Skip to main content

Home/ Sensorica Knowledge/ Group items tagged automatic

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

code.google.com/...guide_events.html

google script apps Programming javascript tool tools infrastructure

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • script that you want to run every day at a specific time
  • script that should run after a user submits a data-collection form.
  • Google Apps Script provides simple event handlers and installable event handlers, which are easy ways for you to specify functions to run at a particular time or in response to an event.
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • let's consider the terminology we use for events
  • event triggers
  • triggers
  • in response
  • event handler
  • event
  • onInstall function
  • onOpen function.
  • onEdit function
  • the simple event handlers are restricted in what they are permitted to do:
  • The spreadsheet containing the script must be opened for editing
  • cannot determine the current user
  • cannot access any services that require authentication as that user
  • Calendar, Mail and Site are not anonymous and the simple event handlers cannot access those services.
  • can only modify the current spreadsheet. Access to other spreadsheets is forbidden.
  • see Understanding Permissions and Script Execution.
  • The onOpen function runs automatically when a user opens a spreadsheet.
  • add custom menu items to the spreadsheet's menu bar.
  • onEdit function runs automatically when any cell of the spreadsheet is edited.
  • record the last modified time in a comment on the cell that was edited.
  • The onInstall function is called when a script is installed from the Script Gallery.
  • setting up custom menus for the user.
  • the script can call onOpen from onInstall.
  • Installable event handlers are set on the Triggers menu within the Script Editor, and they're called triggers in this document.
  • When a specific time is reached
  • When a form is submitted
  • When a Spreadsheet is edited
  • When a Spreadsheet is opened.
  • They can potentially access all services available to the user who installed the handler.
  • are fully-capable scripts with none of the access limitations of simple event handlers
  • may not be able to determine which user triggered the event being handled
  • The spreadsheet containing the script does not have to be open for the event to be triggered and the script to run.
  • You can connect triggers to one or more functions in a script. Any function can have multiple triggers attached. In addition, you can add trigger attributes to a function to further refine how the trigger behaves.
  • When a script runs because of a trigger, the script runs using the identity of the person who installed the trigger, not the identity of the user whose action triggered the event. This is for security reasons.
  • Installing an event handler may prompt for authorization to access
  • An event is passed to every event handler as the argument (e). You can add attributes to the (e) argument that further define how the trigger works or that capture information about how the script was triggered.
  • an example of a function that sends email to a designated individual containing information captured by a Spreadsheet when a form is submitted.
  • With Google Apps, forms have the option to automatically record the submitter's username, and this is available to the script as e.namedValues["Username"]. Note: e.namedValues are only available for Google Apps domains and not for consumer Google accounts.
  • The available attributes for triggers are described in the following tables.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 May 11
     
