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2009

  • 1 min read

Liquid water on mars

"NASA's Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars - droplets that apparently splashed onto the spacecraft's leg during landing, according to some members of the Phoenix team." (from Newscientist.com)

  • 1 min read

mySociety are doing interesting stuff in the public arena

A british organization (or should I say organisation?) called mySociety has done some really cool publically minded open source projects.

Sites like FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow make so much sense and it would seem to me could easily be done here in the USA.

How about it, shall we do it. It doesn 't seem too hard!

Check out this post by Tom Steinberg where he muses about how they might be even able to do more: Why I Want a Million Quid:

"One of our key insights has started to become a hindrance. We love sites like FixMyStreet partly because they show how wonderful success can be achieved at implausibly low cost: about £6000 in the case of that site.

They take maintenance, sure, many tens of thousands of pounds a year once you have a number of such sites, but they are essentially elegant, scaleable small pieces of the web ecosystem.

We love them partly because they are so small and simple, and that affection can lead to a dangerous narrative that only small and zero-cost scalable can ever be seriously considered." (from: from mySociety)

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  • 2 min read

Saving the newspapers. A modest proposal.

You know I am a fan of the Newspapers. I've written about it several times, wondering out loud whether our collective desire to get everything for cheaper and cheaper, eventually for free, would eventually kill them. This topic has been discussed a lot in the press and blogs as well.

What if we apply the principles of viral marketing to supporting newspapers?

How would that work?

What if a paid subscriber of newspaper N is offered the following: For each of your friends who you get to sign up for a subscription, you (personA) get something off every issue that you receive, as do they (personB).

As long as PersonB subscribes, they both get a small bounty. Furthermore, this work down the line, for every subscriber that PersonB signs up, they (PersonC) as well as PersonB get a small bounty. And PersonA gets a smaller bounty.

Some details need to be worked out 🙂 In particular the financial model. The mathematics are not that hard and we could work out how big a bounty could be sustained under various assumptions. I think it could work.

The beauty is that this is a combined marketing/circulation program which could be implemented by the paper itself without creating complicated new agencies, non profits, or NGOs.

Maybe this idea is not the one, but does it inspire others? What, you say this idea isn 't original? Sorry!. With everything and everyone blogging each idea that pops into their head (yours truly included) it's hard to know what's original!

  • 1 min read

How Corrupt is Our Language in Economic Discourse?

Check out this post How Corrupt is Our Language in Economic Discourse?:

"And as Deirdre McCloskey has put it, when your intellectual range is from M-N you think you are being open minded when you look at M and you look at N, but you certainly don't see A or Z. " (from: from The Austrian Economists)

So now that I made a point about my skepticism about whatever politicians say about the economy (see "Who Can I believe about the economy") here's some more.One pal told me, nicely, that my appreciation for Paul Krugman was misguided, that Krugman's a socialist (whatever that means) and that Krugman's way off base and extremely partisan. Whoops. Now I am even more confused.

  • 1 min read

Poem: Tortoise by Tim Mason

Tortoise
by Tim Mason

I set my pace deliberately
keeping precious what matters
under the hard shell
I show the world.

Truth is
survival counts
each step I take assures that.

I'm not much on ambition,
but how long you folks been around?

I put that question to Aesop
when he was a betting lad –
gave my bookie good odds against his rabbit
I left him with a moral and a question
“can you hang?”

Takes time to comprehend
but patience comes with my pace
so let me rephrase that
how do you follow your dreams?

Me, I keep what's precious
under the hard shell
I show the world.

  • 2 min read

Micro volunteering

A very interesting article about volunteering, and applying the wikipedia philosophy to volunteering. Here he sets the scene:

"People have a problem with volunteerism : Now this statement is provocative. It's not said in polite company. We like to think that we're too busy to volunteer, but it's not true. We don't volunteer because we don't want to. Why? Either because we don't care enough about giving back to our communities or today 's volunteer opportunities aren't suited to our lifestyles. Being an optimist, I'm opting for the latter. And so, a corollary is required:

Volunteerism excludes most of us: Why? Because it asks us for a kind of time that few of us can give. We've got a few minutes while waiting for the bus to play Texas Hold'em on our mobile phones. We've got an hour to watch our favorite TV show on a weeknight. And we've got 15 minutes to read Vogue in the dentist's office. What we don't have is two-plus hours on a Saturday. That's prime leisure, family, and catch-up time. It's the most valuable kind of time we've got. It's expensive. Volunteerism excludes most of us by asking for something that's beyond what we're prepared to give. So we don't."

This rings true to me. The rest of the article proposes some ideas on how to better leverage the bits of time people have that they might be using to volunteer.

Ben then goes on to describe a project that he is working on called The Extraordinari which is a really cool idea.

If you are interested in volunteering and the new dynamics there, read the article!It is absolutely chock full of background information and links to other projects.

p.s. If you have the energy, also read the comments. There are some great pointers to other resources. I have to say that I feel it is a little unfortunate that this good post gets somewhat slammed by some who maybe don't realize that whether or not these are new ideas, they are reaching a new audience and putting a new spin on them, and that in itself is positive contribution that should be applauded.

  • 3 min read

Who can I believe about the economy?

The problems in our economy right now are real, I believe. Tons of people have lost jobs, and my investment accounts also prove it. I guess there's no debate about that. But the question is, what to do about it.

My observations:

  • Politicians on both sides are equally passionate yet totally contradict each other about what they claim to be 'facts'.

  • The most glaring one is, for me, "are tax breaks stimulative or is government spending stimulative?

  • I mean this is a case where apparently intelligent adults are calling the sky red and the grass blue.

  • It's not like they say, "well experts have trouble understanding this but I really believe that the sky is red and the grass is blue". It's more like, "every single expert out there agrees with me, and if you don't you're a dope."

What to do? Here's where I come out:

  • I don't believe any politician, left or right. They are all lying. Ok, they would call it "framing" but the fact is there are no facts (I am a little more inclined to believe the President, but even there…)

  • I know that I can't personally determine whether tax breaks are stimulative or not, or whether government spending is stimulative or not, let alone whether either one will 'work'.

  • I decide to believe experts I whose opinion and prescriptions I read in the newspapers and hear on TV. I look for experts who don't have an axe to grind and seem intelligent, thoughtful, and not a shill for one or the other party.

You may ask, then, what do I read and what do I watch? In the end, the person who I have decided is making the most sense is Paul Krugman. He happens to appear in the papers and tv stations I watch. So I side with his prescriptions:

"A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts." (from "On the Edge")

and

"Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive. " (from "On the Edge")

And then in the end I also fall back on the common sense approach: "If you find that you've dug yourself into a big hole, the first thing to do is STOP DIGGING ". Let's face it, we are in a crisis right now, and we know who was in charge and what policies were in charge to get us here, so I guess it's time to try something else.