Global Business Network founder Peter Schwartz summarizes the process of scenario planning for the GBN newsletter Wired:
1. List Driving Forces
2. Make a Scenario Grid
3. Imagine Possible Futures
4. Brainstorm Implications and Actions
5. Track Indicators
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the more limited Mturk Requester site.
Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker’s reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker’s U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent over the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.[1]
Fascinating. It’s named after The Turk:
The name Mechanical Turk comes from “The Turk”, a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this ‘machine’ was not an automaton at all but was in fact a chess master hidden in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren’t suited for.
There’s also some criticism that Amazon Mechanical Turk constitutes a sort of virtual sweatshop.
I was just burned by a Daily Mail story and not eager to get hoaxed again, but this is interesting if true. A commenter at Cryptogon notes:
There is indeed a massive amount of shipping sitting idle around here. You can clearly see them off the southern coast of Singapore (where the main container ship harbour is), where they’re scattered across the horizon and on a recent flight to Malaysia, there is a large amount of shipping in the Johor Straits on the northern tip of Singapore, though its hard to say if they’re moving or not.
They won’t come into harbour (which incurrs fees) because there’s nothing to ship. The Western demand for consumer goods has tanked.
From my vague memory of a news report there are supposed to be about 750-800 ships out there.
It’s probably not the biggest congregation ever, but its certainly unprecedented for this neck of the woods.
Cryptogon: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession
Trevor Blake remarks that these idle ships are ripe to be remade into pirate utopias.
These days the only things that land on Hashima Island are the shits of passing seagulls. An hour or so’s sail from the port of Nagasaki, the abandoned island silently crumbles. A former coal mining facility owned by Mitsubishi Motors, it was once the most densely populated place on earth, packing over 13,000 people into each square kilometre of its residential high-risers. It operated from 1887 until 1974, after which the coal industry fell into decline and the mines were shut for good. With their jobs gone and no other reason to stay in this mini urban nightmare, almost overnight the entire population fled back to the mainland, leaving most of their stuff behind to rot.
Today it is illegal to go anywhere near the place as it’s beyond restoration and totally unsafe. The Japanese Government aren’t keen to draw unwanted attention to this testament to the hardship of the country’s post-war industrial revolution either.
The punishment for being caught visiting Hashima Island is 30 days in prison followed by immediate deportation. But the other week, after getting up before sunrise and cutting a secret deal with a local fisherman, some friends and I landed on Hashima Island.
Vice: Battleship Island – Japan’s rotting metropolis
(via The Agitator)
Spain must end the practice of incommunicado detention as it violates the rights of people deprived of their liberty, said Amnesty International in a report published on Tuesday.
“It is inadmissible that in present day Spain anyone who is arrested for whatever reason should disappear as if in a black hole for days on end. Such lack of transparency can be used as a veil to hide human rights violations,” said Nicola Duckworth, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director.
In its report, Out of the shadows: End incommunicado detention in Spain, Amnesty International illustrates how Spain has one of the strictest detention regimes in Europe which is in breach of the country’s obligations under international human rights law.
Amnesty International: Spain must end incommunicado detention
This year EsoZone – the third annual Portland conference dedicated to the occult, fringe science, and other offbeat topics – is forgoing a pre-planned schedule in favor of letting attendees create their own agenda.
On October 9th, participants will arrive at Watershed PDX and collaboratively create the schedule. The event will be free and open to the public, and anyone will be able to propose a session, lead a workshop, or suggest a group activity. The approach is called “unconferencing,” a technique pioneered by tech-industry events.
Portland has played host to a number of unconferences in the past few years, including BarCamp, WordCamp, and CyborgCamp.
Event organizers Klint Finley and Jillian Ordes-Finley were inspired to transform EsoZone into an unconference after attending CyborgCamp in December of 2008.
“I was amazed at how quickly the schedule was put together at CyborgCamp, and how smoothly the event ran. We’d agonized over the EsoZone schedule for months and were still changing things at the last minute. I was really impressed by how the whole unconference model worked,” Finley says.
The pair hope this new approach will help EsoZone better reach its goal: fostering connections between its eclectic and oftentimes outsider audience. Finley says “This should be a better platform for getting people to interact each other, and making sure the event centers around the subject matter the attendees really want to discuss.”