    script that you want to run every day at a specific time
Kurt Laitner

Smart Contracts - 0 views

www.alamut.com/...smartContracts.html

smart contract cryptography paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 21 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Whether enforced by a government, or otherwise, the contract is the basic building block of a free market economy.
  • A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on the other promises.
  • The basic idea of smart contracts is that many kinds of contractual clauses (such as liens, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher.
  • ...77 more annotations...
  • A broad statement of the key idea of smart contracts, then, is to say that contracts should be embedded in the world.
  • And where the vending machine, like electronic mail, implements an asynchronous protocol between the vending company and the customer, some smart contracts entail multiple synchronous steps between two or more parties
  • POS (Point of Sale)
  • EDI (Electronic Data Interchange
  • SWIFT
  • allocation of public network bandwidth via automated auctions
  • Smart contracts reference that property in a dynamic, proactively enforced form, and provide much better observation and verification where proactive measures must fall short.
  • The mechanisms of the world should be structured in such a way as to make the contracts (a) robust against naive vandalism, and (b) robust against sophisticated, incentive compatible (rational) breach.
  • A third category, (c) sophisticated vandalism (where the vandals can and are willing to sacrifice substantial resources), for example a military attack by third parties, is of a special and difficult kind that doesn't often arise in typical contracting, so that we can place it in a separate category and ignore it here.
  • The threat of physical force is an obvious way to embed a contract in the world -- have a judicial system decide what physical steps are to be taken out by an enforcement agency (including arrest, confiscation of property, etc.) in response to a breach of contract
  • It is what I call a reactive form of security.
  • The need to invoke reactive security can be minimized, but not eliminated, by making contractual arrangements verifiable
  • Observation of a contract in progress, in order to detect the first sign of breach and minimize losses, also is a reactive form of security
  • A proactive form of security is a physical mechanism that makes breach expensive
  • From common law, economic theory, and contractual conditions often found in practice, we can distill four basic objectives of contract design
  • observability
  • The disciplines of auditing and investigation roughly correspond with verification of contract performance
  • verifiability
  • The field of accounting is, roughly speaking, primarily concerned with making contracts an organization is involved in more observable
  • privity
  • This is a generalization of the common law principle of contract privity, which states that third parties, other than the designated arbitrators and intermediaries, should have no say in the enforcement of a contract
  • The field of security (especially, for smart contracts, computer and network security), roughly corresponds to the goal of privity.
  • enforceability
  • Reputation, built-in incentives, "self-enforcing" protocols, and verifiability can all play a strong part in meeting the fourth objective
  • Smart contracts often involve trusted third parties, exemplified by an intermediary, who is involved in the performance, and an arbitrator, who is invoked to resolve disputes arising out of performance (or lack thereof)
  • In smart contract design we want to get the most out of intermediaries and arbitrators, while minimizing exposure to them
  • Legal barriers are the most severe cost of doing business across many jurisdictions. Smart contracts can cut through this Gordian knot of jurisdictions
  • Where smart contracts can increase privity, they can decrease vulnerability to capricious jurisdictions
  • Secret sharing
  • The field of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), in which elements of traditional business transactions (invoices, receipts, etc.) are exchanged electronically, sometimes including encryption and digital signature capabilities, can be viewed as a primitive forerunner to smart contracts
  • One important task of smart contracts, that has been largely overlooked by traditional EDI, is critical to "the meeting of the minds" that is at the heart of a contract: communicating the semantics of the protocols to the parties involved
  • There is ample opportunity in smart contracts for "smart fine print": actions taken by the software hidden from a party to the transaction.
  • Thus, via hidden action of the software, the customer is giving away information they might consider valuable or confidential, but the contract has been drafted, and transaction has been designed, in such a way as to hide those important parts of that transaction from the customer.
  • To properly communicate transaction semantics, we need good visual metaphors for the elements of the contract. These would hide the details of the protocol without surrendering control over the knowledge and execution of contract terms
  • Protocols based on mathematics, called cryptographic protocols, tre the basic building blocks that implement the improved tradeoffs between observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability in smart contracts
  • secret key cryptography,
  • Public key cryptography
  • digital signatures
  • blind signature
  • Where smart contracts can increase observability or verifiability, they can decrease dependence on these obscure local legal codes and enforcement traditions
  • zero-knowledge interactive proof
  • digital mix
  • Keys are not necessarily tied to identities, and the task of doing such binding turns out to be more difficult than at first glance.
  • All public key operation are are done inside an unreadable hardware board on a machine with a very narrow serial-line connection (ie, it carries only a simple single-use protocol with well-verified security) to a dedicated firewall. Such a board is available, for example, from Kryptor, and I believe Viacrypt may also have a PGP-compatable board. This is economical for central sites, but may be less practical for normal users. Besides better security, it has the added advantage that hardware speeds up the public key computations.
  • If Mallet's capability is to physically sieze the machine, a weaker form of key protection will suffice. The trick is to hold the keys in volatile memory.
  • The data is still vulnerable to a "rubber hose attack" where the owner is coerced into revealing the hidden keys. Protection against rubber hose attacks might require some form of Shamir secret sharing which splits the keys between diverse phgsical sites.
  • How does Alice know she has Bob's key? Who, indeed, can be the parties to a smart contract? Can they be defined just by their keys? Do we need biometrics (such as autographs, typed-in passwords, retina scans, etc.)?
  • The public key cryptography software package "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) uses a model called "the web of trust". Alice chooses introducers whom she trusts to properly identify the map between other people and their public keys. PGP takes it from there, automatically validating any other keys that have been signed by Alice's designated introducers.
  • 1) Does the key actually belong to whom it appears to belong? In other words, has it been certified with a trusted signature?
