Francis's News Feeds

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“VCs are continuing to support peer-oriented companies, whose overall reach extends across a number of sectors. An initial public offering remains unlikely in the near future due to the relative immaturity of new entrants, with the possible exception of room rental marketplace Airbnb. Still, venture investors should be able to expect interesting M&A exits.

2006 – 2007: A number of companies received funding for their applications, which were designed to enable “peer-to-peer” collaboration with online tools. An early entrant was handmade goods marketplace Etsy, which received $1.6 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures. Another company was Inigral, a San Francisco-based company intent on developing software for the educational sector. It received $580,000 in Series A funding from the Founders Fund for its software that enables collaboration between students, their peers and instructors. The company has since received another $6.5 million in follow-on funding.

SocialPicks, a “community where stock investors exchange ideas and track performance of financial bloggers,” raised half a million dollars from Bay Partners in its first round of funding. The company was later acquired by stock market data and syndication tools provider FinancialContent.

2010: Room-rental marketplace Airbnb exploded onto the scene with its peer-to-peer marketplace aimed at the global accommodations marketplace. The company closed a $7.2 million series A round in 2010 and followed it with a $112 million series B funding in 2011 and is backed by a syndicate of top-tier venture capital firms and international investor DST Global.

Today: A current trend is veering toward peer-to-peer financial services, such as money transfer and lending platforms sites like peerTransfer and SoMoLend. This is in part due to users becoming increasingly comfortable with conducting business online and the success of crowdsourced microfinance sites like Kiva and Kickstarter. peerTransfer calls itself the “pioneering low-cost online international money transfer and global payments” company. SoMoLend is developing a peer-to-peer lending platform for small businesses and was seeded with $310,000 by Cincinnati, Ohio-based public-private group CincyTech.

This investment has a strong regional flavor: The California and the Northeast regions have accounted for nearly 80 percent of peer-focused technology fundings over the past five years.

As part of the larger consumer web spectrum, peer-to-peer applications are in high demand. The near future will no doubt see expansion of peer-to-peer models to other industry verticals. For example, consumers can now rent out their own parking spots at Park at My House. With social media becoming embedded into most avenues of the user experience, peer-focused technology companies can leverage social network access to drive user adoption rates.

Whether or not they can develop significant IPO offerings remains to be seen, but depending on market traction and strategic importance to acquirers, M&A exits seem the most likely outcome for smaller niche-market oriented companies.”

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“I like to think of crowd-funding is part of a whole wave of social entrepreneurship, how do you think Kickstarter’s mission differs from the average tech start-up?

Kickstarter’s focus is on creative projects. It’s a blend of patronage and commerce, a place for musicians, filmmakers, artists, writers, designers, et al to reach out to their fans and community for support with their projects. Creators maintain full ownership and creative control of their work; Kickstarter gives them the tools and social space to build an audience around their ideas and bring them to life. I know working at a start-up means there are no average days, but tell me a little about what you do at Kickstarter. Yes every month feels different, it’s wild. Our team’s organized between Community and Product. Product does development and design, Community handles curation, editorial, customer support, and outreach, among other things. My role has morphed into a kind of community product manager: collaborating on new features, writing site copy, overseeing customer service, and contributing to curation and editorial. Nearly everyone on the Community team started out getting their hands dirty in the same way: reviewing project proposals and providing support. Understanding where projects come from and how users interact with the site provides a really good foundation.

You must see a lot of interesting and thoughtful projects succeed and fail to meet their fundraising goals. What’re some things users can do to help distinguish their proposal?

There are amazing things going on all the time. I’ve backed 170 projects and wish I could back hundreds more right now. Projects don’t need to be flashy, they just need to have personality—soul. A strong project has a clear focus, and making a personal connection is key, which is why a video is essential. The value of video cannot be overstated! And then, inspired rewards. Offer cool things at fair prices, so people will back them.

Kickstarter has also been used of late as a fundraising platform for causes (like, for instance, The Occupy Wall Street Journal) that aren’t trying to make consumer products per se. How does this fit with Kickstarter’s current and future plans? When people traditionally think fundraising they think of charities and causes, but Kickstarter allows neither of these things. We’ve built something very different that’s focused on people pursuing creative passions and having fun doing it, and those include things like public art, journalism, documentaries, and performance. It’s not our intention to divorce art from message, nor from emotion. But we are dedicated to a site that’s completely devoted to creativity.

Sites like Kickstarter are based on a certain amount of trust — the customer believes they will receive a product that doesn’t even exist yet sometime in the future. Why are people willing to put that kind of trust in the Kickstarter community?

Backing a project on Kickstarter is a combination of commerce and patronage. Often you’re not just buying a product, you’re joining someone on their creative project, getting a window into their thoughts and process. Most projects get their initial momentum from the creator’s network of friends, fans, and immediate communities. That direct relationship between creator and backer makes for pretty powerful motivation to see a project through. But ultimately, it’s part of every creator’s job to earn a backer’s trust, especially backers who don’t personally know them. And a lot of creators do a wonderful job of it. They tell a compelling story, they’re passionate about their work, they’re transparent with their backers, and they want to share what they ultimately create.”

Yesterday Tim Montgomerie wrote a depressing piece on Conservative Home, reporting the views of Number 10 stating that Conservative victory in the 2015 election would be difficult if not impossible, and that a further period of Coalition with the Lib Dems might be the best outcome. This pessimism was based on the inability of Conservatives to win more than 36% of the vote in the last four elections, and the absence of a way of “transforming the brand” in time for a knock out offer at the next election.

Let us assume Mr Montgomerie did his research well. I have no doubt that the issues raised by Number 10 are serious ones which Conservatives need to address. He mentioned two in particular which do matter a lot. He reported that there are worries the health changes could upset more electors. He quoted a Lib Dem source as saying that Conservative Ministers are not engaged in tackling one of the great evils of our time, unemployment.

I disagree with his statement that there are no people within the Conservative party expressing an alternative which could make a difference for the country, and in due course for Conservative electoral prospects. He is right that there is no figure on the right acting as a challenger or alternative to David Cameron. That is a deliberate choice by some figures on the so called right. They do not wish to be factional, to create an impression of personality based splits. They do not wish to divert the government from its crucial national task of economic recovery and public budget improvement.It is an irony that this is taken by some on the inside as a welcome weakness, rather than as a wise and helpful assistance to a government facing a very difficult set of challenges.

There are a wide range of attractive policies proposed by a range of Conservative backbenchers that could make an appreciable difference to the future of the coutnry, and could boost Conservative poll ratings. Many Conservative MPs do not share the pessimisim about prospects. After all, they argue, the polls were boosted rapidly by using the veto on the EU last December, and were boosted again by the benefits cap policy in January.

There are many ideas bubbling out of the talented 2010 intake on new Conservative MPs, as well as ideas coming from more experienced Parliamentarians. Most Conservatives would like to break the state banks up and get them powering a stronger recovery. Tough action to make the banks work better polls well. Many Conservatives would like a revolution in the energy department, so the UK could offer cheap energy to fuel industrial recovery as well as helping hard pressed household budgets. Polling suggest cheaper energy would be very popular, would relieve the squeeze on incomes and could be delivered by market solutions with private sector investment money.

Many Conservatives want power back from Brussels, as promised in the last Conservative manifesto. Making moves to start to do that would be popular, as the country is now far more Eurosceptic than its Parliament. Tax cuts are always popular. Conservative Ministers should not let Lib Dems pose as the tax cutters, demanding a higher income tax threshold, when Conservatives are yearning for a tax break of any kind and would happily settle for higher thresholds.

Many Conservatives want a Freedom Bill, to reduce bureaucracy and free enterprise to get on with creating more jobs. They want better control of our borders, so more of the jobs go to people already settled here, and want sensible welfare reforms to make it more worthwhile to work. Far from being uncaring about unemployment and people’s prospects for higher incomes, most Conservative MPs I know would list that as one of the most central tasks they wish to promote. In many cases they would say it is the overriding task. When asked about the government, they are proudest so far of the welfare reforms being carried through.

Conservative MPs wish Andrew Lansley well with the health reforms. They were unhappy about the way the Lib Dems forced a pause and then changes in them, despite Mr Clegg signing up to the whole package and co signing the recommendation of them in the original White Paper. Conservatives have no difficulty with giving more power to Doctors to make choices for their patients. They are becoming more nervous about the bureaucratic changes being forced on the government by Lib Dem and special interest pleading. It would be wrong to think the health reforms were some incubus designed by the Conservative right. Most Conservative MPs are entirely pragamatic about the reforms, wish them well, and do not wish them to do any damage (nor do they do any damage by design). All Conservative MPs I know are wedded to the funadamental popular principle of the NHS, free at the point of need. The government did not embark on these reforms to placate the “right”.

All Conservative MPs recognise that the next budget is a crucial event for Conservative and government fortunes. This is the last budget that allows three years to see the beneficial consequences of any of its proposals, and still allows a decent length of time to undertake reform and get it to settle down before the General Election. The budget needs to set the course for faster growth – and therefore for a lower budget deficit – for the rest of the Parliament. The best way to get the deficit down is to promote faster growth and generate many more jobs. If the government does this, the Conservatives could be rewarded with a majority next time. There is no substitute for fixing the roof now it’s raining. I will return to more detailed Budget measures in the days ahead.

With winter comes a wonderful assortment of hats and caps. Above its all black with a black bike...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Some aerial cycle chic from the streets of Copenhagen The Original Cycle Chic - straight from...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Charlie here: I'm writing this in a hotel room in Manhattan. It's been a long and exhausting week.

It started at 4am last Wednesday, when I left home in Edinburgh; I timed the door-to-door travel time to a hotel in Colorado Springs and it worked out as 24 hours and 6 minutes (with a seven hour time zone change on top). COSine, the local Colorado Springs SF convention was a blast, and I'd like to thank everyone (and in particular, con chair Joe Sokola) for inviting me. Then it all re-started again on Monday, with a 4am start and a couple of flights that ended at La Guardia. I'm now decompressing somewhat, but still rushing around: New York is where a huge chunk of the US publishing business is based, and I'm here because my agent and both my largest publishers are here.

Anyway, because I'm here, I might as well announce that I'm planning on holing up in a pub on Thursday evening: I'll be at The Ginger Man (11 East 36th St, NYC) from 6pm this Thursday 2nd. (No reservation, all welcome. Well, all who read this blog, or my twitter feed, or my Facebook page. I'd rather you didn't try to flashmob the place by inviting random strangers.)

It is a strange thing to post at such a well-known techy econo-futurist blog. That's not my usual hat, see. I'm a fantasy writer, and more particularly, a folklorist and historian. It is literally my job to find value in old things, to show people versions of themselves in ancient stories. Nobody asks me what I think about the future.

It's not that I don't have a dog in this race. I am, I know you'll be surprised to hear, a human living in the early 21st century with a vested interest in continuing at least one of those states (human or living in the 21st century--I'm not super picky which). And having just written a time-sprawling posthuman AI novella, it's fairly clear I have thoughts on the subject. It's just that, to belabor a metaphor, your dog is a SuperLabrador with paw-rockets, a tail that can hack wirelessly into the holorabbit whipping around the track, and an honest, loving, loyal cyborg heart. Mine is an old herd-dog, shaggy, dark, beautiful and uncanny, primeval and enormous--and every once in awhile, even though her heart is blood and muscle, she wins as if by magic.

A friend of mine said the other day that he'd surprised himself by starting to write a fantasy novel rather than his beloved SF. He felt it was a story he needed to tell, but also confined by what he saw as the limitations of fantasy: that it is essentially about the past and therefore not concerned with possibility in the same way--in fact, by definition a genre of the impossible. A genre of might-have-been instead of could-someday-be.

Now I've written before about what I see as the hierarchy of realism, where in terms of literary respect SF must come out on top of fantasy but below mimetic fiction, because SF presents a future which might come to pass, and could therefore be merely prescient, not fanciful. We know there are no dragons in the world, but there may be artificial intelligence, thus the latter is more worthy of serious thought than the former, which is merely escapism.