EsoZone will use the same scheduling system used by CyborgCamp and BarCamp. Participants will propose sessions on 8.5 x 11 pieces of sticky paper and place them on a large schedule grid on the wall. The sessions can then be rearranged as necessary as attendees negotiate times and spaces for each session. New sessions can be added to empty slots at any time during the event.
In order to give people an idea of what to expect, the organizers are encouraging likely participants to propose subjects on their online forum in advance of the event. However, nothing will be decided until the actual event.
EsoZone will also be exhibiting esoteric art by a variety of artists. “Watershed is such a cavernous space, we have room for a staggering amount of artwork,” Ordes-Finley says. Although artists will be allowed to hang art the day of the event, they are encouraged to check in ahead of time if they have questions or could have any logistical issues.
More information, and contact details, are available at esozone.com
Economics, as a field, got in trouble because economists were seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system. If the profession is to redeem itself, it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision — that of a market economy that has many virtues but that is also shot through with flaws and frictions. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Even during the heyday of perfect-market economics, there was a lot of work done on the ways in which the real economy deviated from the theoretical ideal. What’s probably going to happen now — in fact, it’s already happening — is that flaws-and-frictions economics will move from the periphery of economic analysis to its center.
There’s already a fairly well developed example of the kind of economics I have in mind: the school of thought known as behavioral finance. Practitioners of this approach emphasize two things. First, many real-world investors bear little resemblance to the cool calculators of efficient-market theory: they’re all too subject to herd behavior, to bouts of irrational exuberance and unwarranted panic. Second, even those who try to base their decisions on cool calculation often find that they can’t, that problems of trust, credibility and limited collateral force them to run with the herd.
New York Times: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
Incidentally, here is a free behavioral economics course from the previously mentioned Peer2Peer University.
DIY U author Anya Kamenetz describes the Edupunk movement for Fast Company:
Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can’t easily improve efficiency.
If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
Fast Company: How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education
The article mentions some useful sounding sites:
Peer2Peer University – online community of open study groups for short university-level courses
Academic Earth – The Hulu of online lectures
Western Governors University – actual accredited online university I hadn’t heard of. No grades, and completing coursework is optional.
Here’s an interview with Kamenetz
My contribution to the “edupunk” movement is Personal University, which just launched its first complete program offerings in Computer Science. This project is now defunct.
A new Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, released yesterday, reveals that the American public’s opinion of the press’s accuracy has reached its lowest level in two decades of Pew surveys.
The public’s thoughts on media bias and independence didn’t fare much better — the levels reported in this recent survey now match the lowest figures recorded by Pew. […]
Not surprisingly, the opinion of the news media can be broken down by political party, with Republicans being the most critical of the media, Pew’s research revealed. However, Democrats have become increasingly critical of the media as well in recent years, lessening the gap between the parties over opinions on inaccuracy and favoritism. Reports Pew:
“Today, most Democrats (59 percent) say that the reports of news organizations are often inaccurate; just 43 percent said this two years ago. Democrats are also now more likely than they were in 2007 to identify favoritism in the media: Two-thirds (67 percent) say the press tends to favor one side rather than to treat all sides fairly, up from 54 percent. And while just a third of Democrats (33 percent) say news organizations are ‘too critical of America,’ that reflects a 10-point increase since 2007.”
Previously reported human hair solar panel most likely a hoax:
The young man claims he has sent several units out for evaluation which, on the face of it, lends credibility to his claim: ‘I’m trying to produce commercially and distribute to the districts. We’ve already sent a couple out to the districts to test for feasibility,’ he said. On the other hand, this means that he has built prototypes capable of producing 9VDC at 18W. Based on the analysis below, this seems highly unlikely and, unfortunately, seems to indicate this is a deliberate hoax.
As discussed below, the claimed output of this device does not agree with the published properties of photoelectric organic dyes, making it likely that a conventional solar cell is concealed inside the panel. Furthermore, the article states, “Half a kilo of hair can be bought for only 16p in Nepal and lasts a few months, whereas a pack of batteries would cost 50p and last a few nights. People can replace the hair easily themselves, says Milan, meaning his solar panels need little servicing” and “The young inventor says that human hair due to the presence of Melanin is sensitive to light and also acts as a type of conductor”. These statements indicate that the device uses human hair directly, not purified, extracted melanin which further invalidates the claim. The melanin can’t be electrically active because keratin is an insulator. Human hair is non-conductive and not photochemically active as published articles and my own experiments show.
Nepal Human Hair Solar Panel Hoax
(Thanks Mart K!)
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