  • 2) Does it belong to an introducers, someone you can trust to certify other keys?
  • 3) Does the key belong to someone you can trust to introduce other introducers? PGP confuses this with criterion (2). It is not clear that any single person has enough judgement to properly undertake task (3), nor has a reasonable institution been proposed that will do so. This is one of the unsolved problems in smart contracts.
  • PGP also can be given trust ratings and programmed to compute a weighted score of validity-- for example, two marginally trusted signatures might be considered as credible as one fully trusted signature
  • Notaries Public Two different acts are often called "notarization". The first is simply where one swears to the truth of some affidavit before a notary or some other officer entitled to take oaths. This does not require the notary to know who the affiant is. The second act is when someone "acknowledges" before a notary that he has executed a document as ``his own act and deed.'' This second act requires the notary to know the person making the acknowledgment.
  • "Identity" is hardly the only thing we might want map to a key. After all, physical keys we use for our house, car, etc. are not necessarily tied to our identity -- we can loan them to trusted friends and relatives, make copies of them, etc. Indeed, in cyberspace we might create "virtual personae" to reflect such multi-person relationships, or in contrast to reflect different parts of our personality that we do not want others to link. Here is a possible classification scheme for virtual personae, pedagogically presented:
  • A nym is an identifier that links only a small amount of related information about a person, usually that information deemed by the nym holder to be relevant to a particular organization or community
  • A nym may gain reputation within its community.
  • With Chaumian credentials, a nym can take advantage of the positive credentials of the holder's other nyms, as provably linked by the is-a-person credential
  • A true name is an identifier that links many different kinds of information about an person, such as a full birth name or social security number
  • As in magick, knowing a true name can confer tremendous power to one's enemies
  • A persona is any perstient pattern of behavior, along with consistently grouped information such as key(s), name(s), network address(es), writing style, and services provided
  • A reputable name is a nym or true name that has a good reputation, usually because it carries many positive credentials, has a good credit rating, or is otherwise highly regarded
  • Reputable names can be difficult to transfer between parties, because reputation assumes persistence of behavior, but such transfer can sometimes occur (for example, the sale of brand names between companies).
  • Blind signatures can be used to construct digital bearer instruments, objects identified by a unique key, and issued, cleared, and redeemed by a clearing agent.
  • The clearing agent prevents multiple clearing of particular objects, but can be prevented from linking particular objects one or both of the clearing nyms who transferred that object
  • These instruments come in an "online" variety, cleared during every transfer, and thus both verifiable and observable, and an "offline" variety, which can be transfered without being cleared, but is only verifiable when finally cleared, by revealing any the clearing nym of any intermediate holder who transfered the object multiple times (a breach of contract).
  • To implement a full transaction of payment for services, we need more than just the digital cash protocol; we need a protocol that guarantees that service will be rendered if payment is made, and vice versa
  • A credential is a claim made by one party about another. A positive credential is one the second party would prefer to reveal, such as a degree from a prestigious school, while that party would prefer not to reveal a negative credential such as a bad credit rating.
  • A Chaumian credential is a cryptographic protocol for proving one possesses claims made about onself by other nyms, without revealing linkages between those nyms. It's based around the is-a-person credential the true name credential, used to prove the linkage of otherwise unlinkable nyms, and to prevent the transfer of nyms between parties.
  • Another form of credential is bearer credential, a digital bearer instrument where the object is a credential. Here the second party in the claim refers to any bearer -- the claim is tied only to the reputable name of issuing organization, not to the nym or true name of the party holding the credential.
  • Smart Property We can extend the concept of smart contracts to property. Smart property might be created by embedding smart contracts in physical objects. These embedded protocols would automatically give control of the keys for operating the property to the party who rightfully owns that property, based on the terms of the contract. For example, a car might be rendered inoperable unless the proper challenge-response protocol is completed with its rightful owner, preventing theft. If a loan was taken out to buy that car, and the owner failed to make payments, the smart contract could automatically invoke a lien, which returns control of the car keys to the bank. This "smart lien" might be much cheaper and more effective than a repo man. Also needed is a protocol to provably remove the lien when the loan has been paid off, as well as hardship and operational exceptions. For example, it would be rude to revoke operation of the car while it's doing 75 down the freeway.
  • Smart property is software or physical devices with the desired characteristics of ownership embedded into them; for example devices that can be rendered of far less value to parties who lack possesion of a key, as demonstrated via a zero knowledge interactive proof
  • One method of implementing smart property is thru operation necessary data (OND): data necessary to the operation of smart property.
  • A smart lien is the sharing of a smart property between parties, usually two parties called the owner and the lienholder.
  • Many parties, especially new entrants, may lack this reputation capital, and will thus need to be able to share their property with the bank via secure liens
  • What about extending the concept of contract to cover agreement to a prearranged set of tort laws? These tort laws would be defined by contracts between private arbitration and enforcement agencies, while customers would have a choice of jurisdictions in this system of free-market "governments".
  • If these privately practiced law organizations (PPLs for short) bear ultimate responsibility for the criminal activities of their customers, or need to insure lack of defection or future payments on the part of customers, they may in turn ask for liens against their customers, either in with contractual terms allowing arrest of customers under certain conditions
  • Other important areas of liability include consumer liability and property damage (including pollution). There need to mechanisms so that, for example, pollution damage to others' persons or property can be assessed, and liens should exist so that the polluter can be properly charged and the victims paid. Where pollution is quantifiable, as with SO2 emissions, markets can be set up to trade emission rights. The PPLs would have liens in place to monitor their customer's emissions and assess fees where emission rights have been exceeded.
Steve Bosserman