I don't think very much of that hierarchy, but you don't get to choose your paradigms. (Much.)

When I told my friend it was silly to think that fantasy must be a medieval RISK-analogue, he asked what, then, was the difference between fantasy and science fiction. I didn't have a satisfying answer, and maybe I still don't. But I have an answer.

The famous defense of science fiction is that while taking place in the future or one imaginable future, it is profoundly concerned with the present, taking current trends and understandings of the world and extrapolating forward to a greater or lesser degree. SF always speaks to the time in which it is written.

I have never understood why fantasy is exempt from this. Why is the opposite not taken as equally and unavoidably true? While taking place in the past* or one imaginable past, it is profoundly concerned with the present, taking currents trends and understandings of the world and exaggerating to a greater or lesser degree. Why do I never hear this applied to fantasy? It's not even interesting at this point to say The Lord of the Rings has a great deal to say about WWI. I don't think it's an accident that A Song of Ice and Fire was first published in the aftermath of the Cold War, during a particularly ugly internecine period of struggle in the Balkans, but achieved its greatest popularity in the political climate of post 9/11 America, when fighting a whole bunch of wars all over the world became a reality for many people. Likewise, I suspect the popularity of Lev Grossman's The Magicians series has something to do with the generation of college students graduating into a dark world they believed was good and bright, saddled with debt and joblessness. And you know, it's noticeable that steampunk came into its own during a period when life is starting to look damned Dickensian again, when the split between rich and poor has widened drastically, when the aristocrats with the pretty clothes have moved the child-devouring factories to other continents so that no one has to see them at all. Magical realism tends to spring up in totalitarian regimes--when actual life has become a trickster play, when the government is run by magical thinking and words no longer mean what they say** books start appearing in which the otherworld is encroaching on reality rather than taking place in another reality entirely.

And while I'm rarely asked about my thoughts on transhumanism, when I write about immortal pre-scarcity beings who structure their whole world around the avoidance of boredom and the cultivation of psychologies which will stand the test of longevity, I'm not just thinking about the world of 1164--or honestly thinking about it much at all. When I write about a sexually-transmitted city, it's not just because it's a cool elevator pitch, but because I live in such a fully networked world, one in which we all go to this third place where we can be ourselves when the work day is over. When I break the fourth wall to address the reader, it's to tell them what I think I know about real life here on Earth. It has never once occurred to me that in writing fantasy I am not writing directly and profoundly about actual life in the present day--and where that present day might lead us. That I am not translating fairy tales about then into fairy tales about now. Folklore is how humans explain the world to themselves. Fairy tales are a vital part how a culture promulgates itself and instructs the young (and old). They have always been about how to behave and survive right here and now. Magic, like technology, merely foregrounds the stranger processes at work.

And if you think we're beyond believing in magic, you've got another thing coming. I can't count the number of times during the 08 crash I heard someone give my unemployed husband and friends the following advice: "Write down the job you want ten /seven/three times on a piece of paper, fold it up and carry it with you/against your skin/with a dollar bill in your left pocket/right pocket all the time." That is a magic spell by any measure. Apple uses the word "magical" to sell the iPad because they know it works, it appeals to us on that folkloric level.

It goes both ways, too. When I read SF, I am always delighted by the old, old magic in it. And the Singularity is such a glittering, magical thing. When I listen to discussions about the Singularity, when I read stories about it, I hear: one day we will all wake up and turn into fairies. One day we'll all go to Fairyland together. White shores and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise. I hear visions of a world whose technology accomplishes the exact actions that magic strove to: transmutation, transmigration, immortality, altering the body, the granting of wishes, the reading of minds. Something out of nothing, lead into gold. A world whose folk dwell in so much plenty and ease that they might as well be fairies, their countries Fairyland. I hear the same longing for these things that I hear when fantasy authors write about dragons and potions and magic from before the dawn of time.

Cotton Mather, for those of you who don't know, was a deeply unhappy man who lived in Boston in the late 17th century. I've heard him referred to as New England's first horror writer, and I think that's about right. He was a pastor and an author obsessed with the Rapture to a level that would surprise even Tim LaHaye and his ilk. Both he and his father predicted it would come just about every five years until he died--and in dying he was still waiting for it, bitterly, bitterly disappointed that it had not come in his lifetime. He sparked a Millennialist fever in New England and, rather more famously, was deeply involved in the Salem Witch Trials.

A year or two ago I came across a dialogue between Cotton and his father Increase in which they discussed what parts of the body they would be able to shed after the Rapture, and which they would keep. The genitals could go no problem, of course, and the digestive tract, since eating would be unnecessary. Possibly the liver as well, since what toxins could survive in Paradise? The heart and the brain posed a problem, however--would we need those organs to think and feel or would we become pure persons, identities intact without bodies?

I said aloud: What you mean is when you upload, Cotton, buddy. Will you need to maintain a connection to your physical body or will you be able to upload completely?

The tone of the conversation was exactly the same as the one I hear now--it's not really a joke at all when we call it the Rapture of the Nerds. The same hatred of the body echoed in Cotton and Increase's urgent debate, the same longing to leave all the troublesome processes of physical existence behind, to enter a world where they and their particular abilities would make them saints and kings, and those who mocked them would be useless devils or worse. (Don't think this isn't the very urge behind planning for the zombie apocalypse.) The same assumption that in Paradise, they would be able to affect reality as one would in a VR world, that their highest and purest desires would become manifest. The same desire to witness the end of the world by whatever definition, the same desperation not to miss it, to be the generation that achieved ascension.

Not only New England's first horror writer, but her first science fiction writer.

And to me, it's all one. Not in a flippant way, but deep, primal, unifying. The herd-dog is an uplifted mind. The SuperLab has old, old bones. I do genuinely believe that stories save us. Over and over, narrative tells us how to get through and get beyond, how to be human and how to be inhuman, too, when it comes time to grow. We are, at our cores, narrative beings. And most especially, science fiction and fantasy save us. They tell us who we are, who we can be, who we want to be and who we don't, what we could be and what we can reject if we are strong enough. It says all these things more boldly and yet more secretly than mimetic fiction, which does not often try to speak to the dreams and terrors of a species on the verge.

Ask me about the future and I'll tell you a fairy tale. Ask me about the past and I'll tell you about uploading. We are always writing about ourselves--we can't help it. The difference between a post-human and a fairy, between a dragon and a lobster, is only in the name.

*Obviously, I don't buy the canard that SF is about the future and fantasy is about the past. I think both are about the Other, how we engage with it, refuse to engage, are assimilated or rejected by it. These things don't play for a particular temporal team.

**For more on totalitarian regimes and how language and fiction changes within them I highly recommend Maguerite Feitlowitz's A Lexicon of Terror. For further reading on the desire to shed the body and transform into spirit/energy as a cultural meme throughout more or less the entirety of Western culture from Athens onward, see Peter Brown's superb and eye-opening The Body and Society. For Cotton Mather and his contemporaries' obsession with the end of the world, including the mentioned dialogue, Jame West Davidson's The Logic of Millennial Thought in 18th Century New England is an amazing, wry, and thoughtful read.

Have a look at these great images (on Fubiz) in the series “Enlightened Souls” by French photographer Fabrice Wittner. He uses images of people with a stencil-like effect and puts them on a background of a real photo.

This effect might be very useful in presentation design. It is very hard to a series of images with a consistent look and feel on either stock photo sites, or Flickr. Moreover, I find that using images with real people not working very well in slides. It is too personal. This slight distortion of the characters might just solve these 2 problems in one go.

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Desktop magazine’s 2nd Global Coworking Survey has interesting insights on the emerging ecosystem of coworking spaces:

The 2nd global coworking survey was conducted by Deskmag in cooperation with the team from Coworking Europe:

“Can we realistically describe coworking as “succesful” when only 40% of spaces are currently profitable? The answer is yes – when you take into account some simple factors. Especially time: 72% of coworking spaces become profitable after two years in operation. If they are privately run, the rate is even higher.

Everyone should earn a profit for their work, including the operators of coworking spaces. The second Global Coworking Survey shows that nearly all spaces are profitable after two years. The majority of spaces live from the income from their memberships, while another large group rely on indirect income from the operator’s second job – those in the start-up phase especially. The worst financial situation exists for the operators of very small spaces who do not have a secondary or concurrent job.

The survey results show that coworking space members benefit more rapidly by joining, than the operators do by opening. Setting up is costly (an average of US$58,000 or €46,500), and space founders carry the biggest risk. For this reason, coworking space members should be particularly grateful to the operator.

Coworking spaces earn the majority of their revenue, unsurprisingly, by renting out desks (61%). One in ten spaces earn all of their money from desk rental.

The average space earns ten percent of their revenue from renting out meeting rooms and event spaces (10% each). Food and beverages bring in 5%, and the sale of tickets to workshops and events earns another 5%. Unlike business centers, coworking spaces live on a very small portion from virtual office services (3%).

At least a third of coworking spaces offer all these services as an inclusive package, with no additional costs. Infastructure such as meeting rooms are often built into desk rental prices. Other revenue sources identified by the survey include one-time membership fees, merchandise, public support services, fixed phonelines, commissions, rental of private offices, and even the sale of art from the in-house gallery.

Within revenue streams there are differences between big and small coworking spaces. The more members they serve, the higher the income from renting particular meeting rooms. Big spaces are also more likely to sell virtual office services. The big question: can coworking space operators make money?

On average, 40% of coworking spaces are profitable, according to responses to the second Global Coworking Survey. This initially disappointing figure masks some more complex factors.

First, it should be noted that very few companies in any industries achieve a profit in their first months of existence. And currently, more than half of all coworking spaces are under one year old. That the majority of spaces are not turning a profit could have much to do with the infancy of the movement.

Another important limitation is the corporate form. If 13% of all spaces utilize a non-profit organizational form, economic gains are placed behind social gains for a portion of the industry.

Further and most importantly, 74% of all coworking space operators maintain a second job in addition to their management duties. As the majority of coworkers report a boost to their conditions, so too must managers receive situational benefits from working in their own space.

And finally, the long-term picture should be kept in mind. The second Global Coworking Survey shows that 72% of all coworking spaces become profitable after more than two years in operation. For privately-run coworking spaces (those which are not non-profit groups or government-run), the profitability rate after more than two years is even higher, at 87%.

Three main factors can be identified as the essential elements for a profitable coworking space:

The age of the coworking space: unsurpringsly, newly-opened spaces don’t turn a profit from the day they open their doors.

The number of members: There’s an obvious relation between number of members and the age of a coworking space, and this relation is also statistically significant. However, not all coworking spaces have an unlimited capacity to take new members.

Space operators and their other jobs: This is crucial, especially for small and young spaces. The profit here is achieved not directly through desk rental, but indirectly through the enhanced operation of their secondary professions.

Seventy percent of all privately operated coworking spaces that serve 50 or more members run a profit. Only one in five spaces in this category suffer losses. Coworking spaces with between 10 and 49 members have a profitability rate of about 40% – close to the overall average. The more members they take on, the more profitable they become. Economies of scale also affect coworking spaces.

The most difficulties are suffered by small spaces with less than ten members; 56% of them report a loss. Even though they pay less rent and have lower operating costs, only a quarter of small spaces achieved a direct profit. It’s important to remember most small spaces are also new; they can develop over time to improve their business model and increase membership, if desired.

Succesful coworking spaces attract more members and are able to expand. Unsuccesful ones close. Thankfully, the later cases are less common. Nine out of ten privately operated coworking spaces return a profit after two years in operation. Most spaces become profitable between the first and second year. The youngest coworking spaces are the least profitable, due in part to their age.

Because more than 50% of coworking spaces are not older than twelve months, they pull down the average significantly. The negative outlook for the coworking market is therefore a simple result of the age of the industry.

What is the situation for coworking spaces, if they have limited capacity and cannot (or don’t want to) increase their membership? The survey data shows that even two-thirds of spaces with less than 30 members become profitble after two years. Another third reported at least no losses after this time in operation.

