Sunday, August 31, 2008
Trinny and Susannah going out of fashion?
(Probably only AdrianH and Scribe know why I'd bother to note this. :-)
(Probably only AdrianH and Scribe know why I'd bother to note this. :-)
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Cringely has an interesting metric for assessing countries' network economy investment and predicting their future : count the Cisco certified engineers.
Looking 30 years into the future I think it is clear that the regional leaders will be China and Korea, NOT India and Japan.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Oli asks wrt Superstruct :
Which is clearly my cue to say a bit more.
No, you pretty much got it. It's "role-playing" in the good old fashioned "use your imagination" sense rather than the video-game-inna-dungeon sense.
The assistant game-master role is a kind of moderator / collator. Somewhere between stimulating discussion by starting forum threads, finding the best posts on the subject, highlighting them, and bringing them together into a wiki to create a more intelligible permanent record. There's also some giving of feedback to players in the form of rewards for "good ideas" or "good play". Which is obviously going to be subjective (although based on more than one moderator's assessment.)
Oli's also right that this is coming from the science-fictional wing of futurology; the super-threats are deliberately played-large. Think "scenario planning" not "forecasting"; we're not aiming for the most accurate prediction of the near future but to stimulate the most creative thinking about it. The fascination is in the new institutions that the players (representing humanity) have to invent to help cope with these threats. The aim is quite serious, to use a game-like format to gather a wide-range of opinions and suggestions, which the Institute of the Future will then "reduce" into more accessible form.
For me there are two reasons I'm excited to participate :
1) the scenarios are obviously interesting in themselves. My personal expectations are not as apocalyptic as the game's, but I do think that peak-oil and the end of cheap-energy, climate change and the disruption of our food-production patterns, the break-down of the nation-state, and pervasive, non-state-controlled surveillance technologies and weapons, are almost inevitably coming in the next 20-40 years. I believe that new diseases and large scale migrations are quite possible.
So what are we going to do about them? Are we just going to carry on as normal until we crash into circumstances? Or can we start doing some planning at least?
2) The other interest is the method itself. How good are the internet and the social software tools we have at enabling constructive discussion and problem solving? Does this kind of "game" help? As you know I vary between enthusiastic boosterism and occasional crises of doubt.
I believe that the overall trend is good, but there's a need for new tools and styles of discussion. There's a danger of ignoring and talking past those you disagree with; you can destroy intelligent public discussion in a hail of FUD.
Here's a chance to work with people trying to apply the tools and the "game" milieu to this problem. Let's see how it works or how it can be made to do so.
As I see it, the game occupies an interesting position (assuming that we get the expected numbers of players). To gather information from larger groups of people you usually use something like a market (eg. a prediction market) or maybe large scale opinion polls or "market research". All of which reduce the information contribution of the individual dramatically. On the smaller scale you have journals that bring together papers by multiple researchers or reports with for or five authors.
Superstruct sits somewhere between : there's an attempt to systematically gather ideas from an order of magnitude of 1000s using a mixture of human selection (organized in a fairly flat hierarchy) with some automation (the social software tools) and some game-mechanics to structure the contributions. I don't know how it will work out, and I suspect the organizers don't either. But it will be fun finding out.
All readers of this blog are invited (and positively encouraged) to join in, of course.
Disclosure, this is actually a (modestly) paid gig (ie. being a game-master). Although clearly I wouldn't have applied if I hadn't believed it was interesting.
Have I missed something?
It looks like this 'massively multiplayer' game is basically a themed blog where people 'play' by playfully imagining the future.
Which is clearly my cue to say a bit more.
No, you pretty much got it. It's "role-playing" in the good old fashioned "use your imagination" sense rather than the video-game-inna-dungeon sense.
The assistant game-master role is a kind of moderator / collator. Somewhere between stimulating discussion by starting forum threads, finding the best posts on the subject, highlighting them, and bringing them together into a wiki to create a more intelligible permanent record. There's also some giving of feedback to players in the form of rewards for "good ideas" or "good play". Which is obviously going to be subjective (although based on more than one moderator's assessment.)
Oli's also right that this is coming from the science-fictional wing of futurology; the super-threats are deliberately played-large. Think "scenario planning" not "forecasting"; we're not aiming for the most accurate prediction of the near future but to stimulate the most creative thinking about it. The fascination is in the new institutions that the players (representing humanity) have to invent to help cope with these threats. The aim is quite serious, to use a game-like format to gather a wide-range of opinions and suggestions, which the Institute of the Future will then "reduce" into more accessible form.
