Is social media Epicurean?

Epicurus. What an excellent philosopher.

Epicurus is mostly associated now with the word 'Epicure', a person who enjoys their food and drink with more sophistication than the rest of us oiks (disclosure: I used to be a committee member on a wine tasting society, so sue me). Interestingly, Epicurus wasn't into food and drink at all - he mostly ate cheese and bread. But he was interested in the good life, and as society turned to sensory pleasure as a measure of the good life, his legacy got a little twisted. 

Let's start in my favourite place - the opening paragraph of a wikipedia article!

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by aponia, the absence of pain and fear, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and bad, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

You can't help but like him, can you? (He was also an early advocate for empirical observation as the foundation for science and thusly truth - kudos, Epicurus.)

When Epicurus talked about being surrounded by friends, he meant just that - all the friends, all of the time. He lived in what we would now see as a commune. Happiness, he figured, was not in the seeking of anything - be it power, money, or reward after death. It was in living well, not sometimes but always. And part of that was having good people around you. All the time.

Social networking gets a bad rap for being plagued with narcissists and for creating false connections between people, for being full of people whose only interest is in having as many names connected to their own as possible. That hasn't been my experience at all. The great mass of people I know and observe in social networking environments are friends with their friends. Facebook you populate with friends you've met, twitter with friends you have and haven't, and myspace... well, maybe myspace isn't a good example. But what you wind up with is the Epicurean dream - a life surrounded by your friends. All the friends, all the time.

Maybe that's not so bad - or new - a thing.

Karl Popper, lost genius of business

(Yes, fellow philosophy students, I know that title is cheeky.)

I can go on for hours about the brilliance of Karl Popper. In a nutshell - after Einstein broke Newtonian physics, thereby effectively breaking SCIENCE, Popper was the guy kneeling on the floor, picking up the bits and saying 'don't worry, it's still good...'

Among the insights was this unbelievably important gem:

Science can't prove anything. It can only disprove things.

Consider the famous black swan example:

A scientist spends her life observing swans. She observes that all the swans she has ever seen are white. Based on this empirical evidence, she posits a theory that all swans are white. This theory is good, solid, SCIENCE.

One day she travels to Australia, and sees - GASP! - a black swan.

Her theory is disproven. But that doesn't mean it wasn't science when she thought of it. Now she can posit a new theory: Swans can be white or black. And again, the new theory is science.

You cannot prove science. You can only disprove it. That is what makes science science. 

Isn't that terrific?

So - the connection to business models, especially as relates to the business of distributing content on the internet. As far as e-business models go, we have seen a lot of black swans. And green, and blue, and every other colour. 

There have been a hundreds of different theories about how to make money from content on the internet, and one by one, they have pretty much all been disproven. 

The plaguing question - 'how do I make money from content?' has not been answered. Content producers are, rightly, very worried. But for every disproved theory, we edge closer and closer to a theory that works.

The gaping flaw here is, of course, that there might not actually be a way to make proper money from content on the internet. And even once some good, viable ways are found, they are always open to being disproved. But if there is a way to do it, the only way we're going to find out is by observing, hypothesising, and testing, for as long as it takes.  

Or until bankruptcy, whichever comes first. 

Yay homographs!

Natural Language Processing - it's a minefield. The NLP facet that every google user knows about (even if they might not know the technical name) is the HOMOGRAPH. That's a word that is spelt the same way as another word with a different meaning. 

Not a Homonym.

A homonym is a word that has the same spelling and the same pronunciation as another word witha different meaning - like 'left', 'right', 'current', or 'set' ('set' is the all time winner with 21 discrete meanings in the OED!) Homographs only need to have the same spelling. Computers, after all, aren't fussed with pronunciation.

(For reference, words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings are homophones, but don't concern NLP). 

Here's a list of homographs, and it's longer than you might think:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_homographs

Add in the acronyms of companies, which are so prevalent on the internet, and you have a swamp. 

