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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

What is an ontology and why we need it - 1 views

protege.stanford.edu/...ntology101-noy-mcguinness.html

protege ontologies infrastructure tutorial

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 Jul 12 - Cached
  • an ontology designer makes these decisions based on the structural properties of a class.
  • an ontology is a formal explicit description of concepts in a domain of discourse (classes (sometimes called concepts)), properties of each concept describing various features and attributes of the concept (slots (sometimes called roles or properties)), and restrictions on slots (facets (sometimes called role restrictions)). An ontology together with a set of individual instances of classes constitutes a knowledge base. In reality, there is a fine line where the ontology ends and the knowledge base begins.
  • Classes describe concepts in the domain
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • A class can have subclasses that represent concepts that are more specific than the superclass.
  • Here we discuss general issues to consider and offer one possible process for developing an ontology. We describe an iterative approach to ontology development: we start with a rough first pass at the ontology. We then revise and refine the evolving ontology and fill in the details. Along the way, we discuss the modeling decisions that a designer needs to make, as well as the pros, cons, and implications of different solutions.
  • In practical terms, developing an ontology includes: �         defining classes in the ontology, �         arranging the classes in a taxonomic (subclass–superclass) hierarchy, �         defining slots and describing allowed values for these slots, �         filling in the values for slots for instances.
  • We can then create a knowledge base by defining individual instances of these classes filling in specific slot value information and additional slot restrictions.
  • Slots describe properties of classes and instances:
  • some fundamental rules in ontology design
  • There is no one correct way to model a domain— there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. 2)      Ontology development is necessarily an iterative process. 3)      Concepts in the ontology should be close to objects (physical or logical) and relationships in your domain of interest. These are most likely to be nouns (objects) or verbs (relationships) in sentences that describe your domain.
  • how detailed or general the ontology is going to be
  • what we are going to use the ontology for
  • concepts in the ontology must reflect this reality
  • We suggest starting the development of an ontology by defining its domain and scope. That is, answer several basic questions: �         What is the domain that the ontology will cover? �         For what  we are going to use the ontology? �         For what types of questions the information in the ontology should provide answers? �         Who will use and maintain the ontology?
  • plan to use
  • domain
  • If the people who will maintain the ontology describe the domain in a language that is different from the language of the ontology users, we may need to provide the mapping between the languages.
  • One of the ways to determine the scope of the ontology is to sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should be able to answer, competency questions
  • These competency questions are just a sketch and do not need to be exhaustive.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views

www.panarchy.org/...livingsystems.html

Grier Miller living systems theory concepts paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
  • General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
  • a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
  • ...266 more annotations...
  • s. Euclidean space
  • metric space
  • topological space
  • Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
  • My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Physical or geographical space
  • Euclidean space
  • distance
  • moving
  • maximum speed
  • objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
  • friction
  • The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
  • information can flow worldwide almost instantly
  • Physical space is a common space
  • Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
  • They can give the location of objects in it
  • Conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Peck order
  • Social class space
  • Social distance
  • Political distance
  • life space
  • semantic space
  • Sociometric space
  • A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
  • space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
  • A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
  • These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
  • Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
  • interpersonal relations
  • one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
  • It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
  • fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
  • is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
  • or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
  • durations
  • speeds
  • rates
  • accelerations
  • irreversible unidirectionality of time
  • thermodynamics
  • negentropy
  • "time's arrow."
  • Matter and energy
  • Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
  • Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
  • kinetic energy
  • potential energy
  • rest mass energy
  • Mass and energy are equivalent
  • Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
  • Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
  • Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
  • It is one form of process.
  • information (H)
  • Transmission of Information
  • Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
  • Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
  • The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
  • .) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
  • . The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
  • Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
  • [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
  • meaning cannot be precisely measured
  • Information is the negative of uncertainty.
  • information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
  • The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
  • If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
  • Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
  • There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
  • organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
  • If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
  • The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
  • the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
  • entropy becomes a measure of the probability
  • Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
  • according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
  • therefore no principle of the conservation of information
  • The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
  • but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
  • . Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
  • transforms information into negative entropy
  • smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
  • calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
  • the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
  • in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
  • amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
  • In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
  • the flow of raw materials through societies
  • Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
  • I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
  • Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
  • transformations go on in living systems
  • One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
  • the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
  • Matter-energy and information always flow together
  • Information is always borne on a marker
  • . Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
  • If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
  • Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
  • example
  • example
  • develop normally
  • have appropriate information inputs in infancy
  • pairs of antonyms
  • one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
  • the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
  • System
  • A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
  • .The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
  • Conceptual system
  • Units
  • terms
  • Relationships
  • a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
  • expressed by words
  • or by logical or mathematical symbols
  • operations
  • The conceptual systems of science
  • observer
  • selects
  • particular sets to study
  • Variable
  • Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
  • conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
  • Indicator
  • an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
  • Function
  • a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
  • Any function is a simple conceptual system
  • Parameter
  • An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
  • The state of a conceptual system
  • the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
  • Formal identity
  • variables
  • varies comparably to a variable in another system
  • If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
  • Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
  • Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
  • A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • Concrete system
  • a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
  • Units
  • are also concrete systems
  • Relationships
  • spatial
  • temporal
  • spatiotemporal
  • causal
  • Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • patterns of relationships or processes
  • The observer of a concrete system
  • distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
  • physical proximity of its units
  • similarity of its units
  • common fate of its units
  • distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
  • Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
  • Variable of a concrete system
  • Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
  • which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
  • Examples
  • number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
  • A variable is intrasystemic
  • not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
  • The state of a concrete system
  • its structure
  • represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
  • Open system
  • Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
  • Closed system
  • impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
  • special case
  • No actual concrete system is completely closed
  • In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
  • Nonliving system
  • the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
  • Living system
  • a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
  • They all have the following characteristics:
  • open systems
  • inputs
  • throughputs
  • outputs
  • of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
  • maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
  • by taking in inputs
  • higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
  • than their outputs
  • The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
  • In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
  • To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
  • entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
  • They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
  • They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
  • or have a charter
  • blueprint
  • program
  • of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
  • may also include nonliving components.
  • They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
  • other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
  • Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
  • They can exist only in a certain environment
  • change in their environment
  • produces stresses
  • Totipotential system
  • capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
  • Partipotential system
  • does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
  • A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
  • parasitic
  • symbiotic
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 25 Jun 11
       