Even spaces with a capacity of less than 30 members are profitable after two years, at least about two-thirds of them. A third wrote, even after this time nor losses.

The figures suggest that 30% of privately operated coworking spaces with less than 30 members still operate at a loss after two years, a fact that may threaten their existence. For all spaces, the figure is 6%; and another 7% just break even.

However, the distinction between direct and indirect profit is crucial, especially for smaller spaces. A good coworking space is built for the benefit of its members. By working in such a collaborative workspace, members expand their professional networks, keep their skills and knowledge up to date, and 40% report higher incomes. What works for coworkers should also work for the operators who sit alongside them.

These small space founders must make a bigger initial investment, but they are also able to have more sway in shaping the look and feel of their workplace. Their second jobs benefit as a result of their increased networks.

The survey data shows 64% of full-time operators of coworking spaces with less than 30 members earn an income which is average or above-average, compared to the general working population. But this figure was higher for operators who maintained a second side-job with 79% of this group reporting average or above average incomes. As for the normal coworker, 83% report receiving this height of income.”

February 02, 2012

Here's a bit of a break from the whack you in the face gloom of the last couple of posts.

About a decade ago, there was an interesting game show on Comedy Central called Battlebots. It featured fights between robots (with Bill Nye as the technical expert). It was an early form of a now successful genre: NerdTV.

Background

'Walking' robots ('StompBots') propelled by means other than wheels were initially given a 50% weight bonus. The rules changed following the victory of a heavyweight StompBot (Son of Whyachi) at BattleBots 3.0. For BattleBots 4.0 and beyond only a 20% weight bonus was given to walkers and the technical rules specified that walking mechanisms not use cam operated walking mechanisms as they were functionally too similar to wheel operation. Since the rules change, walking robots have entered the competition, but none have achieved any success beyond preliminary rounds.

Here's a clip (there are lots of these fights archived on YouTube) of two contenders:

The fights on BattleBots (and the UK's Robot Wars) had the feel of the types of competitions you find in college engineering schools (with a little wrestling schtick thrown in). An engineering task is set. Two teams of engineering students build a contraption to accomplish the task. The proving ground is chosen. The teams battle for the best grade. In the case of this show, the victor was the only bot still operation at the end of the time period (if both are, the victory is awarded on points).

BattleDrones

What if there was an updated version of BattleBots called "BattleSwarms." It wouldn't be a simple head to a head competition, but something that combined serious engineering prowess and combat.

In which I examine and discuss important factors and elements of project contracts…

Today's roundtable, as usual, was an international affair, with entrepreneurs presenting from different parts of the US, India, Israel, and many other geographies. Before I share what we heard from them today, I want to highlight an important aspect of 1M/1M that is repeatedly underscored in these roundtables: the international, inclusive, democratic nature of the initiative.

In fact, one of the best ways we can delineate this phenomenon is by contrasting 1M/1M with YCombinator. (Video after the jump.)

Bottomline: YC, superb incubator, is a program that applies to less than .01% of entrepreneurs, whereas 1M/1M is an inclusive, global program. The businesses we will discuss today will put this distinction in perspective.

Hooduku

First, Sudhendra Seshachala from Houston, Texas pitched Hooduku, a professional services business that already has significant revenue from cloud integration work. Hooduku is a 1M/1M premium member and is interested in moving away from pure services toward a product+services model.

Sudhi presented the idea of a platform that bridges between Microsoft Azure customers who are also using RackSpace and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers for their content management and delivery. He uses a classic and highly successful mode of building products, that of being deeply immersed in customer situations through services projects and using that domain knowledge and relationship to identify opportunities for building products. A major example of such a company is Appirio, which went on to get funded by Sequoia Capital and has since built a strong product-services company in the cloud integration domain.

My advice to Sudhi is to not position his company as a 'platform' but rather pitch the value proposition as an 'integration framework'. These subtle wordings make a huge difference in how a company is viewed.

Buy Or Boycott

Next Doug Lowenthal from Jacksonville, Florida presented Buy Or Boycott, which he came up with at the recent Startup Weekend program. Buy Or Boycott wants to offer consumers an easy way to avoid buying products that have major issues, be it political or environmental. However, the user experience that Doug described to deliver this was not convincing. He proposes to offer a mobile app with which to scan every product in your grocery store shopping cart. I don't believe consumers would do this. When we stand on grocery store lines after a long day or week, the last thing we want to do is scan a bunch of products with our mobile phones.

NXI Group

Then Kaushik Mitra from New Delhi, India, pitched the NXI Group of Companies, a custom hardware vendor that presented itself as a laptop and tablet company. It took me a bit of time to parse through the details and figure out that NXI is NOT a laptop or tablet vendor competing with HP, Dell and Acer. Rather, it is developing custom hardware for consumers with specific needs. For example, they are in the midst of developing RFID-enabled tablets for the universal ID effort by the Indian government.

Kaushik's company already has $400,000 in revenue, and while the business is not a typical venture-fundable one, I see no reason why the company cannot continue to grow in its niche.

Koolaring

Last, Edoe Cohen from Tel Aviv, Israel pitched Koolaring, a SaaS solution for building private alumni networks a la LinkedIn. I have seen numerous startups with this general idea. It makes perfect sense for universities to have their own private alumni networks, and it is only a matter of time before they do. Whether Koolaring will be the winner in that space or not will depend on execution.

So you see, I just shared with you four businesses, none of which would suit YCombinator for a variety of reasons outlined in the video. However, 1M/1M is delighted to help any and all of them.

You can listen to the recording of today's roundtable here. As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables on the following dates starting at 8:00 a.m. PST:
Thursday, February 9, Register Here.
Thursday, February 16, Register Here.
Thursday, February 23, Register Here.

If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.

I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch, and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.

I'm presenting our story work at KM Australia this year (24-26 July) and I'll also be taking part in the debate, which has been organised in a friendly and fun way. We are debating whether tacit knowledge can and should be captured.

If you'd like to know more about the congress here's the event blurb. I've been told that if you share this blog post with your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers, or any other social media channel for that matter, you'll receive a 15% discount off the registration price.

We were sent both these books for review from Barrington Stoke. Their website says “Struggling, reluctant and dyslexic readers deserve the best books available” and that is what they are aiming to produce. Both these books are written in relatively simple direct language, but with good strong story lines and characters – I hoped they would work for Small, who tends to like ideas above his chronological age, but gets turned off by overly wordy books, even though his vocabulary and ability are well up there. I think basically his tolerance level for waffling is low

I read both books first and was impressed. They don’t read like easy books, if that makes any sense, they aren’t talking down to ppl. I particularly enjoyed My name is O, although I thought Pale was an interesting concept, and proposed some intriguing moral questions. And I expected Small to feel much the same.

Turned out I was totally wrong – he felt that O was utterly implausible and really enjoyed Pale. Having said that, a 50% hit rate where he is concerned is pretty good going – he is what could be called a tough audience

The premise of My name is O is good. The characterisation is excellent and I thought plausible (opinion of my 8 year old notwithstanding) and it carries along nicely. Aimed at a reluctant reader the story should draw them in without the book being too long and offputting, which I think is the strength of the story. And it isn’t so short that you feel shortchanged either. All in all, it requires a lot of discipline to put across this kind of material in this format, and I think the author, Sam Enthoven has done it well. And I’d have thought that the story would have reasonably universal appeal, not being so male oriented as to be offputting for girls.

Pale is more challenging in some ways. The concept is a morally difficult one – would you rescue someone from death if it meant that they would be ostracised and hated? Even though you’d get to keep them. I’d expected this to be above Small’s level in some ways, but he preferred it, and we had some interesting discussions afterwards, so it definitely worked as a thought provoking novel. Again it’s strongly written but doesn’t feel contrived or shoehorned in, and I’d be very happy to look for other books for Small from this publisher and author.

Disclosure – books were sent free for purposes of review, and links above are affiliate.

FOI Man sums up what he told the Justice Select Committee as they prepare to carry out their post-legislative scrutiny.

Tomorrow, Friday 3 February, is the deadline for submissions of evidence to the Justice Select Committee for their post-legislative scrutiny. After days of writing – and rewriting – my despatch, I finally sent it off on Tuesday. Hopefully many of you have written to say how important you think FOI is, and why.

The rules of the Committee mean that I’m not allowed to publish my full statement here without permission – I’ve asked the Clerk of the Committee to allow that. However, in the meantime I can summarise the key points I made. Most of this won’t be a surprise to regular readers.

Fundamentally, I think the FOI Act is a brilliant piece of legislation. It’s introduced a right to know that now seems an important part of our democracy; and by and large I think it balances this right with the need to ensure that public services can be run effectively.

It’s met all of its objectives to some extent or another – the Ministry of Justice had already put forward plenty of evidence of FOI making the public sector more open and transparent; I also pointed out how it was allowing campaign groups to engage better with decision makers. I argued that it was almost certainly improving decision-making; and I put forward a defence against suggestions of a “chilling effect”.

The limits of cultural change within the public sector was one of my key themes. I pointed out that whilst senior figures such as former Prime Ministers and Civil Servants were openly and aggressively attacking the legislation, it was always going to be difficult to win people over. In future these attacks need to be aggressively countered from within Whitehall if FOI is ever going to become embedded in our organisations and its full benefits felt.

And linked to that, we can’t ignore those who make requests irresponsibly. The requesters who submit the same request to hundreds of public bodies; the people using the Act to pursue their personal vendettas; and others who don’t understand that the way they use FOI will affect whether it survives. I’ve proposed a Code of Practice for requesters – an FOI “highway code” to promote good practice amongst those using the Act – rather like my Guide to Making FOI Requests. I’d rather see education than litigation used to manage issues with FOI.

I don’t want to see transparency go backwards in the UK. I’ve called for any changes to be subject to a transparency impact assessment, and I’ve also asked the Committee to bear in mind the commitment the current Government has made to transparent and open public services.

I want to see more proactive disclosure, and public authorities encouraged to introduce Disclosure Logs if they don’t already. But I agree with those who think that Publication Schemes are unnecessary to make this happen. I’ve also suggested statutory reporting on compliance and asking requesters to say when they are making a request under FOI. And I’m very keen to see the limitation on prosecution under s.77 of the Act extended beyond the ridiculous 6 months that it stands at now.

Finally, I’ve argued against changes to the fees regulations. I fear that the changes that some have suggested could limit legitimate and reasonable research, so I hope this won’t be a change put forward by the Committee. If there must be changes, let’s focus them on those who use the Act irresponsibly – I think the restrictions on vexatious requesters are probably adequate as they are, but perhaps they could be clarified and maybe linked to the “Code of Practice” I suggested above.

Fundamentally, now is not the time for change. At this time of economic uncertainty, when Government and public services are making difficult and challenging decisions, the scrutiny that FOI offers is needed more than ever. Let’s hope the Committee’s post-legislative assessment reaches the same conclusion.

Women make up more than half the global population, but hold fewer than a third of the world’s engineering jobs. In the U.S., female students comprise fewer than 15 percent of all Advanced Placement computer science test takers. Even in high-tech Israel, few girls choose computer science. Not only is this a loss to companies like Google and everyone who benefits from a continually developing web; it's also a lost opportunity for girls.

Beginning in 2008, a group of female engineers at Google in Israel decided to tackle this problem. We established the “Mind the Gap!” program, aimed at encouraging girls to pursue math, science and technology education. In collaboration with the Israeli National Center for Computer Science Teachers, we began organizing monthly school visits for different groups of girls to the Google office and annual tech conferences at local universities and institutes. The girls learn about computer science and technology and get excited about its applications, as well as have a chance to talk with female engineers in an informal setting and see what the working environment is like for them.

Since we started this program over three years ago, we’ve hosted more than 1,100 teenage girls at our office, and an additional 1,400 girls at three annual conferences held in leading universities. These 2,500 students represent 100 schools from all sectors and from all over the country: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tira, Beer-Sheva, Jerusalem, Nazareth and more; what they have in common is the potential to become great computer scientists.