When Cities Run Themselves | WOUB - 0 views

woub.org/...when-cities-run-themselves

urban trends machine-to-machine automation internet-of-things sensor_technology

shared by Steve Bosserman on 24 May 12 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 24 May 12
     
    Machines talking to machines No doubt that the Olympics will have a profound effect in shaping London's future. By the time the Games begin, for instance, it will have Europe's largest free WiFi zone, with the city's iconic red phone booths converted, fittingly, into hotspots. But another opportunity London landed earlier this month could have just as much impact, perhaps more. A company called Living PlanIt announced that it will begin testing its "Urban Operating System" in the Greenwich section of the city. What does that mean? Put simply, London would have its own operating system, much as your PC runs on Windows or your Mac runs on Apple's IOS. This ties into the latest hot buzz phrase, "the internet of things," which describes a world where machines talk to other machines. No human interaction required. So, for a city, this means sensors in buildings would connect to sensors in water treatment plants which would connect to sensors in stoplights. It would be one gigantic, computerized urban nervous system, which a lot of experts think is the only way cities can survive a future when they'll contain more than two out of every three people on Earth. Based on what sensors reveal about the location and movement of humans in a section of a city, for instance, buildings will automatically adjust their temperatures, streetlights will dim or brighten, water flow will increase or slow. Or, in the event of a disaster, emergency services would have real-time access to traffic data, trauma unit availability, building blueprints. And soon enough, our smart phones will be able to tap in to the Urban OS. So will our household appliances. This is not some 21st century analogue of the personal jet pack. The Urban OS is the driving force behind a smart city being built from the ground up in northern Portugal. Construction is scheduled to be completed in three years; eventually it will have about 150,000 residents. It will also have more than 100 million sen
Francois Bergeron

Automatic Micro Manipulation System for Cell Manipulation - 1 views

www.aml.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/...manipulator_e.html

automatic micro manipulation system cell

shared by Francois Bergeron on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
Luciano Silva liked it
  • Here, we applied piezo impact drive mechanism, which utilizes rapid deformation of piezoelectric element, to realize smooth insertion of the micro pipette into the cytoplasm without deformation. This mechanism had already been commercialized and being used in many institutes.
  • Francois Bergeron on 19 Nov 12
     