For me there are two reasons I'm excited to participate :
1) the scenarios are obviously interesting in themselves. My personal expectations are not as apocalyptic as the game's, but I do think that peak-oil and the end of cheap-energy, climate change and the disruption of our food-production patterns, the break-down of the nation-state, and pervasive, non-state-controlled surveillance technologies and weapons, are almost inevitably coming in the next 20-40 years. I believe that new diseases and large scale migrations are quite possible.
So what are we going to do about them? Are we just going to carry on as normal until we crash into circumstances? Or can we start doing some planning at least?
2) The other interest is the method itself. How good are the internet and the social software tools we have at enabling constructive discussion and problem solving? Does this kind of "game" help? As you know I vary between enthusiastic boosterism and occasional crises of doubt.
I believe that the overall trend is good, but there's a need for new tools and styles of discussion. There's a danger of ignoring and talking past those you disagree with; you can destroy intelligent public discussion in a hail of FUD.
Here's a chance to work with people trying to apply the tools and the "game" milieu to this problem. Let's see how it works or how it can be made to do so.
As I see it, the game occupies an interesting position (assuming that we get the expected numbers of players). To gather information from larger groups of people you usually use something like a market (eg. a prediction market) or maybe large scale opinion polls or "market research". All of which reduce the information contribution of the individual dramatically. On the smaller scale you have journals that bring together papers by multiple researchers or reports with for or five authors.
Superstruct sits somewhere between : there's an attempt to systematically gather ideas from an order of magnitude of 1000s using a mixture of human selection (organized in a fairly flat hierarchy) with some automation (the social software tools) and some game-mechanics to structure the contributions. I don't know how it will work out, and I suspect the organizers don't either. But it will be fun finding out.
All readers of this blog are invited (and positively encouraged) to join in, of course.
Disclosure, this is actually a (modestly) paid gig (ie. being a game-master). Although clearly I wouldn't have applied if I hadn't believed it was interesting.
w00t!
It's official. I'm going to be an assistant game-master in Superstruct, the internet "role-playing" game run by The Institute for the Future.
More soon ....
It's official. I'm going to be an assistant game-master in Superstruct, the internet "role-playing" game run by The Institute for the Future.
More soon ....
Monday, August 11, 2008
I'm debating Simon Wardley (read comments) over what generalist computer programmers with their understanding of abstraction can bring to specialist science.
Meanwhile he finds a great video of embedding electronics in paper.
Meanwhile he finds a great video of embedding electronics in paper.
Momus rises to the defence of the hipsters. The classic Momus discourse in microcosm, made urgent and relevant in this context.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Friday, August 08, 2008
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Keep reading Oli's excellent comments to my last climate change post. Very, very interesting and informative.
Here's a good recent example of the anti-sceptic case. Anyone got a similar from the sceptics?
Here's a good recent example of the anti-sceptic case. Anyone got a similar from the sceptics?
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Been undertaking one of my regular trawls through the climate change denial blogs.
Depressing as always, not so much because of Climate Change itself. If it's true, that's depressing, if the denialists are right, that's obviously a good thing.
No, what's depressing is the degree to which politics and special interest and pride and anger, resentment and malice seem to be involved in the debate.
It looks like it's on both sides. The denialists are big on highlighting stupid and pompous and venal prevaricating statements by climate change scientists. It's harder to guage whether that's a representative sampling or if they've goaded those scientists into intemperate outbursts which are then gleefully seized on as evidence of those same scientists' worthlessness.
Whichever is the case, the tools of the internet are being turned to the destruction of a knowledge and the sowing of confusion rather than it's creation, refinement and promulgation.
What's needed is something better than newspapers and television documentaries and blogs and graphs as a way of structuring this debate.
Update : Maybe we need things like this. Or TruthMapping which seems very close to a working Typed Threaded Discussion.
Depressing as always, not so much because of Climate Change itself. If it's true, that's depressing, if the denialists are right, that's obviously a good thing.
No, what's depressing is the degree to which politics and special interest and pride and anger, resentment and malice seem to be involved in the debate.
It looks like it's on both sides. The denialists are big on highlighting stupid and pompous and venal prevaricating statements by climate change scientists. It's harder to guage whether that's a representative sampling or if they've goaded those scientists into intemperate outbursts which are then gleefully seized on as evidence of those same scientists' worthlessness.
Whichever is the case, the tools of the internet are being turned to the destruction of a knowledge and the sowing of confusion rather than it's creation, refinement and promulgation.
What's needed is something better than newspapers and television documentaries and blogs and graphs as a way of structuring this debate.
Update : Maybe we need things like this. Or TruthMapping which seems very close to a working Typed Threaded Discussion.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Friday, August 01, 2008
Groovy Dr. Who themed second release from online label Bleepfiend who excavate old amateur electronica.
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