The results are encouraging. For instance, some 40 percent of the girls who participated in last year’s conference later chose computer science as a high school major.

We encourage people in other countries, at other companies and in other scientific disciplines to see how they could replicate this program. You can read more at the project site. Currently, we are working with the Google in Education group to expand the program to more offices globally and get even more young women excited about computer science. The difference we can make is real: At one of our first visits three years ago, we met a 10th grade student named Keren who enjoyed math but had never considered computer science as a high school major. Last month, Keren informed us that the visit made such an impact on her, she decided to change her major to computer science. “Talking to women in the field helped me change my mind,” she said.

Posted by Michal Segalov, Software Engineer at Google’s R&D Center, Israel

This is actually pretty good advice, especially the part about actually typing sample code yourself when you are going through a book on a programming language. Sure, it came with downloadable code, but if you’re a novice, you may grasp the concepts faster by retyping the code than you will by just reading it. It’s like writing something out to memorize it. It works for me.

And so on. The answer to this has always been “Well, you can’t do that on the server side…” You can either do it on the client side or store comments in their own collection. What you really want is the ability to treat embedded documents like a “real” collection.

The aggregation pipeline gives you this ability by letting you “unwind” arrays into separate documents, then doing whatever else you need to do in subsequent pipeline operators.

Serious Cat’s comments are scattered between post documents, so there wasn’t a good way of querying for just those embedded documents. Now there is.

Let’s assume we want each comment by Serious Cat, along with the title and url of the post Serious Cat was commenting on. So, the steps we need to take are:

Now, this works well for something like a blog, where you have human-generated (small) data. If you’ve got gigs of comments to go through, you probably want to filter out as many as possible (e.g., with $match or $limit) before sending it to the “everything-in-memory” parts of the pipeline.

Let’s assume our site lists the 10 most recent comments across all posts, with links back to the posts they appeared on, e.g.,

To extract these comments from a collection of posts, you could do something like:

Suppose we allow users to upvote comments and we want to see who the most popular commenters are.

As I mentioned before, there are a couple downsides to using the aggregation pipeline: a lot of the pipeline is done in-memory and can be very CPU- and memory-intensive. However, used judiciously, it give you a lot more freedom to mush around your embedded documents.

By James Kwak I must admit that I find Facebook’s impending glory a bit awkward, as it touches on two themes I have written about previously. One is that I just don’t like Facebook. And, I confess, I don’t really understand it. I sort of understand why people like it, but I don’t really understand [...]

Pedazos de La Isla links to a report which states that “428 arbitrary arrests of activists were documented” for the month of January alone, as well as a blog post which details “yet another method of repression” being used against government critics.

Lec 1 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008

“Another occupied building has collapsed in Havana, this time only partially and with no fatalities, but in the same district”: Havana Times reports.

Columbia University, arguably the best Journalism school in the world is giving us the opportunity of a lifetime. We are hosting our first ever US event (Journalism Data Camp #jdcny) and its their first hackathon in a proud 100 year … Continue reading →

opening a half block from USV and Tumblr HQ. They need a follow on Tumblr option too!

I was going to write a post about Facebook’s valuation, but Bill Gurley has done such an excellent job, that the better idea is to point at his post explaining “Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10x Revenue Club.” There is one other important point to consider in thinking about Internet company valuations in the current economic environment: low interest rates. Companies that are still growing and have a lot of room for future growth have a fair bit of their value sitting in the future — that’s certainly true for a company such as Facebook. As we are currently in a global deflationary environment (*) the discount rate being applied to these future cash flows is lower than it has been in a very long time and possibly ever. When I started learning about DCF models in the late 80s, a common rule of thumb was to use 7% for the risk free rate of return!

The (*) above is to indicate that we have been expanding the money supply like never before but the lending multiplier has contracted even faster and supply is far outstripping demand in combination resulting in a deflationary environment.

PS If anyone has seen a good analysis of revenue composition for Facebook (advertising versus credits, assuming that’s even disclosed in the S1) please let me know

The following guest post is by Timothy Vollmer, policy coordinator at Creative Commons. It has been adapted from his post on the same subject over on the COMMUNIA International Association blog. Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are institutional members of COMMUNIA. The mission of COMMUNIA is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise and research about the public domain in the digital age within society and with policymakers.

The European Commission Public Sector Information Directive, which describes the conditions under which European public sector information (PSI) should be made available for reuse by the public, has been in place since 2003. PSI ranges from digital maps to weather data to traffic statistics, and there’s a lot of potential value in making PSI available for reuse for commercial and non-commercial purposes – up to €140bn. The EC says that increasing the reuse of PSI can generate new businesses and jobs – and to this end is planning to update its nine-year-old Directive. COMMUNIA International Association last week released a short policy document in reaction to the to the European Commission’s (EC) proposals, which the OKF’s Daniel Dietrich presented at the LAPSI conference in Brussells to a positive and interested audience.

To give a bit of background: in December 2011 the EC published a proposal to update the PSI Directive. The Open Knowledge Foundation already covered the basics of the Commission announcement. The COMMUNIA document draws attention to two areas where these proposals still need improvement: firstly regarding the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive; and secondly regarding public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.

From the perspective of COMMUNIA, the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states. The article of the amended Directive dealing with licensing mentions “standard licenses,” but does not sufficiently clarify what should be considered to be a standard license, and encourages the development of open government licenses. Instead of recommending the use and creation of more licenses, COMMUNIA suggests that the Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied across the entire European Union. Such licenses (stewarded by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons) already exist and are widely used by a broad spectrum of data and content providers.

COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested change to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of PSI has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. For instance, the EC’s amendments to the Directive are aligned with COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendation #13, which states, “The PSI Directive needs to be broadened, by increasing its scope to include publicly funded memory organisations – such as museums or galleries – and strengthened by mandating that Public Sector Information will be made freely available for all to use and re-use without restriction.”

Including such content under the purview of the Directive will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture and should increase the amount of digitized cultural heritage that is available online. But, while the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights will be re-usable for commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights at all because those works are in the public domain. COMMUNIA thinks that explicitly including public domain content held by libraries, museums and archives in the re-use obligation of the amended PSI Directive will strengthen the Commission’s position with regard to access and re-use of public domain content.

The full COMMUNIA association reaction to the EC’s proposal to amend Directive 2003/98/EC on re-use of public sector information can be downloaded here.

Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate:

2. One change that should have been made to the keyboard decades ago is the addition of a dedicated em-dash key. An em-dash is meant to indicate an abrupt change of thought within the context of a sentence. Writers of all stripes use them often—sometimes too often—but they can be a real pain in the carpal to type.

To make an em-dash using a Mac, you have to do this: First, press the option key. Next, while holding down “option,” press “shift.” Now, while keeping those other two buttons pressed, hit the hyphen key. It’s too much—three keys for one mark. On a PC, there’s a handy “shortcut.” Simply hold down “alt” and then type 0151 on the far right number pad. (Next challenge: safecracking.) Although some popular word processing programs will automatically create an em-dash when you type two consecutive hyphens, that’s no reason to prolong the mark’s banishment from the board.

(At least partially because there’s no dedicated em-dash button on the keyboard, people mess up this mark in many annoying ways. Some use two hyphens--like so. It’s not an attractive replacement. Other typists resort to a single hyphen as a stand-in for an em-dash-like so. That’s just confusing.)

More here. [I heartily endorse an em-dash key. I usually have to copy and paste it from somewhere.]

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A very interesting experiment/project by Markus Kayser as part of his MA studies in Design Products on Platform 13 at the Royal College of Art:

“In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance. In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology. Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and trigger dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource – the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking.”

Over the past two years I’ve been struggling mightily with the dynamics of “classical VC funded board of directors” and how these boards work. When I hear a VC say “I’m an active board member” it gives me the same nauseous feeling I get when someone says “I’m a value added investor.” I’ve been on some awesome boards, some terrible boards, and everything in between. Today, I refuse to be on a shitty or dysfunctional board and I’m proud that every board I’m on is one that I’d consider to be effective, although they all operate in different ways.

I’ve experimented with a bunch of different approaches across a lot of boards and have been thinking hard about this lately. I’m working on a book called Startup Boards with Mahendra Ramsinghani and have done some interviews about this topic lately, including a chaotic one the other day with James Geshwiler on the Frank Peters Show.

My long term friend Matt Blumberg (Return Path CEO) and I were going back and forth about his recently board meeting (which ironically I missed) and he wrote some kind words about me and his other board members (Fred Wilson – USV, Greg Sands – Sutter Hill, Scott Weiss – A16Z, and Scott Petry – Authentic8.) I asked him if he’d write a guest post about what makes an awesome board member. He was willing – it follows.

I’ve written a bunch of posts over the years about how I manage my Board at Return Path. And I think part of having awesome Board members is managing them well – giving transparent information, well organized, with enough lead time before a meeting; running great and engaging meetings; mixing social time with business time; and being a Board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation. All those topics are covered in more detail in the following posts: Why I Love My Board, Part II, The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, and Powerpointless.

But by far the best way to make sure you have an awesome board is to start by having awesome Board members. I’ve had about 15 Board members over the years, some far better than others. Here are my top 5 things that make an awesome Board member, and my interview/vetting process for Board members.

I asked my exec team for their own take on what makes an awesome Board member. Here are some quick snippets from them where they didn’t overlap with mine:

Disclaimer – I run a private company. While I’m sure a lot of these things are true for other types of organizations (public companies, non-profits, associations, etc.), the answers may vary. And even within the realm of private companies, you need to have a Board that fits your style as a CEO and your company’s culture. That said, the formula above has worked well for me, and if nothing else, is somewhat time tested at this point!

I've been booked to speak there for months. Should be the first speaker for the day.

This should be my LAST speaking (and in person consulting) gig for a long, long while. Focusing more of my time on original research and writing. Now that I've got my health back, I'm going to make the most of the uptime available.

What's the topic of the presentation? I'm going to present on the 27 rules of open source warfare (the structure of my new book). It suspect this book is going to be essential reading for anybody concerned about where things are headed re: globalization, drones, etc.

Long time readers of the blog will recall that I spent much of the first year explaining how in a MobCon world the media model had fundamentally changed from the old media model of Browse with us, Buy from them to the new model of Browse with us, Buy from us.

Mashable provided additional proof of this argument during world FB day with an infographic illustrating how 9 tech giants traded after going public.

As you can see from this extract the new model easily out performed the old model as a long term investment.

If this was an American blog, it would be going dark for 24 hours tomorrow in sympathy with the strike against the Stop Online Piracy Act currently before Congress — which might more accurately be named the Rent-Seeking Plutocrats Enabling Act.

(PS: Many of the links in this blog entry will fail if you click on them on January 18th, the day of the anti-SOPA internet strike. They should be back by the 19th.)

A few weeks ago I wrote about Mary Portas’ Review of the High St and its confusion over what she was trying to achive with her review, or was it a strategy or perhaps a wishlist? Maybe we’ll never know. There’s a lot of confusion over what to do with the High Street . Dan Thompson, artist and erstwhile leader of the PopUpPeople movement and the informal Empty Shop Network is not one of them.

“Pop-ups” are temporary uses of empty shops. Ordinarily, pop-ups create a highly-visible re-use of empty premises adding additional activity to the High Street. Mostly pop-ups are ventures that have arts & culture bent, sometime there is a charitable theme but increasingly there is a community purpose.

High Streets are massively important to Place. They are a hub for interaction. The idea of Town Centre (or Neighbourhood Centre) implicitly creates the notion of convergence. The High St is confluence of the known and the unknown, friends and strangers, the planned and the unplanned. They reinforce place networks, keeping the connections and dependencies above the critical level to ensure ‘belonging’ can be nourished. The High St is one of the opportunities we get to check our identity and test the unity of our prejudices through the personal self and civic self. We may not consciously experience the High Street in this way because of habituation, but very few of us fail lament the demise of the High Street when we pass thru and see closed shops and the decay.

The Pop-up people report, available here, looks at examples of Pop-use from all around the country, from places as diverse as Coventry and Worthing, Bedford and Leeds. There is even an international example from Rotterdam.