      The Exchange fime is a symbiotic system to SENSORICA
  • Fully functioning system
  • when it
  • Partially functioning system
  • it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
  • Abstracted system
  • Units
  • relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
  • Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
  • Relationships
  • The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
  • these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
  • The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
  • An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
  • representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
  • Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
  • are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
  • spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
  • their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
  • important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
  • Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
  • we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
  • intensity of interaction
  • in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
  • To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 25 Jun 11
       
      This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools. 
  • PARSONS
  • the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
  • culture
  • cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
  • The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
  • RUESCH
  • A social system is a behavioral system
  • It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
  • The roles are the units of a social system
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 25 Jun 11
       
      That is why we need a role system in SENSORICA
  • On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
  • What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
  • To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
  • system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
  • evolution
  • differentiation
  • growth
  • from earlier and simpler forms and functions
  • capacities for specializations and gradients
  • [action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
  • Abstracted versus concrete systems
  • One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
  • A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
  • If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
  • It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Kurt Laitner

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE! - 1 views

strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs

*davidgraeber bullshit jobs

shared by Kurt Laitner on 22 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations
  • provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones
  • It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat)
  • working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars
  • The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
  • The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political
  • And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them
  • Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at
  • they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets
  • It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)
  • plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school
  • Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist
  • I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?
  • (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
  • should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely
  • This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?
  • Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work
  • in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it
  • There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?
  • Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should b
  • You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people
  • It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)
  • It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
  • If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job
  • The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...the_meme_hustler

O'Reilly paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
  • the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
  • ...139 more annotations...
  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
  • It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • “free software.”
  • association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • “open source”
  • The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
  • O’Reilly’s bet wa
  • the “cloud”
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
  • O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
  • The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • “open to intellectual exchange”
  • “open to competition”
  • “For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
  • “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
  • The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
  • “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
  • Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
  • O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
  • Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
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

What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views

blogs.valvesoftware.com/...it-into-todays-corporate-world

valve management structure company paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 07 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
  • Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
  • the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
  • they are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within… capitalism
  • The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
  • The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
  • Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
  • Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
  • The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
  • Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
  • In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
  • Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
  • One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
  • He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero 
  • As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
  • Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
  • Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
  • Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
  • In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
  • There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?
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