    that may be nice to add force feedback control
Kurt Laitner

Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views

p2pfoundation.net/Crowding_Out

crowding out p2p Michel Bauwens financial reward incentive

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      in other words, people are financially motivated until they are financially secure, then other motivations come in
  • "leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees
  • At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so part of the dynamic is that everyone is paid fairly, if not there is the feeling of exploitation
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      which are... abundance?
  • It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
  • giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them
  • There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      the real question though is why, and whether it is the paying them that is the problem, or perhaps how that is determined, and who else gets what on what basis..  if you have to have them question the fairness of the situation, they will likely check out
  • Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
  • If you pay me for it, it must be work
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      only because a dichotomy of work and play exists in western culture
  • It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes, why is key
  • interesting examples of an effect called crowding
  • Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
  • A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
  • Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
  • Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      or perhaps the key was to help her fit the medication into her day, which she was having trouble with...
  • The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      absolutely, in some sense the guilt of being late is replaced by a rationalization that you are paying them - it is still a rationalization, and parents in this case need to be reminded that staff have lives too to reinforce the moral suasion
  • "The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
  • External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      emphasis on "if" and replacing that with "in so far as"
  • External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      interesting footnote
  • In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc.  If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
  • cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      are these learned or intrinsic?
  • this is labor, this is work, just do it.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      except that this cultural meme is already a bias, not a fact
  • When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      true, and part of our challenge then is to remove this dichotomy
  • So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and perhaps the problem is simply the conversion to money, rather than simply tracking these activities themselves (went to church 50 times this year!, helped 50 orphans get families!) (the latter being more recognition than reward
  • Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and tracking them causes them to conform to cultural expectations
  • You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and we are left with the challenge, how to work to purpose but still have our scarce goods needs sufficiently provided for?  it has to be for love AND money
  • When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      so pay them highly for highly valued labour, and don't forget to recognize them as well... no?
  • you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is a non argument, these are just interacting but separate problems, use ether or bitcoin, change legislation, what have you
  • Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      exactly, so use commonsource, they can use it all they want, but they have to flow through benefit (provide attribution, recognition, and any financial reward must be split fairly)
  • You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc.  if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
  • No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      this is an utter cop out - figure out what is close enough to fair and iterate forward to improve it, wow
  • too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes to the human evaluation part, but "it's too complicated" is disingenuous at the least
  • Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      yes indeed, so get your metrics right, and be prepared to adjust them as they are gamed - and ultimately, as financial penalties are to BP, even if some people game the system, can we better the gaming of the capitalist system.. it's a low bar I know
  • They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      it doesn't have to be this way, unless you think that way already
  • If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      wow, talk about entrepreneurial taker attitude rationalization
  • People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      and getting paid for others free work isn't sleazy, somehow...?
  • Donate.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      better yet, give yourself a reasonable salary, and give the rest away
  • Thank-you gifts
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      cynical.. here have a shiny bobble you idiot
  • Pay bounties
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
       
      good way to get people to compete ineffectively instead of cooperating on a solution, the lottery mechanism is evil
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15
     
    while good issue are brought up in this article, the solutions offered are myopic and the explanations of the observed effects not satisfying
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Partner_State

partner state blockchainaccess_project paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16
       
      we call this a custodian
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16
       
      we call this a custodian
  • So here we have it, the new triarchy: - The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario) - The private sector, with the corporation and private property - The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 May 16
       
      so where is direct democracy in all this?
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative.
  • becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole
  • phase transition and transformation will need to occur.
  • how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.
  • At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations
  • The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.
  • More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.
  • The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature
  • Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.
  • In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.
  • fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics
  • the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production.
  • the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society
  • retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects
  • the role of the state
  • “the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions.
  • trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"
  • the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.
  • stop enclosures
  • peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value
  • communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.
  • It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.
  • In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.
  • it fulfills three contradictory functions
  • Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business.
  • protect the whole system, under the domination of private business
  • protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements
  • protector of its own independent interests
  • Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.
  • key institutions and forms of property.
  • The state managed a public sector, under its own property.
  • The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.
  • civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations
  • Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector
  • However, this configuration is changing,
  • the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
  • participatory politics
  • Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.
  • if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.
Kurt Laitner

The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...12

Michel Bauwens p2p economy civil society partner state paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • under the ‘leadership’ of corporations and those members of our society who have access to capital.
  • Despite all democratic advances, the state forms have clearly been captured by private interests.
  • continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
  • in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
  • Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
  • democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      hmm
  • infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’
  • consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
  • which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.
  • civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
  • democratically decide
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      ? our values need be expressed in every action within the matrix, not just when a 'vote' is held, in fact general democratic 'voting' should probably disappear
  • the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      there is no such thing
  • The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      !!!
  • Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
  • true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      really?
  • Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
  • Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
  • designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
  • mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
  • surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
  • ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.
  • because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
  • A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.
  • mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract
  • Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
     