We have to be honest and accept that we can’t deal with evaporating retail demand and consumer desire through Pop-Ups alone. But I think the Pop-Up movement shows that we can do something else with High Streets. That Pop-ups are frequently ‘artsy’ simply tells us that creative community sees opportunity for renewal too. There are many reuses for former shops including office space, residential, and so on. It doesn’t have to be solely about retail space and we need to get landlords to think about this. PopUpPeople are one inspiration to this essential cultural and economic shift.

To maintain the importance of the High Street at the heart of the community, we need to think creatively about the long term repositioning and reinvention of the spaces to keep people coming to and through the High Street. To build resilience we need to defend places that we share. This requires us to re-imagine the High street and PopUpPeople are the animateurs of possibility, Pop-Up is a form of reinvention.

There's an MtoGo at Lime Street now. A dinky one tucked in the corner. Ready to fulfil all your ticket and Mars Bar requirements.

It means they've demolished the old 1970s ticket office, and replaced it with a tiled floor pattern showing the city's skyline:

You’re definitely going to want to make sure you stop by Sephora in Center City (1714 Chestnut St.) tomorrow. From noon-6pm, make-up artist and founder of NARS Cosmetics, Francois Nars is celebrating his new, limited edition set “Wicked Attraction” by sharing some of his makeup magic. You’ll learn how to recreate this season’s top beauty trends and be one of the first to experience the brand’s Spring 2012 Color Collection (side note: is it just me or is Nars pretty hot?)

In honor of both First Friday and Valentine’s Day, tomorrow night from 6-9pm, Smak Parlour is offering customers a free fab flower pin and hair-clip with any purchase over $25 as well as a complimentary glas of “Pale Pink” wine from Pinot Boutique (it has a hint of red berries!). You’ll also be entitled to a free sample at Pinot Boutique when you come from Smak (it’s just a few doors down).

No need to wait and hope your beau buys you a little bling for Valentine’s Day! Encouraging you to wear your “Heart On Your Sleeve,” Third Street Habit is taking 20 percent off their entire selection of jewelry all day Saturday (11am-6pm). Sip some bubbly while perusing an array of stunning creations—from the Chan Luu limited edition heart wrap bracelet to A Peace Treaty’s line of timeless, artesian pieces.

Debra Bradley Ruder in Harvard Medicine:

Russian archaeologists have been excavating Denisova Cave for three decades, but it wasn’t until recently that they unearthed a pea-sized pinky bone from a young girl who, they think, lived some 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. Remarkably, it contained enough genetic material to salvage and study.

That bone, along with an oversized adult molar, helped Reich and his colleagues at HMS and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, identify a previously unknown hominin who was neither Neanderthal nor modern human. This “archaic” group, dubbed the Denisovans, after the cave, apparently inhabited a large swath of Asia and—like Neanderthals—mated with modern humans. Although both Neanderthals and Denisovans eventually died out, traces of their genes live on in some populations today.

These discoveries are adding pieces to the puzzle of how humans evolved and where and when prehistoric people roamed the Earth. The work also reinforces the notion that population mixing has been the rule, not the exception, throughout human history. For geneticists like Reich, however, the greatest promise of this research might be in learning whether the genes inherited from these ancient people help protect today’s humans from disease.

More here.

"The past is a different country; they do things differently there."

In my last essay I discussed the likely and predictable environmental and technical constraints on writing fiction set in the 21st century, specifically looking at 2032 and 2092 as yardsticks. But I said virtually nothing about probably the most important factor in defining what our world might look like in the near future — namely, how we perceive it, and how our perception of our world feeds back into the way we behave (and how this in turn determines its shape).

This is of necessity a much fuzzier and more incoherent, flexible view of the future. But let's start with the predictive element that looks most likely — that the future will be about cities full of elderly people who are afraid of the sky — and then ask what this means.

A key prerequisite for a society of old people is a demographic transition from large families with many children to small families (typically of 1-2 children, with 3 or more being outliers). This phenomenon has swept around the planet since the 1930s with increasing force, driven by several triggers: antibiotics and modern medicine mean that almost all children survive into adulthood (prior to the 20th century around 50% of children died before reaching the age of 5), the cost of raising and educating a child sky-rockets as a society industrialises and requires a more educated work force: and female education and emancipation almost inevitably leads to family planning.

Long term economic consequences of the demographic transition are still unclear, but we can be fairly sure that post-DT societies need new models for nursing the elderly (you can't simply shuffle them off to a back room and split the work load among five or six daughters). There may be cyclic deflationary pressures (as populations shrink, real estate becomes less valuable), age-induced recessions (as the ratio of workers to [mostly elderly] dependents in a society skews towards the elderly), and so on. The medical care costs of the elderly are higher, but in turn, care for the old is labour intensive (and may offer some hope for how we find jobs for the employable people who've been shoved out of work in agriculture and industry by automation). There's also some indication that the demographic transition is semi-reversible, with some countries that went into steep sub-replacement decline suddenly experiencing baby booms (notably France and the UK in the past decade).

More controversial is the interaction between future shock, the demographic transition and religious indoctrination.

One response to the rapid pace of technological and social change is what Alvin Toffler characterised in 1970 as future shock: a syndrome characterised by inability or refusal to adapt to change, rejection of new patterns of social organization, vehement adoption of superstitious, new age or fundamentalist religious beliefs, and social reaction. We can see the symptoms of future shock all around us today. Among the reactions to change are a rise in extreme fundamentalism, and also (in societies undergoing or just having undergone the demographic transition) the use of religious justifications to restrict womens' reproductive freedom. (Males with social privilege are threatened directly by female emancipation, especially in traditional societies where large family size is a status/wealth symbol. It's also a direct threat to male sexual privilege in developed nations).

Restrictions on female reproductive autonomy also serve to induce women to remain within a faith community by making it hard to leave, which in turn ensures that their children are raised within that particular memetic complex. The War On Women's Reproductive Freedom is probably best seen as an adaptive backlash against the background of rapid change, but I think it's doomed to fail in the long term because forces driving the demographic transition (notably the increasing cost of raising a child to adulthood, combined with the decreased rate of infant mortality) aren't going to go away; the ultra-religious are going to end up having to choose between smaller families or living in ever more abject poverty. (Even trying to evade the pressure by home-schooling is problematic, because it's going to be the women who deliver the schooling, which in turn means that the women are going to have to be literate ...)

Keeping on the subject of emancipation: the long-term trends are running in favour of female education and emancipation, and against discrimination on the basis of spurious assumed genetic grounds (classical 19th century European racism). I'm not proposing that bigotry in general is in decline because there are startling blind spots all over the place, and crazy-sounding shit so wild I couldn't put it in a work of fiction. (Bigotry is fractal, and today's victim is tomorrow's oppressor.) I do think that homosexuality is slowly but surely being mainstreamed in western culture, despite opposition from threatened masculinists (and conservative women who see female homosexuality as threatening to undermine their status or lifestyle choices).

Speaking of supernormal sexual stimuli, Peter Watts has speculated that just as Photoshop retouching has corrupted our idea of beauty sufficiently good VR or teledildonics may offer us sexual experiences via machine that are so much better than person-to-person real world sex that, well, nobody wants to make the nasty any more. I'm not sure it's going to go that far, any more than pervasive access to porn on the internet has debauched and depraved our entire society in the past decade or so, but some subcultures/sexualities are unlikely to be mainstreamed because they are frankly harmful to third parties. It is interesting to speculate that teledildonics or VR may not only offer a distracting supernormal sexual stimulus to us, but be tailored to channel individuals with paedophile, necrophile, or other societally unacceptable desires into a non-harmful direction. Or at least in a direction that doesn't harm human beings. (Currently child pornography is illegal because it is argued that paedophiles use it for grooming children by convincing them that it's normal. But what if the child pornography in question could give a paedophile a more fulfilling sexual experience than anything they could experience with a real child, and could not be used for grooming?)

Ahem. Getting back to the long-term consequences of the demographic transition, what is clear is that a population that is around 30-50 years past the transition has a lot more middle-aged or elderly folks than children, with various psychological effects. Past 95, very few surviving adults are physically active. Past 85, many adults are suffering from some degree of dementia (be it vascular dementia or Alzheimer's). Past 45, a low speed cognitive decline begins to set in among many people. Past about 40, we become less flexible and find it harder to adapt to new technologies and ways of thinking, or to learn. And past about 25, we acquire a sense of our own mortality (one reason why, in traditional mass conscription armies prior to the First World War, troops aged 18-24 were assigned to front line units and reserves aged 24-34 were assigned to garrison duty/reserve operations: it wasn't just their physical stamina that was in question, but their willingness to take risks).

Given the rising proportion of elderly people in our societies, I expect that over the next century a lot of medical research will focus on the cognitive defects associated with age. I expect the most debilitating ones to receive most of the research funding -- notably the dementia problem, and to a lesser extent middle-aged cognitive impairment.

Now, it's almost a cliche that the older people get, the more socially conservative/reactionary they become, relative to the baseline social beliefs of young adults. But right now it's hard to tell whether this is a consequence of slow neurodegenerative conditions or of social conditioning — by age 40-50 adults conforming to the majority definition of social success will have raised children and owned property and hopefully started a pension fund; they have a stake in society, and a lot to lose in event of adverse change. Also, with more fragile health, they are generally more risk-averse than youngsters. In the USA it's very rare to see a start-up company founded by anyone over the age of 35; family and health pressures are a huge deterrent against striking out in a new venture without employer-provided group health insurance. (In the UK, start-up founders are frequently older or middle-aged, because a socialised healthcare system removes this major barrier to entrepreneurial ventures.)

I'll note that one side-effect of mild cognitive impairment is a reduction in curiousity. Another is that the person in question tends to assimilate new information only insofar as it validates and supports their existing world-view and prejudices. Beliefs people hold by the time they reach middle age often become set in stone as they grow older. And if more people live into old age, we will see a society in which social change becomes harder to achieve. (Unless medical treatments for cognitive degeneration become available.)

We will probably see by 2032 (much less 2092) middle-aged or elderly adults who are healthier and more cognitively flexible than their counterparts in 2012. The definition of "middle age" is pushed back somewhat; the threshold for "elderly" may likewise be moved. If it turns out that much of the post-35 cognitive change is degenerative and can be treated medically then we may see much livelier middle-aged and elderly people with more flexible, changeable, tolerant attitudes (albeit still more cautious than the young because they've lived through hard times and expect them to come again). Intolerance and authoritarianism seem to be largely an emergent side-effect of abuse and deprivation — a response to existential fear. A post-demographic transition population where child-rearing efforts are focussed on a small number of children and women are educated will (I hope) result in adults who are less prone to fear and intolerance.

If we get life prolongation treatments that work — even if they only prolong our active lives towards the current limit threshold (of roughly 120 years) — then we can expect some more interesting social changes.

For one thing, the primary benefit of democracy over autocracy (that it provides a pressure valve by facilitating orderly transitions of power before any government can become unpopular enough to trigger a mass revolt) may evaporate if the working life of a political professional stretches from age 30 to 120: with the same faces repeatedly coming up from decade to decade there may be an emergent gerontocracy. Jobs with responsibility are going to be hard for youngsters to find, career progression will be slow, and the ability of the elderly to make long-term plans is going to be socially exclusionary towards the young — not a good recipe for avoiding inter-generational strife. Policing of youthful behaviour may become a major social flash-point, with ubiquitous surveillance deployed to produce a global panopticon that suppresses behaviour the elderly find alarming (such as anything remotely high spirited in a public place). The world of 2092 will not be a pleasant place for the under-45s, if this is the state of the medical art.