If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views

www.moq.org/...ifnotglobal.html

paper nondominium Chris Cook

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11 - Cached
  • I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and “Open” form of Capitalism.
  • Open Capital
  • the concept of “Open” Capital is “so simple…. it repels the mind".
  • ...162 more annotations...
  • Open Capital is defined as “a proportional share in an enterprise for an indeterminate time”
  • ‘Enterprise’ is defined as ‘any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Value”.
  • Value is to Economics as Energy and Matter are to Physics.
  • The Metaphysics Of Value
  • division between “subject” and “object”.
  • primary reality is “Quality”
  • formless and indefinable
  • not a “thing”
  • a non-intellectual awareness or “pre-intellectual reality”
  • but an event at which the subject becomes aware of the object and before he distinguishes it
  • Quality is the basis of both subject and object
  • distinguish between “Static” and “Dynamic” Quality
  • treating Value as a form of “Quality” as envisioned by Pirsig.
  • Riegel
  • defined “Value” as “ the Relativity of Desire” again implying indeterminacy.
  • Pirsig’s approach Capital may be viewed as “Static” Value and Money as “Dynamic” Value. “Transactions” are the “events” at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which “Value judgments” are made based upon a “Value Unit”.
  • The result of these Value Events /Transactions is to create subject/object pairings in the form of data ie Who “owns” or has rights of use in What,
  • at what Price
  • accounting data
  • Neo-Classical” Economics confuses indeterminate Value with a market– determined Price –
  • Data may be static
  • This Data identifies the subject with objects such as tangible ‘Material Value’
  • Data may itself constitute ‘Intellectual Value’
  • It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of “intellectual property”.
  • Other forms of Value are however not definable by data:
  • “sentimental” Value
  • Emotional Value’
  • 'Spiritual Value’
  • We may therefore look at the “transaction” or “value event” in a new light.
  • The creation and circulation of Value essentially comprises the concept we know of as “Money”.
  • Money / Dynamic Value
  • “The purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
  • money
  • value unit dissociated from any object
  • monetary unit
  • the basis relative to which other values may be expressed
  • The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
  • The monetary “Value Event”/ Transaction involves the creation of “Credit”
  • obligation to provide something of equivalent Value at a future point in time.
  • These obligations may be recorded on transferable documents
  • database of “Credit”/obligations is not Money, but temporary “Capital”
  • “Working Capital”
  • Static Value – which only becomes “Money”/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
  • what we think of as Money is in fact not tangible “cash” but rather
  • the flow of data between databases of obligations maintained by Credit Institutions
  • or dynamic
  • Banks literally “loan” Money into existence
  • In exchange for an obligation by an Individual to provide to the Bank something of Value
  • Bank’s obligation is merely to provide another obligation at some future time
  • These Bank-issued obligations are therefore
  • claim upon a claim upon Value
  • The true source of Credit is the Individual, not the intermediary Bank
  • this Money they create from nothing despite the fact that it is literally Value-less
  • Thus there is no true sharing of Risk and Reward involved in Lending
  • issue in relation to Credit/Debt and this relates to the nature of Lending itself.
  • the practice of Lending involves an incomplete exchange in terms of risk and reward: a Lender, as opposed to an Investor, has no interest in the outcome of the Loan, and requires the repayment of Principal no matter the ability of the Borrower to repay.
  • Ethical problem
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      "The Lender has no interest in the outcome of the loan", i.e doesn't care what happens in the end. The Lender ins not interested in the economical outcome of the Lender-Loner relation. So in fact there is no real risk sharing. the only risk for the Lender is when the Loner doesn't pay back, which is not really a risk... In fact it is a risk for the small bank, who has to buy money from the central bank, but not for the central bank. 
  • Money is not
  • an “Object” circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a “Value Unit”.
  • Capital/ Static Value
  • Capital represents the static accumulation of Value
  • Some forms of Capital are “productive”
  • An ethical question
  • in relation to Productive Capital relates to the extent of “property rights” which may be held over it thereby allowing individuals to assert “absolute” permanent and exclusive ownership - in particular in relation to Land
  • our current financial system is based not upon Value but rather a claim upon Value
  • Financial Capital consists of two types:
  • “Debt”
  • “Equity”
  • Interest
  • obligations of finite/temporary duration but with no participation in the assets or revenues
  • absolute and permanent ownership/participation (without obligation) in assets and revenues
  • discontinuity between Debt and Equity
  • at the heart of our current problems as a Society
  • The Enterprise
  • ‘Charitable’ Enterprise
  • ‘Social’ Enterprise
  • Value
  • exchanged in agreed proportions;
  • Value is exchanged for the Spiritual and Emotional Value
  • ‘Commercial’ Enterprise
  • ‘closed’
  • Value are exchanged between a limited number of individuals
  • Early enterprises were partnerships and unincorporated associations
  • need for institutions which outlived the lives of the Members led to the development of the Corporate body with a legal existence independent of its Members
  • The key development in the history of Capitalism was the creation of the ‘Joint Stock’ Corporate with liability limited by shares of a ‘Nominal’ or ‘Par’ value
  • over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
  • Such “Closed” Shares of “fixed” value constitute an absolute and permanent claim over the assets and revenues of the Enterprise to the exclusion of all other “stakeholders” such as Suppliers, Customers, Staff, and Debt Financiers.
  • The latter are essentially ‘costs’ external to the
  • owners of the Enterprise
  • maximise ‘Shareholder Value’
  • There is a discontinuity/ fault-line within the ‘Closed’ Corporate
  • It has the characteristics of what biologists call a ‘semi-permeable membrane’ in the way that it allows Economic Value to be extracted from other stakeholders but not to pass the other way.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      It is a way to extract value from productive systems. It is a system of exploitation. 
  • Capital most certainly is and always has been - through the discontinuity (see diagram) between:‘Fixed’ Capital in the form of shares ie Equity; and ‘Working’ Capital in the form of debt finance, credit from suppliers, pre-payments by customers and obligations to staff and management.
  • irreconcilable conflict between Equity and Debt
  • xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
  • No Enterprise Model has been capable of resolving this dilemma. Until now.
  • Corporate Partnerships with unlimited liability
  • mandatory for partnerships with more than 20 partners to be incorporated
  • in the USA
  • it is the normal structure for professional partnerships
  • Limited Liability Partnerships
  • In the late 1990's
  • litigation
  • The UK LLP is supremely simple and remarkably flexible.
  • All that is needed is a simple ‘Member Agreement’ – a legal protocol which sets out the Aims, Objectives. Principles of Governance, Revenue Sharing, Dispute Resolution, Transparency and any other matters that Members agree should be included. Amazingly enough, this Agreement need not even be in writing, since in the absence of a written agreement Partnership Law is applied by way of default.
  • The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended – as an ‘Open’ Corporate partnership.
  • ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership
  • concepts which characterise the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership
  • it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
  • ‘Open’
  • supplier
  • employee
  • may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      Can SENSORICA be a UK LLP?
  • no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
  • Proportional shares
  • in an Enterprise constitute an infinitely divisible, flexible and scaleable form of Capital capable of distributing or accumulating Value organically as the Enterprise itself grows in Value or chooses to distribute it.
  • Emergence of “Open” Capital
  • example of how ‘Temporary Equity’ may operate in practice
  • The Open Capital Partnership (“OCP”)
  • Within the OCP Capital and Revenue are continuous: to the extent that an Investee pays Rental in advance of the due date he becomes an Investor.
  • Open Capital – a new Asset Class
  • create a new asset class of proportional “shares”/partnership interests
  • in Capital holding OCP’s
  • Property Investment Partnerships (“PIP’s”)
  • Open Corporate Partnerships as a Co-operative Enterprise model
  • A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
  • Within a Partnership there is no “Profit” and no “Loss”.
  • Partnerships
  • mutual pursuit of the creation and exchange of Value
  • Partners do not compete with each othe
  • the crippling factors in practical terms have been, inter alia: the liability to which Member partners are exposed from the actions of their co-partners on their behalf; limited ability to raise capital.
  • they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
  • The ‘new’ LLP was expressly created to solve the former problem by limiting the liability of Member partners to those assets which they choose to place within its protective ‘semi-permeable membrane’
  • However, the ability to configure the LLP as an “Open” Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
  • it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
  • the revenues
  • would be divided among Members in accordance with the LLP Agreement. This means that all Members share a common interest in collaborating/co-operating to maximise the Value generated by the LLP collectively as opposed to competing with other stakeholders to maximise their individual share at the other stakeholders’ expense.
  • facilitate the creation of LLP’s as “Co-operatives of Co-operatives”.
  • he ‘Commercial’ Enterprise LLP – where the object is for a closed group of individuals to maximise the value generated in their partnership. There are already over 7,000 of these.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jun 11
       
      Can SENSORICA be one of these?
  • the Profit generated in a competitive economy based upon shareholder value and unsustainable growth results from a transfer of risks outwards, and the transfer of reward inwards, leading to a one way transfer of Economic Value.
  • This,
  • will very often impoverish one or more constituency of stakeholders
  • A partnership, however, involves an exchange of value through the sharing of risk and reward.
  • Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively – for mutual profit.
  • Open Capital, Economics and Politics
  • continuity between Capital as Static Value and Money as Dynamic Value which has never before been possible due to the dichotomy between the absolute/infinite and the absolute/finite durations of the competing claims over assets – “Equity” and “Debt”
  • Open Capital Partnership gives rise to a new form of Financial Capital of indeterminate duration. It enables the Capitalisation of assets and the monetisation of revenue streams in an entirely new way.
  • It is possible to envisage a Society within which individuals are members of a portfolio of Enterprises constituted as partnerships, whether limited in liability or otherwise.
  • Some will be charitable
  • Others will be ‘social’
  • ‘Commercial’ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
  • the process has already begun
  • Capitalism
  • superior
  • to all other models, such as Socialism.
  • It can only be replaced by another ‘emergent’ phenomenon, which is adopted ‘virally’ because any Enterprise which does not utilise it will be at a disadvantage to an Enterprise which does.
  • The ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is: capable of linking any individuals anywhere in respect of collective ownership of assets anywhere; extremely cheap and simple to operate; and because one LLP may be a Member of another it is organically flexible and ‘scaleable’. The phenomenon of “Open Capital” – which is already visible in the form of significant commercial transactions - enables an extremely simple and continuous relationship between those who wish to participate indefinitely in an Enterprise and those who wish to participate for a defined period of time.
  • Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate “shares” which constitute ‘Open’ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and ‘pre-distributive’: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the ‘Open’ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the “Co-operative Advantage” based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to “rentier” Capitalists.
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
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Google Apps Script - introduction - 0 views

