal with a worldwide nuclear renaissance?" Answer: No. That's the most limiting resource at this point.

There's a third question, which I've previously heard Stewart himself address, when he first turned heads by coming out in favor of nuclear power: how effective is long term storage of nuclear waste? Stewart's answer was typically provocative. As I recall it, he said something like this: "We don't know, but our framing of the question shows a failure of long term thinking. We've all been imagining that we have to solve the nuclear waste problem for all time to come. In fact, we only have to solve it for a few hundred years. Either by then technology will have advanced sufficiently that it will no longer be a problem, or we will have regressed so far that a few nuclear waste dumps in out of the way places will be the least of our worries."

What do you think?

Fortune Mag Bullish on Technology

I was fascinated by the take on the tech industry in David Kirkpatrick's recent story for Fortune magazine: This Tech Boom Has Legs. While it's true, as Marc recently noted, that Web 2.0 appears to be reaching a bubble level of hype, Kirkpatrick nonetheless notes good prospects for the adoption of technology, especially because of emerging markets:

The tech boom now underway is profoundly different from any that has come before. It is broader and probably longer-lasting in its impact on tech companies, and more transformative macroeconomically. There are two reasons. First, everybody wants technology. And second, technology has become radically easier to create... Just about every government and company worldwide now realizes that technological excellence is critical for competitiveness."

I saw this first hand on my recent visit to the Basque country in Spain. These guys have been thinking very creatively about how to bring new economic life to their region. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is not only a modern cathedral (one of the few buildings I've been in that creates the same kind of awe), it's also a testament to the power of thoughtful long term planning by local governments. Bilbao, largely a forgotten city, stepped up to compete with high-profile locations like Venice, dug deep, and landed the museum, which now brings in more than a million tourists a year. It was the first step in revitalizing the local economy.

Now they've turned to tech. On a much smaller scale, my visit was part of an effort to support the burgeoning technology community in this northwest corner of Spain. I had an enthusiastic audience of about 500 people--well informed, thoughtful developers ready to take their place on the world stage. And it was amazing that it was the Basque government that is funding the initiative to bring outside speakers to this part of the world.

I should also add that Kirkpatrick's article is consistent with Carlota Perez's analysis of bubbles, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, which argues that bubbles are an inevitable part of the redeployment of capital during truly transformative revolutions, and are followed by a long "golden age" as the bubble-funded technology is successfully deployed.