On the other hand, if we get a handle on the senescence process itself and can either freeze or roll back the physical ageing process and treat the cognitive debilitation of age, then things may take a different (and to our eyes more surreal) turn. Physically young and mentally agile/flexible elderly people will be hard for youngsters to compete with, but will look similar — aside from different choices of style markers. And the cult of youth in 20th/21st century western civilisation will give the elderly youth an incentive to adopt youthful fashions, or to apply the brakes to the rate of change of fashion (however, my money is on the former). It's going to be hard to tell at a glance (without resorting to reality augmentation tech) whether the apparently 22 year old hipster in the bar is a real 22-yo hipster adopting an ironic pose because they're poor and locked in a dead-end part time job for the next 20 years before there's any hope of their obvious merit being recognised, or whether they're an 82 year old whose cynicism is born of genuinely having seen it all before.

Work is going to be a headache. We're already in a situation where, in most of the developed world, the full employment rate is in the range 25%-40% — that is, the proportion of people in the population at large who are employed full-time in a job that they are not over-qualified for. (Remember: a large chunk are under or over employable age, or unemployed, or employed part-time, or in the position of a law graduate working a counter in Walmart. The full employment rate is thus a better indicator of an economy's health than the unemployment rate — because below 4% unemployment there isn't actually enough liquidity in the labour market, and in any case, you can reduce unemployment easily by mandating a lower limit on weekly working hours, thus necessitating more employees to cover a job for 168 hours per week.)

There's an ideological road-block to survival here, and it is current generation capitalism (not to mention the Calvinist work ethic and a whole bunch of quasi-religious baggage). The truth is that we can't all work, and there isn't enough work to go round. Basing our social values on our fiscal utility is both short-sighted and inhumane. It's also horrifyingly oppressive, if you are 20 years old and looking forward to a century of labour at the bottom rungs on the ladder, or poverty. We're currently getting a crash course in what Karl Marx called the crisis of capitalism — its tendency to oscillate between boom and bust. Old, cautious, frightened people don't like busts. So unless they're deprived of effective political redress via the ballot box, they're going to vote for socialisation of risk. It's going to take another generation for the memory of the down-side of the Soviet Bloc to fade, but thereafter we may well see the pendulum swing back towards state planning and provision of universal services such as healthcare, a basic income, and education. Assuming, that is, that the highly acidic melting pot of capital globalisation doesn't dissolve the states before the mass movement of manufacturing capital from the developed to the developing world slows down and equilibrates.

In the short term lots more religious fundamentalism, coupled with an anti-feminist backlash (and racist "get off my lawn" ranting against foreigners taking our jobs, either by coming over here to work or by our corporations sending their factories overseas). Also, lots of Bad Crazy stuff. The USA will be particularly bad, as empires in retreat are always fecund breeding grounds for paranoia, anger, and strange religious heresies. This will die down slowly, as the fundamentalists run into the demographic transition and the wealth-or-fecundity trap, and the imbalance between the wealth of the developed world and the third world diminishes (due to a combination of capital flight on one hand and industrialization on the other).

Other factors will tend to support female emancipation and societal normalization of homosexuality. For example, in China sex-selective abortion has led to a skewed gender ratio, with 1.2 males per female in some areas. The result, however, is that young women contemplating marriage can demand that suitors provide them with wealth such as a house and a car; the social status of young women is indirectly boosted by the dearth of competition, and new families are actively seeking to have daughters. Meanwhile, the first Gay Pride event in Beijing passed peacefully last year, and it's reasonable to predict that social acceptance of homosexuality will in turn reduce the pressure on gay men to marry a beard. Extrapolate to the rest of the world: as countries develop, family sizes shrink, women acquire more education, we see a familiar pattern emerging.

Longer term, we can expect a more cautious societal background, with slower change. More dispossessed youth feeling put-upon by their long-lived elders (as is particularly notable in Greece and Italy. Politics may well slowly swing back towards a pattern of state provision of social services by mid-century; the alternative will be serious civil disorder as the surplus labour left high and dry by the receding tide of automated industrial production revolts.

Huge turd-in-the-punchbowl events that may Change Everything include: working, affordable life extension, a Singularity (i.e. the Rapture of the Nerds, as envisaged circa 1990), mind uploading or working human equivalent AI, a new religion or ideological complex with the growth dynamic of 6th/7th century Islam or 20th century Leninism, and a global epidemic of Martian Hyper-Scabies. But I'd pencil in all of the above as speculative, rather than something that can be counted on.

I’ll be talking at Data Insights Meetup today on the topic of Digging into Open Data.

Abstract

There has been growing interest, especially in government, in ‘open data’. This talk will explain what open data is, why it is important and go on to cover some of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s recent work in this area.

About the Open Knowledge Foundation

The Open Knowledge Foundation has been a pioneer in the field of open data since its inception in 2004. It works in a wide array of areas from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. Its open-source CKAN software powers http://data.gov.uk/, http://thedatahub.org/ and dozens of other open data hubs around the world. For more information about the Foundation see http://okfn.org/ and http://okfn.org/projects.

Back in 2006, I gave a talk at Euro OSCON on the future of technology covering commoditisation with a specific focus on 3D printing. This was based upon research and talks I'd given many years earlier on the subject.

Our world is heading in a fairly clear direction in terms of continual evolution of business activities such as commoditisation of discrete IT components, creation of higher order systems, disruption of past industries, development and exploitation of ecosystems, co-evolution of practice and ... well, I've covered this lots.

The strategic use of open source as a weapon is also becoming more common along with the new forms of organisation that are necessary to cope with this more evolved world. We should see the development of higher order agents and hence augmented intelligence with Siri being a starting point on this journey. Increasingly organisation will learn to exploit flow, the natural evolutionary path of any activity from chaotic (genesis) to the more linearly ordered environments (commodity and utility services). Flow was a topic I touched up again in Strata last year.

The reactions of past industries (e.g. legal protection as barrier to entry), the inertia of many, the next wave of change (being commoditisation of the manufacturing process), explosions of un-modeled data, the confusion, the arguments ... oh, it's the same cycle.

Don't worry if you're missing out in the buzz around today's hot topic (commoditisation of IT nee cloud) or tomorrow's (commoditisation of manufacturing nee 3D printing) as there's much more to come and invariably the giants of today will fail to cope with flow and new giants will appear to replace them.

The trends are already in motion and it's just a question of how the game plays out. To mangle one of Tim O'Reilly's favourite phrases - the future has been here for some time, it's just not uniformly distributed.

So, I want to return to one part of that 2006 presentation which I still find relevant - the formation of Spime Script. We're entering a phase where hardware will become increasingly as malleable as software which leads to a problem of choice - if I want to change the function of something, do I do this in software or hardware? The tendency today is obviously towards software because its more malleable but the future is never the past. However this creates a problem of skill - will I need to become proficient in both software and CAD / electronic design?

In reality both CAD and whatever software language you use, compile down to instruction sets and the function of the device is the interaction of these instruction sets - one which is substantiated physically and the other which is substantiated digitally.

Turning this on its head then why not write the function of what you want, the function of the device? Compilers can therefore undertake the complex decision trees (which is what they're good at) required to determine what element of that function is encoded as physical and what element is digital.

A future language is needed, something whereby the output is both physical and digital and I describe merely the function of what I'm after.

A sort of ...

I'm an idiot. Not all of the time, mind you, not even most of the time, but every now and then, I'm an idiot. Like the time my friend and co-founder Brian Halligan asked me to read the book “Moneyball”. This was back when we had first launched our startup, HubSpot. “But, I'm not a baseball guy,” I said. “It's not about baseball. It's about data.” And, I put it on my reading list, and then still failed to read it. I even bought the book, but still failed to read it That was a mistake. moneyball

I just got done watching the movie “Moneyball” for the second time. The first time I watched it was last night. It's the only time I've watched the same movie twice in two days. It's not just because it was a great movie (it was), but because I felt I missed so much the first time, that I had to watch it a second. If you haven't seen the movie yet, you should stop reading this article and go watch it. If you get distracted and never make it back to this article, I forgive you.

Brilliant Startup Lessons From Moneyball

1. He passes the eye candy test. He's got the looks, he's great at playing the part.

Spectacular startup success often becomes a game about scouting and recruiting. A common mistake entrepreneurs make is recruiting team members early on simply because they look the part. In the long run, it doesn't matter if on paper, someone's perfect. You want people that can actually do the job. That VP of Sales candidate that has 15 years of experience at Oracle? Likely not worth it for you. They'll look the part, but they're not guaranteed to be able to actually do the job. And, like Johnny Damon, they're going to be expensive. Get good at seeing talent where others don't.

For example, at HubSpot, most of the early team did not look good on paper at all. Most of us had little or no prior background doing what we were setting out to do.

Identify a fundamental problem and then focus, focus, focus on solving that problem. Don't get distracted by all the the things that are swirling around the actual problem. Don't listen too closely to those that have deep industry expertise and are emotionally attached to the status quo — it's possible that they're part of the problem. Figure out what the actual issue is, and solve it.

For example, look at Dropbox. Drew set out to solve a really hard problem -- getting data to synch across different devices. He had many people (including me) that were telling him that this particular idea had been pursued so many times before. He didn't get distracted by all that noise. He dug in and fixed the problem. Today, Dropbox is valued at billions of dollars and has millions of happy users.

Reminds me of Apple. Only, Steve Jobs wrote it as ”think different” (intentionally going with the grammatically incorrect version because it “sounded better”). Like the Oakland As, your startup too is working under constraints. Often, big constraints. Often, unfair constraints. If you're trying to disrupt the status quo and beat competitors that are much bigger and better funded, you're not going to do it by playing their game. You'll need to think differently. Playing the old way when you're at a disadvantage is a sure-fire way to lose.

This is one that I'm personally very passionate about. When we started HubSpot, everything we had learned about startups -- and the convention wisdom was "do one thing, and do it very, very well." Generally, that's really, really good advice. Except when it's not. Like in our case. The problem we saw was not that there weren't great marketing apps out there -- the problem was that none of it was integrated or worked well together. So, we thought different. We decided to do the crazy, crazy thing of doing it all. Why? Because that's what we believed the problem was.

Experience is often over-rated. Some of the most successful startup teams consisted of people that lacked relevant experience at the time they joined. But, what they lacked in experience, they more than made up for in sheer talent and hunger. In the early days, hire athletes. People with raw talent and a propensity to get things done. Don't be resistent to recruiting people that are early in their careers. You're looking for arbitrage opportunities. You're looking for the future stars -- because you likely can't afford or convince the current stars.

I'm going to illustrate this point with a quick paraphrasing with a conversation I had with an entrepreneur last year. It went roughly like this:

Me. No, you actually need to write code and release a product. You need to respond to customer issues. You need to iterate quickly so you can learn quickly. You don't need a VP of anything, you need a doer of stuff that needs to get done. Don't think about buying titles — think about buying outcomes. Think about plugging gaping holes in the company. Signing up customers so fast that you can't respond to all the support emails? Don't hire a head of support, hire someone that helps you tackle the support issue. Someone that's maniacally committed to customer happiness. They can become your head of support some day.

6. He really needs to accept this as life's first occupation, a first career.

This statement was made to the young Billy Beane when he was trying to decide between the full scholarship to Stanford and a career in Major League Baseball. Billy's mom asked if he could do both. The answer was, he couldn't. And, that's true in baseball, in startups and just about any hyper-competitive activity. You can't straddle the fence, because you will get your ass kicked by someone who's almost as good as you, but much more committed. You can't take that investment banking job and do a startup. You can't maintain two feet firmly planted on the ground and take the leap of faith. You have to pick. It's not an easy choice, but you have to pick. And, if you're in school, my personal (and unpopular in some startup circles) advice is stay in school . Make learning and building connections your “first occupation”.

But whatever you do, don't sit on the fence. Commit to something. Don't hedge. Give it all you have. Make it your life's first occupation. If you can't get excited about it -- find something else. I've made lots of stupid mistakes in my professional career -- the stupidest was trying to run two startups at the same time. That's a story for another day. I'm going to close with a quote from my co-founder at the first startup: "If you sit on the fence too long, your genitals are going to hurt."