code.google.com/...guide_writing_scripts.html

google script apps Programming javascript tool tools infrastructure

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • Use the Script Editor to write and run scripts, to set triggers, and to perform other actions such as sharing scripts.
  • start the Script Editor from a Google Site
  • declares a function called myFunction()
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • You can perform the following tasks from the Script Editor.
  • pening, deleting, renaming, and saving scripts
  • Cutting, copying, and pasting text
  • Find and replace
  • Setting a time zone
  • scripts with time-based triggers
  • Running functions
  • Viewing log messages
  • revision history
  • write pseudocode first
  • When you're planning a script
  • narrative version of what the script needs to do.
  • A particular script is associated with one and only one Google Spreadsheet.
  • If you make a copy of the Spreadsheet, the script is also copied.
  • A particular Spreadsheet can have multiple scripts associated with it.
  • use the onOpen event handler in more than one script associated with a particular Spreadsheet, all scripts begin to execute when you open the Spreadsheet and the order in which the scripts are executed is indeterminate.
  • event handler is a function executed when a particular event takes place.
  • see Running Scripts in Response to an Event.
  • A script cannot currently call or create another script and cannot call functions in another script.
  • If you want to store the results of a function, you must copy them into a spreadsheet cell.
  • You can trigger Apps Script events from links that are embedded in a Google Site. For information about how to do this, see Using Apps Scrip in Your Ssite.
  • You can insert a script into a Site as a gadget.
  • you must grant permission for the script to run as a service.
  • You also designate whether only you can invoke the service or whether all members of your domain can invoke the service.
  • you can assign functions within the script any arbitrary name.
  • The instructions in a function must be enclosed within curly braces.
  • event handler
  • when a spreadsheet is opened,
  • when a script is installed
  • when a spreadsheet is edited
  • at times you choose
  • menu item
  • Using a drawing or button embedded in a Spreadsheet
  • Using a custom function that is referenced as a Spreadsheet function
  • Clicking the Run button
  • object-oriented programming languages
  • Google Apps Script uses the JavaScript language.
  • Operations
  • are performed using the objects and methods described in the API documentation.
  • An API provides pre-packaged code for standard tasks you need to accomplish in scripts or programs.
  • API includes objects that you use to accomplish tasks such as sending email, creating calendar entries
  • A method describes the behavior of an object and is a function attached to an object.
  • MailApp
  • use to create and send email
  • To send email, you invoke the sendEmail method and provide values for the method arguments.
  • Google Apps Script can access or retrieve data in different formats in different ways.
  • A custom function
  • is called directly from a cell in a Spreadsheet using the syntax =myFunctionName()
  • they cannot set values outside the cells
  • have some restrictions not shared by other functions
  • cannot send email
  • cannot operate on a Google Site
  • cannot perform any operations that require user authorization
  • cannot perform any operations that require knowledge of who the user
  • onInstall function
  • onOpen function
  • Other functions run when you run them manually or when they are triggered by clicking
  • Custom functions and formulas in the spreadsheet execute any time the entire Spreadsheet is evaluated or when the data changes in the function or formula's cell.
  • share the Spreadsheet
  • publish the script to the Script Gallery
  • spreadsheet template
  • the color coding for that line will not be correct
  • A script with incorrect syntax or other errors does not run.
  • The Script Editor includes a debugger.
  • view the current state of variables and objects created by a script while that script runs.
  • step through the code line by line as it executes or set breakpoints
  • The debugger does not work with custom functions, onEdit functions, event triggers, or scripts running as a service.
  • use the debugger to find errors in scripts that are syntactically correct but still do not function correctly.
  • Functions ending in an underscore (_), for example, internalStuff_(), are treated differently from other functions. You do not see these function in the Run field in the Script Editor and they do not appear in the Script Manager in the Spreadsheet. You can use the underscore to indicate that users should not attempt to run the function and the function is available only to other functions.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Design Like No One Is Patenting - How SparkFun Stays Ahead of the Pack - 0 views

www.wired.com/...sparkfun-10-years

open hardware business model Sparkfun paper innovation

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 26 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Electronics supplier SparkFun designs dozens of products a year and they haven’t patented a single one. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
  • makes its living by shipping kits and components like bread boards, servo motors and Arduino parts to a mixture of students, hobbyists, and professionals making prototypes
  • the company has made its name is in a stable of its own custom parts and kits, the designs for which it gives away for free.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • “We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”
  • “The open source model just forces us to innovate,” says Boudreaux.
  • the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.
  • wolf of obsolescence is always at electronics’ door
  • don’t spend much time worrying about the copyists, they just keep releasing new looks
  • it’s about staying relevant and filling the needs of the community
  • SparkFun’s rapid turnover model is one that echoes the fashion industry.
  • keep their service exemplary
  • listening to their customers
  • developed a community of loyal users and fans
  • weekly new product posts
  • You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.
  • SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.
  • Their catalog has about 2,500 items at any given time
  • SparkFun orders parts from 500 suppliers
  • 15 new products every week
  • hey retire products at a similar rate, due to either low sales, or obsolescence
  • Of the 2,500 items, about 400 are things designed internally.
  • To handle the pace of change, SparkFun needs to keep its inventory lean.
  • “We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”
  • To help manage the demand, they use an in-house software system
  • along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.
  • the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”
  • monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”
  • anyone in the company can suggest ideas and contribute designs.
  • ideas run through an internal process of design, review, prototyping, testing and release.
  • “They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”
  • symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community
  • I don’t think they help much
  • The risk of this rate of change is that SparkFun can end up outpacing some of their customers.
  • “There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”
  • unprotected and unencumbered by patents
  • racing to get the latest, coolest things in the hands of its customers.
  • patents
  • “We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”
  • cost $30,000 to $50,000
  • USPTO is so backed up you’ll have to wait three to five years to even hear back on their decision.
  • how much does technology change in five years?
  • company’s blog where they’ve been documenting production and business practices for years.
  • they even want to open source Sparkle. “It’s a wild ride,” she says, “but a fun one for sure.”
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 26 Jan 13
     
    shared by Jonathan, annotated by Tibi
Kurt Laitner

Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views

www.yesmagazine.org/...ng-together-is-the-new-sharing

ouishare sensorica loomio enspiral cobudget ethereum sovolve swarm ownership sharing paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing
  • Their main contribution to society has been facilitating new kinds of transactions
  • The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how
  • Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
  • Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations
  • once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • “We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
  • It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.
  • From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • a companion tool, CoBudget, to help them allocate resources together
  • The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
  • And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
  • Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
  • “People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
  • As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
  • The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like 
  • His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
  • Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
  • Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
  • Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
  • It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
  • all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
  • A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
  • For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
  • For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
  • Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
  • A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
  • In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Welcome to the new reputation economy (Wired UK) - 1 views