This is why I'm a fan of the semantic web. Until there's a reliable way for a machine to tell the difference between 'bear' and 'bear', which I don't think there ever will be (even a person requires detailed context), RDF will be the best we have.

TERM	Meaning	Spelling	Pronunciation
Homonym	Different	Same	Same
Homograph	Different	Same	Different
Homophone	Different	Different	Same
Heteronym	Different	Same	Different
Polyseme	Multiple meanings	Same	Same or Different
Capitonym	Different	Different if capital first letter	Different

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym

My favourite will always be the capitonym. From polish to Polish and march to March is a lovely semantic jump!

My Bad

Like a lot of people, I have been loving twitter. LOVING it. 

Because of twitter, I've stopped using my RSS feed, stopped googling for news, stopped doing lots of things. 

On twitter, I mostly contribute links by re-tweeting - passing on other people's tweets to my followers. 

But recently, this has felt a little... weak. Because one of the OTHER things I've stopped doing is blogging.

That is to say, while I am doing a great job of passing on other people's ideas, I'm not creating - or contributing  - any of my own.

So - a new direction. I've thought about what I appreciate in a blog post, and here's what I've come up with:

• Posts that are brief
• Posts that contain new ideas
• Posts that synthesise broad ideas and patterns
  
• Posts that link to sources
• Posts that have a sense of humour

So that is what I'll try to do. Post regularly, briefly (but in more than 140 characters!), and hopefully, provide something valuable.  

Ada Lovelace Day - I love Lucy!

**This was originally posted a month ago, but, in keeping with the spirit of the day, here it is again!**

As documented at http://findingada.com/:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.All you need to do is sign the pledge, pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited. To help us keep track of the conversation about Ada Lovelace Day ahead of the event, and to pull together everything on the day, please use these tags:AdaLovelaceDay09 for Delicious, Technorati etc. It’s long, but clear.#ALD09 for Twitter hashtags.

I already know who my tech heroine is, and while I'll write this again on the day, I'm happy to nominate... LUCILLE BALL!! No, I'm not joking.Lucille Ball is one of the great unrecognised media figures of our time. Media is a technology, and technology is increasingly a medium, so why not?

Amazingnesses include:

1. Lucille Ball invented the repeat. And if you think that's a so-so achievement, get yourself a copy of 'Everything Bad is Good for You' (underrated book imho) and get yourself some learning about the power of repeatability. The more times a consumer can watch a show, the more potentially profitable it can be over time, and the greater incentive there is for producers to improve the quality. DVD box sets, people. And yes, I am saying Lucille Ball is responsible for the Sopranos.

2. Lucille Ball opened people's minds & broke down prejudices. Desi Arnaz (Ricky) was Cuban. And this was the 50s. (And yes they were actually married, but did divorce after 20 years or so.)

3. Lucille Ball was the first female head of a TV production company (DesiLu).

4. Lucille Ball produced Star Trek. HA! Bet you didn't know that last one, did you? Totally true, and she gets the credit for Mission: Impossible, too.

educational publishing - some predictions

A thought provoking set of ideas from MIT's Sarah Scrafford, as found here: 

http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2009/03/927_imminent_ch.html#more

What I like about Sarah's approach is that she avoids some of the more Utopian, airy/fairy leanings of typical digital-ed future predictions, and gets down to specifics. She's talking specifically about higher ed publishing, but many of the ideas are further reaching. 

I recommend reading the whole thing, because I'm only going to report on points of personal interest here (ie the following is not representative of the original). 

Highlights include: 

* Data in the digital format requires the use of additional technology to access, read and modify. This technology may not be universally available due to constraints like cost, and even if available, may not be used by everyone because of training gaps and lack of accessibility.