The startup world is filled with superstars that get overlooked or don't quite make it because they're "quirky" or otherwise don't fit preconceived patterns of what you think a person in a given role should look and feel like. None of that matters. When recruiting engineers, find brilliant people that write code that solves the problem simply, effectively and can be maintained without brain damage. When hiring sales people find those that have high emotional IQ and care about truly understanding customer problems -- and selling them a solution. Figure out what success looks like for a given role, and ignore the irrelevant details. (Note: Culture fit is not an irrelevant detail. Things that are irrelevant are age, nationality, gender, etc. -- things that have no bearing on the outcome).

Your ability to teach is one of the single biggest levers you have in a startup. Why? First, because it's one of the biggest benefits you can deliver to your team members. They can get a higher salary somewhere else. They can get better perks somewhere else. But, at your startup, they can learn things. Second, it's unlikely you're going to find the "perfect" 5-tool player. Even if you found them, you likely couldn't afford them. If you're willing to help people with a specific super-power fill in gaps in their knowledge/experience, you create lots of value.

Be a little bit patient. Often, your best people will take a little time to really shine. Don't judge too early. Determine the context. If someone's not cranking yet, is it because getting up to speed is hard? Everyone's too busy to show them ropes? Their lack of early performance could be the context, so be patient

But, don't be too patient. If someone isn't at least moderately productive in the first month or two, it's unlikely they're going to be super-productive in the following year. The really great people tend to deliver some value almost immediately.

It is good to be budget-conscious in an early-stage company. Instills the right kind of discipline that will help long-term. But, don't be a penny wise and a pound foolish. There are little things that don't cost that much, that makes people happier. It's not about the money (they can all afford the soda), it's about the inconvenience and the principle. Remember, deep down inside, people are human. [smile]

One quick example from HubSpot: We launched a book program whereby any employee can request any book they think makes them a better HubSpotter. I personally handle all requests and send out a Kindle version of the book immediately. It's not that expensive, but it's been super-well received.

One of the best segments in the movie. Pete is troubled at how different what they're doing is, and why it's hard to get others to understand and accept it. But, the point was, when you're transforming something and making massive change, not everyone is going to understand. The important thing is to be right -- and then make the change happen. The best way to convince people that your theory was right is to be right and show them (not tell them) you're right. Most people will never be convinced otherwise.

16. I'm not paying you for the player you used to be, I'm paying you for the player you are right now.

Hard-hitting advice. I'd extend this to say: Recruit on potential but reward on performance. Customers are not going to be delighted by the code a brilliant engineer could have written. On a related note is the quote "If he's a good hitter, why doesn't he hit good?" Or, "If she's such a good sales person, why can't she sell?"

And really, that's what it's all about. It's not about exiting for millions of dollars or going public. It's about changing the game. It's about seeing something that's not quite right in the world, and deciding you want to fix it. For me, personally, it was observing that marketing is broken. Most people hate marketing. we want to transform marketing into something people love. It's hugely ambitious, but I have this feeling, deep-down inside, that we're right.

How about you? What is the flaw (big or small) that you're seeing in the universe that you're trying to fix? Any favorite lines from Moneyball that you'd like to share?

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Why is Big Data viewed as Big Problem? In reality Big Data means Big Opportunity…All that data can be put to use to leverage and give you Knowledge discovery, Insight and Predictive Analytics capabilities for quick Decision Making and efficiency within your enterprise or organization.
Consuming Big data, be it structured, un-structured or semi-structured in totality and to recognize all natural patterns within, would be a solution to surf over the issue of chaotic data and multiple disparate data sources. Our research labs at Xurmo have invented an “Intelligent Information Fabric” which precisely does this and creates a pattern store (ever learning) for enterprises. One can then slice and dice this fabric to leverage all that one wants to, be it KD, Insight or predictive Analytics. If anyone is interested to know more, we can connect offline in this regard.

Eric and Ernie, Barker and Corbett, Keegan and Toshack are all great double acts. Few would disagree. At one point in history you might even have added Brown and Blair to that list, as everybody spent the money they didn’t earn propelling us to our present economic meltdown. But will anybody ever mention Cameron and Clegg in those same terms – I fear not.

What makes a great double act? I would suggest it is that the individuals, although they may have different qualities and attributes, are widely perceived to be roughly equal in talent and skill. Also they are made individually better because they act as a foil for their partner. So when Toshack heads the ball on for Keegan to crack it in the back of the net; it’s the same as Ernie feeding Eric a gag.

Now let’s look at the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of British politics – Cameron and Clegg. After their initial love-in at the No.10 garden, things haven’t gone great for the No.2 man.

Clegg has been made to look a chump by doing the mother of all U-turns on tuition fees and managed to get snared in an unwinnable PR referendum, which means the Liberals will forever be on the fringes of politics.

I’ve now been supplied with a FoI response from the Cabinet Office, sent only after I got the Information Commissioner involved, which shows just how seriously Clegg is taken inside Government.

Those of you who have read this blog before will know I was trying to find out the communication between No.10 and Wimbledon in relation to the deputy MP helping himself to complimentary tickets for the women’s final this year – an event which two of my family attended AFTER winning a raffle AND then paying £200.

The Cabinet Office said they could find no record of him having attended the event! But I saw him on television hob-nobbing in the Royal Box.

When I found a photo of him at the event and sent that to the Commissioner the Cabinet Office did at last find a record of the information.

But let’s look at the excuse. Does it give us an insight into just how highly regarded Clegg must be considered within No.10.

“The search for information in response to your initial request was co-ordinated by two members of staff (one inside No.10 and one for the rest of the Cabinet Office). Each thought that the other had contacted the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, when in fact neither had. I am very sorry for this oversight. I have now taken steps to make the search process more robust in future cases.”

If you want to see the whole of the letter it is here No10, and the actual e-mail exchange in which Clegg first tries to go on a day when there is no tennis and then seems more concerned about who else will be in the Royal Box is here Emails.

The algorithms that enable drone swarms is advancing EXTREMELY quickly. In the next couple of years, the number of advances in technology, deployments, use cases, and awareness of drones will be intense. In 5 years, they will be part of every day life. You will see them everywhere.

Not just one or two drones. SWARMS of drones. Tens. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions (potentially if the cost per unit is small enough)?

Here's a video depicting experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. It was posted today:

If you want to learn more about how swarming works as a method of attack, here's an article I wrote about it seven years ago. Benefits of swarming attacks include:

Here's your homework. Think about the swarming tech you see above in the context of the following:

Also, check out my Resilient Communities site. It's a site dedicated to figuring out how to not only survive the coming decades but how to thrive regardless of how bad it gets.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): This is rightly difficult territory. I am relieved to hear that Ministers have reconsidered the transitional arrangements, and I am pleased that the Opposition welcome that. In the noise and heat of the debate, important truths are getting lost or ignored. We are not generous enough towards the disabled, and I was pleased to hear that they are completely exempted from the proposals, which should be widely welcomed across the House. The exemption of war widows, who often have very little to live on and whose former husbands sacrificed so much to help our country, is extremely welcome, as both parties in government have asked their loved ones to go into battle on our behalf.

I am also pleased to hear that anybody in work is exempted. The Government’s case revolves around something with which I believe the Labour party normally agrees: working should always be worth while. In today’s debate, there has been more heat than light. If the Labour party, the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party all believe that it should be more worth while to work, we need such a provision to achieve the desired effect. It comes down to the last-minute proposal that there should be some regional differentiation of the cap. We are no longer arguing for or against caps—we all now believe in that type of headgear—but Labour believes that there should be different fashions of cap across the country whereas, on the Government Benches, the passion is apparently for uniform caps.

Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con): Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is difficult to set a cap if one is not prepared to name a level for it?

Mr Redwood: My hon. Friend is ahead of me in my argument. So far, I think I have carried an expectant and worried Labour party with me. Labour agrees with all the exemptions, agrees with the delayed transition and agrees that we need to make working worth while.

Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill) (Lab): I was not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman was about to propose himself as the head of Ofcap in practice.

Mr Redwood: No, I like representing my constituents and I suspect that the two jobs would not be compatible. I am very grateful for the kind offer, however, and I notice that the right hon. Gentleman prefers the name Ofcap to Doffcap. As Labour has not yet put forward proposals to deal with the people it describes as fat cat landlords, I think it might well be a case of Doffcap to the landlords, as we seem to be discussing how much money we will route to the landlords through the housing benefit mechanism.

I suspect that if I strayed into the subject of proposals for the housing market and landlords, you would rule me out of order, Mr Deputy Speaker, but perhaps that is a debate for another day. There might be common ground on how we can get better value for the public money being spent while ensuring that we do not cut off the supply of housing, which would be a very stupid thing to do by clumsy intervention. We need more housing at an affordable level for people on modest incomes.

We are talking about a group of people on very modest incomes, and it ill behoves people on decent incomes, such as Members of the House, to be too mean about it. We have the conundrum, however, that we always want to make it worth while for those people to work. We all accept that there will be a cap, but, if it is to be a regional cap, before deviating from the Government’s proposal to the Labour proposal we would need to know what Labour has in mind for the total costings and how the proposal would work fairly within an area as well as between areas.

Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab): One thing that the right hon. Gentleman has not mentioned is that when we compare the working family with the non-working family, all too often in this debate we are not comparing apples with apples. The working family would have child benefit for their children on top of the wage that is constantly mentioned and, depending on the number of children they have, they might well qualify for child tax credit. We are not comparing properly, so simply saying that the situation is unfair to those working families gives the wrong impression. Does he not agree?

Mr Redwood: I thought it was now common ground that for a large number of people on certain kinds of benefit, work is not worth while. We are trying to solve that problem, so despite all those things that the hon. Lady truthfully reports to the House, we still have that problem, with which both parties are wrestling. That is why the Labour party is not here today saying, “There is no problem: we are going to vote against the whole thing,” but is here with an alternative proposal at the 11th hour—the last possible chance to consider this.

Let us go back to Labour’s argument on the regional cap. If it had come with a properly costed and working proposal, I might have been sympathetic to it, but we do not yet know from Labour what is the total package of money available. We have not even been told whether it wants to live within the budget that the Government have come up with for the proposal or whether it thinks the overall proposal is too mean. If it wants to spend much more, it will not solve the “Why work?” problem because provision will become too generous again and it will have a public spending problem.

Mr Byrne: Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what the budget actually is because although we have heard some figures from the Minister today, he has not set out, for example, whether the grace period will cost any money?

Mr Redwood: Ministers are very capable of setting out their own figures. I do not have, at the top of my mind, all the detailed figures the right hon. Gentleman wants, which are properly things for Ministers to report to the House, but they have detailed the total savings overall and they are trying to live within that budget. As has rightfully been reported to the House today, they have given up some of the savings to accommodate the transitional period. It is entirely fair to ask the right hon. Gentleman, who is a specialist, as is the Minister he shadows, to tell us how much difference there would be in his proposals. Clearly, Labour has not yet thought through what the total should be.

There is another, very difficult, issue to consider with regionalism: there are big divergences in house and flat prices within, as well as between, regions. We should recognise this point, which in some ways makes this policy a bit easier to stomach than some on the Labour Benches suggest. I heard a former Westminster councillor saying that she had done some work on the situation of families who would be caught by the cap in Westminster. Naturally I was worried and wanted to hear what her answer was. She said she had found a considerable number of properties that she thought would be suitable for those families, quite close to where they were currently living, which happened to be rather better value than those in which they were currently living, supported by benefits. That seemed rather good news to me. Members from London constituencies will know that within London there is a huge variety of cost in property—often street by street, not merely borough by borough—so I do not think the proposal is quite as penal as some on the Labour Benches suggest. That makes it quite difficult to set a regional cap because such a cap might be no more appropriate as an average than the national cap.

Naomi Long (Belfast East) (Alliance): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making this point, which a number of Opposition Members from Northern Ireland have concerns about. I represent a Belfast constituency and there are massive disparities between rents in the Greater Belfast area and those in more rural constituencies. If this sort of regionalisation was driven down to a very local level, it could distort people’s ability to seek work in the city or outside it.