www.wired.co.uk/...-to-the-new-reputation-economy

economy Reputation paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan
  • headhunters hire you based on the expertise you've demonstrated on online forums
  • reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy?
  • The difference today is our ability to capture data from across an array of digital services. With every trade we make, comment we leave, person we "friend", spammer we flag or badge we earn, we leave a trail of how well we can or can't be trusted.
  • An aggregated online reputation having a real-world value holds enormous potential
  • peer-to-peer marketplaces, where a high degree of trust is required between strangers; and where a traditional approach based on disjointed information sources is currently inefficient, such as recruiting.
  • opportunity to reinvent the way people found jobs through online reputation
  • "It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.
  • At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED.
  • "People are currently underusing their networks and reputation," King says. "I want to help people to understand and build their influence and reputation, and think of it as capital they can put to good use."
  • Social scientists have long been trying to quantify the value of reputation.
  • Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers monitored brain activity
  • "The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.
  • Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.
  • Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes.
  • When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.
  • Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.
  • Presently, reputation data doesn't transfer between verticals.
  • A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.
  • trusted to pay on time
  • PeerIndex, Kred and Klout,
  • are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action,"
  • "Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"
  • Early influence and reputation aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations.
  • Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.
  • reputation is a measure of knowledge
  • a measure of trust
  • a measure of propensity to pay
  • measure of influence
  • Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.
  • It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.
  • The most basic level is verification of your true identity
  • reliability and helpfulness
  • do what we say we are going to do
  • respect another person's property
  • His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."
  • we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.
  • idea of global reputation
  • By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession.
Kurt Laitner

Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being.pdf - 0 views

www.oecd.org/...%20Subjective%20Well-being.pdf

OECD well being subjective measures

shared by Kurt Laitner on 21 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • such as interest,engagement and meaning,
  • subjective well-being is taken to be:2Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that peoplemake of their lives, and the affective reactions of people to their experiences
  • “subjective well-being is an umbrella term for the different valuationspeople make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds,and the circumstances in which they live”.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In measuring overall human well-being then, subjective well-being should be placedalongside measures of non-subjective outcomes, such as income, health, knowledge andskills, safety, environmental quality and social connections
  • Inparticular, a distinction is commonly made between life evaluations, which involve acognitive evaluation of the respondent’s life as a whole (or aspects of it), and measures ofaffect, which capture the feelings experienced by the respondent at a particular point in time(Diener, 1984; Kahneman et al., 1999
  • eudaimonic aspect ofsubjective well-being, reflecting people’s sense of purpose and engagement
  • The framework used here covers all three concepts of well-being:●Life evaluation.●Affect.●Eudaimonia (psychological “flourishing”)
  • the result of a judgement by the individual rather than thedescription of an emotional state.
  • Elements of subjective well-beingLife evaluation
  • making an evaluation of this sort as involving the individual constructing a “standard” thatthey perceive as appropriate for themselves, and then comparing the circumstances oftheir life to that standard
  • Life evaluations are based on how people remember their experiences (Kahneman et al.,1999) and can differ significantly from how they actually experienced things at the time
  • It is for this reason that life evaluations are sometimes characterised as measures of“decision utility” in contrast to “experienced utility”
  • One of the mostwell documented measures of life evaluation – thePersonal Wellbeing Index– consists of eightquestions, covering satisfactions with eight different aspects of life, which are summedusing equal weights to calculate an overall index (International Wellbeing Group, 2006)
  • (job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, house satisfaction, healthsatisfaction, leisure satisfaction and environmental satisfaction),
  • AffectAffect is the term psychologists use to describe a person’s feelings. Measures of affectcan be thought of as measures of particular feelings or emotional states, and they aretypically measured with reference to a particular point in time.
  • Such measures capturehow people experience life rather than how they remember it (Kahneman and Krueger,2006
  • While an overall evaluation of life can be captured in a single measure, affect has atleast two distinct hedonic dimensions: positive affect and negative affect (Kahneman et al.,1999; Diener et al., 1999
  • positive affect is thought to be largely uni-dimensional
  • negative affect may be more multi-dimensional.
Kurt Laitner

The Energy Efficiency of Trust & Vulnerability: A Conversation | Switch and Shift - 0 views

switchandshift.com/t-vulnerability-a-conversation

*trust discussion contextual

shared by Kurt Laitner on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • trusting people because of who they are personally vs. who they are professionally
  • also need to trust systems
  • our own resources
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • How much we need to trust others depends on the context,
  • how much we trust ourselves,
  • our ability to understand the context we are in
  • When we trust, we re-allocate that energy and time to getting things done and making an impact
  • the more information and/or experience we have, the better we can decide whether or not to trust
  • Trust is a tool to assess and manage (reduce and/or increase) risk, depending on the situation.
  • Trusting someone implies making oneself more vulnerable
  • When we don’t trust, we exert a lot of energy to keep up our guard, to continually assess and verify.  This uses a lot of energy and time.
  • If the alternative is worse, we might opt for no trust
  • As we let ourselves be vulnerable, we also leave ourselves more open to new ideas, new ways of thinking which leads to empathy and innovation.
  • the more we can focus on the scope and achievement of our goals
  • trusting is efficient….and effective
  • Being vulnerable is a way to preserve energy
  • It lets us reallocate our resources to what matters and utilize our skills and those around us to increase effectiveness…impact.
  • If we are working together, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘done’.  When are we done, what does that look like?
  • “Control is for Beginners”
  • Strategic sloppiness is a way to preserve energy
  • Build on the same shared mental models
  • use the same language
  • As the ability to replicate something has become more of a commodity, we are increasingly seeing that complex interactions are the way to create ‘value from difference’ (as opposed to ‘value from sameness’).
  • allow for larger margins of error in our response and our acceptance of others
  • higher perfection slows down the tempo
  • We can’t minimize the need to be effective.
  • Efficient systems are great at dealing with complicated things – things that have many parts and sequences, but they fall flat dealing with complex systems, which is most of world today.
  • make sure we hear and see the same thing (reduce buffers around our response)
  • timing
  • intuition
  • judgment
  • experience
  • ability to look at things from many different perspective
  • to discover, uncover, understand and empathize is critical
  • focus on meaning and purpose for work (outcomes) instead of just money and profit (outputs)
  • When we have a common goal of WHY we want to do something, we are better able to trust
  • When we never do the same thing or have the same conversation twice, it becomes much more important to figure out why and what we do than how we do it (process, which is a given)
  • Kurt Laitner on 30 Jan 14
     
    spot on conversation on *trust, I see creating a trustful environment quickly among strangers as a key capability of an OVN, we need to quickly get past the need to protect and verify and move on to making purpose and goals happen
Kurt Laitner