Now why is that interesting? Because it shows a reversal of what publishers want: We want paid-for content distributed on free technologies that everyone understands. The technology of 'how to make a book' is basically free - you get some bits of paper and bung them together. And everyone knows how to use a book (apart, of course, from this dude). We've never expected people to pay for paper - we expect them to pay for what's written on it, i.e. the content. 

So, the way things are going is exactly the opposite of our business model. 

Nuts. 

Highlight 2: 

* Lack of publishing format standards hinder the process of aggregating content from various sources, collating it and re-publishing only what you need.

Absolutely. Especially re. 'aggregation' - but I have a post on this ready for next week, so I won't extrapolate now. I would add, though, that as well as aggregating between sources we also need standards for aggregation within sources. Individual chapters of books, individual articles in journals, series of monographs... it's a long list that requires an extensible solution.  

Highlight 3:

* Digital publishers must cope with opposition and resentment from the print industry which will certainly not relish the prospect of being driven out of business.

Now here I disagree, but only because this is a false dichotomy. The print publishers are all scrambling to become digital publishers, but no-one - even the exclusively-digital - has got a grip on how to long-term derive revenue from content yet. (Yet.)

Sarah goes on to identify benefits of going digital:

* The ability to modify content or just a part of it easily and at a considerably low cost. The same exercise with traditional books is a time consuming and costly affair.

In the case of academic textbooks, updated versions are where a significant fraction of income comes from - digital versioning may yet cost publishers more than it saves.

* Teachers can put together customized lessons depending on what they think their students are interested in rather than being forced to rely on one or two books alone.

This is 100% true if the teachers can find the content. That hurdle, unfortunately, is yet to be jumped (and is why I bang on about metadata & searchability all my life). 

* Digital content takes up a fraction of the storage space that printed matter does, thus freeing up shelves and shelves of space.

And did we mention the dead trees? (NB counterpoint: All English repository libraries still keep books. Why? Because paper is still the most reliable technology available. Floppy disks from ten years ago are obsolete, but books from five hundred years ago still work just fine. Digital longevity - in the 'centuries' context - is still a Great Unknown.)

* There's no need to carry around books when you're travelling from place to place. If it's online, all you need is access to a computer and a fast Internet connection.

No... you also need server space. You need the cloud. You also need a particularly good bit of librarian software to find what you need (yes, even if you've found it before). And as the wonderful Bruce Sterling said (see 'patterns and collapse' on this blog + http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html), you can't make a platform out of the cloud. Platforms are solid - clouds aren't.  

That's my two cents. But if you've made it this far, do yourself a favour and read the original as well.

worst flight EVER

Far be it for me to use a blog to whinge, BUT:

I just flew Iberia.

The flight from Heathrow? It was supposed to leave at 3.25. We boarded at 3.50. What time was take-off? 5.30.

Got to Madrid an hour late to get my connecting flight to Vigo. But that turned out to be OK - the flight after my flight was over an hour late, so I got that instead. There was no-one to ask if this was OK; I tried to ask a lady steward, who told me (in Spanish) 'I'm counting' and proceeded to count something, and when I asked again, told me 'can't you see I'm working?'

It was great when I finally got to Vigo, though - a little after eleven pm. A very nice lady looked after me, and gave me a special package of treats. Here are some pictures of my special treat pack. Can you guess what type of treats they are?

 

They're treats for people whose luggage has been lost.

(And yes, that is a pair of disposable underwear.)

patterns and collapse

This is interesting. 

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html

The part I like is this. Consider the following system:

1. It's very big

2. It underpins pretty much everything for everybody, individuals and businesses both

3. It runs on systems that no one actual person understands

4. The people who use it day-to-day - let's call them 'customers' - are the people who understand it least - but they assume that somewhere, someone is running it who does understand it

5. But there isn't, see point 2

6. The best services are either cheap or free

7. And based on 6, you can get whatever you want and not pay

So What system is that? There are two potential answers: 

a) the banking system last year

b) the internet... today

It may be time to be a little bit worried.