    Good synopsis of the big picture by Michel
Kurt Laitner

Ethereum whitepaper - 0 views

www.ethereum.org/ethereum.html

paper Ethereum

shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The general concept of a "decentralized autonomous organization" is that of a virtual entity that has a certain set of members or shareholders which, perhaps with a 67% majority, have the right to spend the entity's funds and modify its code. The members would collectively decide on how the organization should allocate its funds. Methods for allocating a DAO's funds could range from bounties, salaries to even more exotic mechanisms such as an internal currency to reward work. This essentially replicates the legal trappings of a traditional company or nonprofit but using only cryptographic blockchain technology for enforcement. So far much of the talk around DAOs has been around the "capitalist" model of a "decentralized autonomous corporation" (DAC) with dividend-receiving shareholders and tradable shared; an alternative, perhaps described as a "decentralized autonomous community", would have all members have an equal share in the decision making and require 67% of existing members to agree to add or remove a member. The requirement that one person can only have one membership would then need to be enforced collectively by the group.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14
       
      key application for OVNs
  • Note that the design relies on the randomness of addresses and hashes for data integrity; the contract will likely get corrupted in some fashion after about 2^128 uses
  • This implements the "egalitarian" DAO model where members have equal shares. One can easily extend it to a shareholder model by also storing how many shares each owner holds and providing a simple way to transfer shares.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14
       
      interesting...
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • DAOs and DACs have already been the topic of a large amount of interest among cryptocurrency users as a future form of economic organization, and we are very excited about the potential that DAOs can offer. In the long term, the Ethereum fund itself intends to transition into being a fully self-sustaining DAO.
  • In Bitcoin, there are no mandatory transaction fees.
  • In Ethereum, because of its Turing-completeness, a purely voluntary fee system would be catastrophic. Instead, Ethereum will have a system of mandatory fees, including a transaction fee and six fees for contract computations.
  • The coefficients will be revised as more hard data on the relative computational cost of each operation becomes available. The hardest part will be setting the value of
  • There are currently two main solutions that we are considering: Make x inversely proportional to the square root of the difficulty, so x = floor(10^21 / floor(difficulty ^ 0.5)). This automatically adjusts fees down as the value of ether goes up, and adjusts fees down as computers get more powerful due to Moore's Law. Use proof of stake voting to determine the fees. In theory, stakeholders do not benefit directly from fees going up or down, so their incentives would be to make the decision that would maximize the value of the network.
Kurt Laitner

Smart contracts · FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions Wiki · GitHub - 0 views

github.com/...Smart-contracts

smart contract github implementation *nickszabo

shared by Kurt Laitner on 21 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Once voting groups are someday eventually added to OT, they will also be able to act as parties to agreements, and they will be able to take a vote in order to change their own bylaws!
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 21 Mar 13
       
      ah governance
  • Scripted clauses can also be configured to trigger on certain events.
  • Smart contracts are most distinguished by the fact that they can have scriptable clauses
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The script code is unable to manipulate any assets excepting those explicitly declared beforehand on the smart contract,
  • Not only can the smart contract move_funds() between these declared accounts, as its script logic dictates, but it can also stash_funds() directly inside the contract itself!
  • A smart contract can be activated, after which point it takes on a “life of its own”
  • You can also define variables in your smart contract, which persist through its entire lifetime. As the smart contract—including its internal state—continues to process over time, receipts will continue to drop into the relevant parties’ inboxes,
  • A signed copy of the original smart contract shows it as it was, when the parties first signed and activated it. Additionally, a server-signed, updated version of the contract comes with each receipt, showing the latest state
  • Once the contract expires (or is deactivated) then a finalReceipt is dropped into all relevant inboxes, after which no other receipts are possible for that smart contract.
  • Let’s say a party needs to DIRECTLY trigger one of the clauses on the contract. (Instead of waiting around for it to trigger automatically based on some rule.) For example, perhaps an escrow user wishes to execute a clause in order to DISPUTE THE OUTCOME, or perhaps an arbitrator wishes to activate a clause in order to RENDER A JUDGMENT. OT’s smart contracts can do precisely these sorts of things, limited only by your imagination (and my pre-alpha code.)
1 - 10 of 10
Showing 20▼ items per page