A StumbleUpon for Design Geeks | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation - 0 views

www.fastcoexist.com/...a-stumbleupon-for-design-geeks

sensorica ambient metrics

shared by Kurt Laitner on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • While there’s no "like" button to declare your affection for certain content, the app monitors how much time you spend with an article, whether you scroll all the way down, and whether or not you share it via social media, and makes assessments based on those data points.
  • Kurt Laitner on 24 Jul 13
     
    "While there's no "like" button to declare your affection for certain content, the app monitors how much time you spend with an article, whether you scroll all the way down, and whether or not you share it via social media, and makes assessments based on those data points." An example from a colleague of an application that uses ambient metrics to determine what you like without you needing to explicitly rank it - much more effective and efficient than explicit ranking, they could add _who_ you share it with to further qualify (shared widely, narrowly, to respected peers, social peers, or senior peers, all of which are also ambiently determined, possibly in combination with some user provided metadata through other processes)
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

4.1.D. Peer governance in peer production? - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/vernance_in_peer_production%3F

peer governance p2pfundation

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • quality control
  • access and the workflow
  • The free-form model, which Wikipedia employs, allows anyone to edit any entry at any time.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • the owner-centric model
  • permission of a specific ‘owner’ who has to defend the integrity of his module.
  • different assumptions and effects.
  • The free-form model connotes more of a sense that all users are on the “same level," and that expertise will be universally recognized and deferred to
  • the creator of an entry is spared the trouble of reviewing every change before it is integrated, as well as the need to perform the integration
  • the owner-centric authority model assumes the owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand,
  • and all others must defer to them.
  • the owner must review all modification proposals, and take the time to integrate the good ones.
  • The owner-centric model is better for quality, but takes more time, while the free-form model increases scope of coverage and is very fast.
  • 'equipotentiality'
  • rules are generated within the community itself, though mostly in the early phases. After a while, they tend to consolidate and they are a given for the new participants who come later
  • a process of socialization is crucial to eventual acceptance . The process is akin to the tradition of artisanship, which has been used in the three-degree system of original freemasonry as well: apprentice, companion (fellow craft), master. But it is implied rather than formalized.
  • Crucial to the success of many collaborative projects is their implementation of the reputation schemes.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae

blockchainaccess_project paper Holochain Arthur Brock

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
  • This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
  • Rather than trying to make one global, anonymous, digital cash
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
  • What are the core elements of a modern cryptocurrency?
  • Digital
  • Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
  • Trustless
  • don’t have to trust a 3rd party central authority
  • Decentralized
  • Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
  • Cryptographic
  • This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
  • Identity
  • there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
  • Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
  • It does not have to be stored in a synchronized global ledger
  • does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
  • Its units do not have to be cryptographic tokens or coins
  • It does not have to protect the anonymity of users, although it may
  • if you think currency is only money, and that money must be artificially scarce
  • Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
  • You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
  • if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
  • In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
  • Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
  • If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
  • We should not need system wide consensus for two people to do a transaction in a cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
  • how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
  • Replicate the same processes across all nodes
  • Empower every node with full agency
  • Hold this transformed state locally and reliably
  • Establish protocols for interaction
  • Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
  • we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
  • Language IS a communication protocol we learn by emulating the processes of usage.
  • Dictionaries try to catch up when the usage
  • there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
  • Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
  • Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
  • This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
  • Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
  • Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
  • If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
  • When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
  • If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
  • Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
  • By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
  • You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
  • Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
  • Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
  • Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
  • how units in a currency are issued
  • Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies. They create tokens or coins from nothing
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of
  • ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • Blockchain cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies
  • These coins are just “spoken into being”
  • the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
  • You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
  • In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
  • Alice pays Bob 20 credits for a haircut. Alice’s account now has -20, and Bob’s has +20.
  • Alice spent credits she didn’t have! True
  • Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
  • Notice the net number units in the system remains zero
  • One elegant approach to managing mutual credit limits is to set them based on actual demand.
  • concerns about manufacturing fake accounts to game credit limits (Sybil Attacks)
  • keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
  • What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
  • If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
  • Most modern community currency systems have been implemented as mutual credit,
  • Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
  • Let’s look at building a minimum viable cryptocurrency with the hawala network as our use case
  • To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
  • Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
  • seeding your information with those other peers so you can be found by the rest of the network.
  • As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
  • Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
  • Accounting Transactions create signed data that changes account balances and contains these fields:
  • The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
  • Routing Transactions sign data that changes the peers list and contain these fields:
  • As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
  • Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
  • a distributed network of mutual trust
  • operates across national boundaries
  • everyone already keeps and trusts their own separate records
  • Hawaladars are not anonymous
  • “double-spending”
  • It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
  • After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
  • This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
  • millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
  • There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
  • By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
  • It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 01 Jun 16
     
    Article written by Arthur Brook, founder of Metacurrency project and of Ceptr.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Designing the Void | Management Innovation eXchange - 0 views

www.managementexchange.com/...40941

OVNi infrastructure OVN contribution accounting

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable.  You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      This is about self-organization, putting in place bounderies and internal mechanisms to make the the system self-organize into something desirable.  You can see this from a game theory perspective - how to set a game which will drive a specific human behavior. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      Very similar to SENSORICA, an environment of entrepreneurs. The argument against this is that not everyone is a risk taker or has initiative. The answer to it is that not every role in the organization requires that. 
  • The system is not made up of artifacts but rather an elegantly designed void. He says “I prefer to use the analogy of rescuing an endangered species from extinction, rather than engaging in an invasive breeding program the focus should be on the habitat that supports the species. Careful crafting of the habitat by identifying the influential factors; removing those that are detrimental, together with reinforcing those that are encouraging, the species will naturally re-establish itself. Crafting the habitat is what I mean by designing the void.”
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • It is essential that autonomy is combined with responsibility.
  • staff typically manage the whole work process from making sales, manufacture, accounts, to dispatch
  • they are also responsible for managing their own capitalization; a form of virtual ownership develops. Everything they need for their work, from office furniture to high-end machinery will appear on their individual balance sheet; or it will need to be bought in from somewhere else in the company on a pay-as-you go or lease basis. All aspects of the capital deployed in their activities must be accounted for and are therefore treated with the respect one accords one’s own property.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes". 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      ...
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      So they have a value accounting system, like SENSORICA, where they log "uses" and "consumes".  
  • The result is not simply a disparate set of individuals doing their own thing under the same roof. Together they benefit from an economy of scale as well as their combined resources to tackle large projects; they are an interconnected whole. They have in common a brand, which they jointly represent, and also a business management system (the Say-Do-Prove system) - consisting not only of system-wide boundaries but also proprietary business management software which helps each take care of the back-end accounting and administrative processing. The effect is a balance between freedom and constraint, individualism and social process.
  • embodiment of meaning
  • But culture is a much more personal phenomenon
  • Culture is like climate- it does not exist in and of itself- it cannot exist in a vacuum, it must exist within a medium.
  • underlying culture
  • Incompatibility between the presenting culture and the underlying one provide a great source of tension
  • The truth of course is that when tension builds to a critical level it takes just a small perturbation to burst the bubble and the hidden culture reveals itself powered by the considerable pent-up energy.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      SENSORICA had this problem of different cultures, and it caused the 2 crisis in 2014. 
  • Consider again the idea that for the health of an endangered species; the conditions in their habitat must be just right. In business, the work environment can be considered analogous to this idea of habitat.
  • A healthy environment is one that provides a blank canvas; it should be invisible in that it allows culture to be expressed without taint
  • The over-arching, high-level obligations are applied to the organization via contractual and legal terms.
  • But it is these obligations that the traditional corporate model separates out into functions and then parcels off to distinct groups. The effect is that a clear sight of these ‘higher’ obligations by the people at the front-end is obstructed. The overall sense of responsibility is not transmitted but gets lost in the distortions, discontinuities and contradictions inherent in the corporate systems of hierarchy and functionalization.
  • employees are individually rewarded for their contribution to each product. They are not “compensated” for the hours spent at work. If an employee wants to calculate their hourly rate, then they are free to do so however, they are only rewarded for the outcome not the duration of their endeavors.
  • Another simplification is the application of virtual accounts (Profit and Loss (P&L) account and Balance Sheet) on each person within the business.
  • The company systems simply provide a mechanism for cheaply measuring the success of each individual’s choices. For quality the measure is customer returns, for delivery it is an on-time-and-in-full metric and profit is expressed in terms of both pounds sterling and ROI (return on investment).
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      They have a value accounting system. 
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 08 Jan 15
       
      They have a value accounting system. 
  • The innumerable direct links back to an external reality -like the fragile ties that bound giant Gulliver, seem much more effective at aligning the presenting culture and the underlying embodied culture, and in doing so work to remove the existing tension.
  • With a culture that responds directly to reality, the rules in the environment can be “bounding” rather than “binding”- limiting rather than instructive; this way individual behavior need not be directed at all. The goal is to free the individual to express himself fully through his work, bounded only by the limits of the law. With clever feedback (self-referencing feedback loops) integrated into the design, the individuals can themselves grow to collectively take charge of the system boundaries, culture and even the environment itself, always minded of the inherent risks they are balancing, leaving the law of the land as the sole artificial boundary.
  • the conventional company, which, instead of rewarding enterprise, trains compliance by suppressing individual initiative under layer upon layer of translation tools.
  • apply accountability to the individual not command-and-control.
  • without the divisive and overbearing management cabal the natural reaction of humans is to combine their efforts
  • a new member of staff at Matt Black Systems
  • recruited by another staff member (sponsor) and they will help you learn the basics of the business management system- they will help you get to know the ropes.
  • jobs are passed to new staff members, a royalty payment can be established on the work passed over.
  • Along with that job you will be given a cash float (risk capital), P&L Account, a Balance Sheet and computer software to help plan and record your activities. Your operation is monitored by your sponsor to see if you increase the margin or volume, and so establish a sustainable operation. Training and mentoring is provided to support the steep learning curve - but without removing the responsibility of producing a return on the sponsor’s risk capital.
  • You will, in the meantime be looking to establish some of your own work for which you will not have to pay a commission or royalty to your sponsor and this will provide you with more profitable operations such that eventually you might pass back to the sponsor the original operation, as it has become your lowest margin activity. It will then find its way to a new employee (along with the associated Balance Sheet risk capital) where the process is repeated by the sponsor.[4]
  • Remuneration for staff is calibrated in a way that reflects the balance of different forces around ‘pay’
  • there is an obligation upon the company to pay a minimum wage even if the profitability of the operation does not support this
  • there are therefore two aspects of the basic pay structure: one is “absolute” and reflects the entrepreneurial skill level of the employee according to a sophisticated grading scale
  • A further 20% of the original profit will be paid into his risk capital account, which will be his responsibility to deploy in any way he sees fit as part of his Balance Sheet. Of the three remaining 20% slices of the original profit, one is paid out as corporation tax, another as a dividend to the shareholders and the last retained as collective risk capital on the company’s balance sheet- a war chest so to speak.
  • Julian Wilson and Andrew Holm sell products / services to their staff (such as office space and software) they have an identical customer/supplier relationship with the other employees.
  • Naturally there are some people that can’t generate a profit. The sponsor’s risk capital will eventually be consumed through pay. After a process of rescue and recovery- where their shortcomings are identified and they are given the opportunity to put them right, they either improve or leave, albeit with a sizeable increase in their skills.
  • there is a gradual process of accustomisation; the void of the new employee is surrounded by others dealing with their particular activities, offering both role models and operations they may wish to relinquish. One step at a time the new employee acquires the skills to become completely self-managing, to increase their margins, to make investments, to find new business, to become a creator of their own success. Ultimately, they learn to be an entrepreneur.
  • responsible autonomy as an alternative vision to traditional hierarchy
  • Matt Black Systems it is not simply commitment that they targeted in their employees, rather they aim for the specific human qualities they sum up as magic- those of curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality).
  • a new form of association of individuals working together under the umbrella of a company structure: a kind of collective autonomy
  • The business is called Matt Black Systems, based in Poole in dorset
  • Turning an organisation on its head- removing all management, establishing a P&L account and Balance Sheet on everyone in the organisation and having customers payment go first into the respective persons P&L account has revolutionised this company. 
  • This innovative company’s approach views business success as wholly reliant upon human agency, and its wellspring at the individual level.
  • problem (of unnecessarily high overheads placed on production) that arguably is behind the decline in western manufacturing
  • over-managed business
  • Autonomy Enables Productivity
  • organizational design brings to light the unconscious socio-philosophical paradigm of the society in which it exists, organizational development points to how change occurs.
  • a mechanistic approach to organization
  • scientific management employs rationalism and determinism in pursuit of efficiency, but leaves no place for self-determination for most people within the system.
  • Command and Control
  • today, a really “modern” view of an organization is more likely to be depicted in terms that are akin to an organism.
  • When it comes to getting work done, the simple question is: are people the problem or the solution?
  • the Taylorist approach may be more real in theory than in practice: its instrumentalist view of the workforce is cursed by unintended consequences. When workers have no space for their own creative expression, when they are treated like automata not unique individuals, when they become demotivated and surly, when they treat their work as a necessary evil; this is no recipe for a functional organization.
  • The natural, human reaction to this is unionization, defiance and even outright rebellion; to counter this, management grows larger and more rigid in pursuit of compliance, organizations become top heavy with staff who do not contribute directly to the process of value creation but wield power over those who do.
  • voluntary slavery of ‘wagery’
  • Even when disgruntled employees strike free and start their own businesses they seem unable to resist the hegemony of the conventional command-and-control approach
  • Making the transition involves adherence to a whole new sociology of work with all the challenging social and psychological implications that brings.
  • first principal that people in the business have the ability to provide the solution
  • In the “theory of constraints” the goal is to align front-line staff into a neat, compact line for maximum efficiency. Surely the most considered approach is to have front-line staff self-align in pursuit of their individual goals?
  • The removal of hierarchy and specialization is key to a massive improvement in both profitability and productivity. In summary: there are no managers in the company, or foremen, or sales staff, or finance departments; the company is not functionally compartmentalized and there is no hierarchy of command. In fact every member of staff operates as a virtual micro-business with their own Profit & Loss account and Balance Sheet, they manage their own work and see processes through from end to end
  • Formal interaction between colleagues takes place via “customer and supplier” relationships.
  • autonomy enables productivity
  • if one creates a space in which staff pursue their own goals and are not paid by the hour, they will focus on their activities not the clock; if they are not told what to do, they will need to develop their own initiative; if they are free to develop their own processes, they will discover through their own creative faculties how to work more productively- in pursuit of their goals
  • The human qualities which are of greatest potential value to the business are: curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality)
  • These qualities are the very ones most likely to be withheld by an individual when the environment is ‘wrong’.
  • Any elements in the business environment that undermine the autonomy and purpose of the individual will see the above qualities withheld
  • High on the list of undermining elements come power-hierarchy and over-specialization
  • the responsibility of the individual is formalized, specified and restricted. An improved system is not one where responsibility is distributed perfectly but rather one where there is simply no opportunity for responsibility to be lost (via the divisions between the chunks). Systems must be reorganized so responsibility -the most essential of qualities -is protected and wholly preserved.
  • Matt Black Systems believe this can only be done by containing the whole responsibility within an individual, holding them both responsible and giving them ‘response-ability’
  • The experience of Matt Black Systems demonstrates that radical change is possible
  • productivity is up 300%, the profit margin is up 10%[3], customer perception has shifted from poor to outstanding, product returns are at less than 1%, “on time and in full” delivery is greater than 96%, pay has increased 100%.
  • staff develop broader and deeper skills and feel greater job security; they get direct feedback from their customers which all go to fuel self-confidence and self-esteem.
  • the staff manage themselves
  • “only variety can absorb variety”.
  • What is particular about their story is that behind it is a very consciously crafted design that surrounds the individualism of each person with hard boundaries of the customer, the law and the business. It is these boundaries rather than the instructive persona of ‘the boss’ that gives rise to the discipline in which individuals can develop. Autonomy is not the same as freedom, at least not in the loose sense of ‘do as you please’. An autonomous person is a person who has become self-governing, who has developed a capacity for self-regulation, quite a different notion from the absence of boundaries. Indeed, it is with establishing the right boundaries that the business philosophy is most concerned. The company provides the crucible in which the individual can develop self-expression but the container itself is bounded. Wilson calls this “designing the void”. This crucible is carefully constructed from an all-encompassing, interconnecting set of boundaries that provide an ultimate limit to behaviours (where they would fall foul of the law or take risks with catastrophic potential). It is an illusion to think, as a director of a company, that you are not engaged in a process of social conditioning; the basis of the culture is both your responsibility and the result of your influence. The trick is to know what needs to be defined and what needs to be left open. The traditional authoritarian, controlling characters that often dominate business are the antithesis of this in their drive to fill this void with process, persona and instruction. Alternatively, creating an environment that fosters enterprise, individuals discover how to be enterprising.
Francois Bergeron

Conference Detail for Industrial and Commercial Applications of Smart Structures Techno... - 0 views

spie.org/...index.cfm

conference sensors structures smart

shared by Francois Bergeron on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Francois Bergeron on 05 Mar 13
     
    "Three-axis distributed fiber optic strain measurement in 3D woven composite structures   Paper 8690-6 Time: 1:50 PM - 2:10 PM Author(s): Matt Castellucci, Evan M. Lally, Sandra Klute, Luna Innovations Inc. (United States); David Lowry, NASA Johnson Space Ctr. (United States) Hide Abstract Add to My Schedule  Recent advancements in composite materials technologies have broken further from traditional designs and require advanced instrumentation and analysis capabilities. Success or failure is highly dependent on design analysis and manufacturing processes. By monitoring smart structures throughout manufacturing and service life, residual and operational stresses can be assessed and structural damage identified. Composite smart structures can be manufactured by integrating fiber optic sensors into existing composite materials processes such as layup, filament winding and three-dimensional weaving. In this work optical fiber was integrated into 3D woven composite parts at a commercial woven products manufacturing facility. The fiber was then used to monitor the structures during a VARTM manufacturing process, and subsequent static and dynamic testing. Low cost telecommunications-grade optical fiber acts as the sensor using a high resolution commercial Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometer (OFDR) system providing distributed strain measurement at spatial resolutions as low as 2mm. Strain measurements using the optical fiber sensors are correlated to resistive strain gauge measurements during static structural loading."
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