I am conscious that others want to speak so I shall not extend my argument further. I just want to make the point that in order to consider fairly what is an interesting proposal from Labour, the minimum we would need to know is the overall cost in comparison to the Government scheme and how these difficult problems of judgment within areas or regions would be settled. That is an important consideration.
Mr Byrne: Presumably, the fact that homelessness will not be created, which is what the Secretary of State has argued over the past year, is the reason why he has had to find another £80 million—to solve a problem that does not exist. In direct answer to the challenge put by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), our amendment suggests that the right place to start this debate is by having a level for London and a level for outside London. That would begin to address the problem he is highlighting.

Mr Redwood: That is something we need to think rather more about, but unfortunately we have little time to do so. That suggestion might have been helpful, but there is also the problem of the big variety of levels within London. We need to know the extent to which the Labour party wants to validate the current high rents and whether there might be some other solution to the problem of very high rents that lies behind some of this difficulty.

The conclusion I must come to is that the best offer on this issue at this late stage is the Government’s. Something must be done to move things in the right direction and make it more worth while to work. All of us, on both sides of the House, are extremely concerned that in recent years, under both parties, although quite a lot of jobs have been generated a very large proportion of them have gone to people who have recently arrived, because they think the jobs are good enough and that the pay is high enough. There have been reasons—perhaps very good reasons—why people who are settled here and out of work have not wanted those jobs or been able to take them, but part of the answer must be that we have the wrong balance between benefit and work income, and we need to do something about that.

What’s the current deal on credit default swap data? Is the Dodd-Frank bill going to force any CDS pricing to be publicly available? A bit of background: a credit default swap is something like insurance you pay in case the underlying bond is defaulted on (but not exactly, see here), so it’s relatively easy to infer [...]

When they released fourth quarter earnings data last week Netflix broke out their streaming and DVD businesses for the first time. A quick analysis of the data reveals that in the US the revenue and profit per month for each streaming customer was $21.94 and $2.40, whilst the average DVD subscriber paid $33.04, which yielded a profit of $17.32. Lower revenues are combined with lower margins with the result that the 34% less revenue per streaming sub translates into 86% less profit. Netflix hopes to make up for the lower amounts per sub by growing the digital business fast enough to more than offset the declining physical business, and by increasing margins.

Results out from Amazon yesterday tell a similar story in their books division. The worlds largest retailer provides much less information than Netflix about the performance of its different business units. However, we know that digital books rose to 19% of the US publishing market in the first 11 months of 2011, up from 8% in the same period of 2010, and that at 8% the Q4 growth rate for Amazon’s North American media sales, which include books, music, movies and video games, was below expectations. The explanation for the disappointing growth is most likely digital books, which typically cost less than physical books and on which Amazon only recognises 30% of the cover price as revenue. From the Financial Times:

It is likely, however, that Amazon makes more profit on e-books than on the physical books, so whilst the trend to digital is shrinking revenues their profits should be ok. In this sense, which is the most important sense, it is better off than Netflix.

Financial analysts worry when there is a decline in any top line or bottom line metric and it is hard for management to keep Wall Street happy through transitions of the kind described above. In Reed Hastings and Jeff Bezos Netflix and Amazon have two of the most respected tech CEOs in the world, but their stock prices have still whipsawed wildly. Amazon was down 11% after their results this week and Netflix had a terrible time last year when Wall Street rejected its attempt to bring absolute clarity to its physical to digital transition by splitting the streaming and DVD businesses. So far Netflix has had the harder time of it, but streaming is now over half their business in the US, so they are over the hump. Amazon is much earlier in the transition, and has music, movies and games to worry about as well as books. That said, Amazon is a much more diversified business and is therefore more resilient to shocks in individual business units.

It will be interesting to see how the next year plays out for both these companies. Digital is the only way to go, but Wall Street may punish them for going there. If it does, then the implication is that the companies are over-valued today, not that they are getting worse.

Joe Anderson live chat Liverpool council leader Joe Anderson will be answering readers' questions on this liveblog from noon to 1pm today....

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Thank you for your letter dated 23 January 2012, and subsequent letter clarifying the position around the evidence given by The Times to the Leveson Inquiry.

I write to reassure you that the concerns raised within your letter are under investigation and officers from Operation Tuleta are dealing directly with the victim.

John Levett
Detective Superintendent
Operation Tuleta
pp Deputy Assistant Commissioner Akers

From shmoop.com:

"I hope that Sojourner Truth would be proud to see me, a descendant of slaves, serving as the First Lady of the United States of America.”– First Lady Michelle Obama

Sojourner Truth is considered one of the great abolitionists, activists, speakers, and thinkers of all time. Born into slavery in 1797, she possessed a gift for public speaking and spoke fervently about abolishing slavery and about the need for women’s rights. After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth dedicated her time to helping former slaves transition to a life of freedom. Sojourner Truth fought tirelessly for the rights of African-Americans and women until the day she died in 1883. In April of 2009, Sojourner Truth became the first black woman to be honored with a bust in the United States Capital. First Lady Michelle Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Hillary Clinton were among those who spoke about Sojourner Truth at the bust’s unveiling.

More here. (Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February. The 2012 theme is Black Women in American Culture and History).

From The Guardian:

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again." Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware.

More here.

Martin Brooke, from Cornwall UK, is an NHS associate specialist in paediatrics. He has generously given up his month-long holiday to travel to Malawi and volunteer his time and valuable skills at the SOS Hospital in Blantyre, where 21,000 people are treated every year.

In the past investigative reporters would suffer from a scarcity of information relating to questions they were trying to answer. While this is still the case, today journalists are also faced with an overwhelming abundance of data. In an age of information overload, to stay relevant to society journalists need to learn to separate signal from noise in order to provide valuable insights. Journalists need to be equipped with knowledge of the tools, techniques and tactics of working with data in order to derive maximum value from for their readers.

The European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation are pleased to invite you to the School of Data Journalism hosted at the sixth edition of Italy’s leading journalism event, the International Journalism Festival. The 2012 edition takes place in the beautiful city of Perugia between 25-29 April. Entry to the School of Data Journalism panels and workshops is free. Each workshop has a limited number of places and therefore registration will be necessary. Please note that not all requests to participate in the workshops will be accepted.

What is the School of Data Journalism and who is it for?

The panels attempt to provide answers to crucial questions for aspiring data journalists, editors and decision-makers in newsrooms:

In the workshops journalists who are interested to get started with reporting with data and budding data journalists will learn from experienced data journalists and open data experts essential skills related to how to get the data you need, how to analyse it, how to get stories from data and how to present your stories.

Panels

Panel 1: News and numbers: from CAR to data journalism (Thursday, 26 April)

Journalists have always used data and numbers to produce stories…and win Pulitzers. From Philip Meyer’s coverage of the Detroit riots in 1967 to Steve Doig’s ‘What Went Wrong’ analysis of the damage patterns from Hurricane Andrew, data-driven reporting has brought valuable public service and won journalists recognition and prizes.

Whereas there may be distinguishing aspects about the data journalism of today and the computer-assisted reporting of the past, it is crucial to learn from successful examples, techniques and approaches of the past.

Panel 2: How can data journalism save your newsroom? (Friday, 27 April)

Journalism is under siege. Traditional models are collapsing. Developing the know-how to use the available data more effectively, to understand it, communicate and generate stories based on it, could be a huge opportunity to breathe new life into journalism.

Panel 3: You Too Can Be A Data Journalist! (Saturday, 28 April)

Where can I find data? How can I request data? What tools can I use? How can I find stories in data? How can I make money with data journalism?

Several leading data journalists, CAR specialists and journalism professors from the Guardian, the New York Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Medill School of Journalism and Cronkite School of Journalism worked together to answer these questions in the Data Journalism Handbook.

The handbook, the first comprehensive practical guide to data journalism, will be officially launched in this session. The session will provide the opportunity to meet and greet authors of the book, exchange knowledge and learn from them what you need to know to be a data journalist, as well as get a printed copy of the book.

Speakers

Workshops

Workshop 1: Scraping data & cracking PDFs (Thursday, 26 April)

Hands up who knows what machine-readable data is? You will soon, and more importantly, how to get it and what you can do with it once you have it!

A workshop targeted at scraping from scratch, including: What PDFs and webpages look like to your computer – An introduction to machine-readable / non-machine readable data The Scraper Cookbook – an overview of the key things you need to know to write a scraper Hands on session – learning to screen-scrape. Main focus: hands on session using tools such as ScraperWiki. If sufficient interest & time, we will also touch on some of the tools & skills needed to extract data from PDFs. Error checking – how to check what you have makes sense, spotting the types of errors sometimes introduced if you don’t get it quite right!

Workshop 2: Information wants to be free – Freedom of information requests and how to use them (Friday, 27 April)

Freedom of information requests are constantly evolving. Law changes and technological advancements make it increasingly easier to file and systematise FOI requests, and importantly track their progress through the system. This workshop includes demonstrations and case studies examining the current state-of-play with FOI requests in Europe and beyond and looking into what’s next for the freedom of information movement.

Workshop 3: Making data pretty (Friday, 27 April)

Journalism is no longer just a block of prose on a page. The modern reader often demands maps, infographics and visualisations to make the story jump out at them, particularly in digital environments.

There are a vast array of free tools available on the web to allow data-journalists to quickly and easily digest, process and display the data powering their stories. This workshop aims to give a good overview of what is currently available and delve into depth on one of the most powerful: Google Fusion Tables.

Workshop 4: Getting Stories from Data (Saturday, 28 April)

Enormous datasets can often prove extremely daunting to the unfamiliar. Mistakes and crimes have historically benefited from, and triumphs and good decisions been obscured by, a mask of bewildering numbers and statistics and gone unreported.

Large datasets often hold a wealth of undiscovered stories for those willing to invest the time into exploring them. This workshop is a ‘spotters’-guide’ for things to look out for and where to look for datasets.

Workshop 5: Spending Stories (Sunday, 29 April)

To get to the bottom of a story, you need only to ‘follow the money’. The same is true of government: budgeting is where policies and priorities are broken down into figures. Financial programming has a direct influence on all political areas: while other data on health or social help us understand what challenges society faces, looking at spending data allows us to see how government reacts to all of these.

There are many spending databases available on the web, some impenetrable, some accessible for analysis. We’ll show how we enable journalists and researchers to make sense of the data and what strategies can be used to investigate stories and policies.

Workshop leaders

When and where?

The Data Journalism School takes place at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia between 25 and 29 April 2012. The schedule of the Data Journalism School, with confirmed speakers for each panel and workshop, will be posted on the festival website in early February.

How to register?

Entry to the festival and the School are free. There is no registration process to attend the festival. For the workshops there is a limited number of available seats. To secure a seat in the workshops please register via this form. The deadline for workshop registration is 20 March 2012. You will be notified by email by 25 March at the latest if we were able to confirm you a seat. The workshops are entry-level. Consideration will be given to your experience, skills and motivation to attend the workshop when making the selection.

What do you need to bring?

A lot of enthusiasm and a laptop for the workshop sessions are required. Please note for hands-on workshops tablet PC’s will not be appropriate.

Questions?

If you have questions about the School of Data Journalism get in touch with the coordinators: Liliana Bounegru (bounegru [at] ejc.net) or Lucy Chambers (lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org).

"NOW look here, men," said Captain Joe Anderson as he inspected the platoon, baton tucked firmly under his elbow. "It's come to my attention that fascists are gathering in our midst, and there's no way old Tommy Atkins is going...

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Back in early December 2011, I wrote a blog post about Engagio, a new web service launched by our very own William Mougayar. For those who didn't read that post, Engagio is a service that aggregates your comment activity across many of the major social platforms and gives you a gmail style dashboard to see them and reply to them.

A lot has happened in the past 45 days since that post and I wanted to bring everyone up to speed on this project.

First, and most importantly, Engagio is now open to everyone. Every few days, I'd send an email to William saying "you have to open it up". And he'd reply, "we can't scale it yet". Now they think they can scale it, so it's open to everyone. If you didn't or couldn't check it out back then, you can now.

There are a bunch of new features, large and small. Most of them are pretty useful. A good example of that is social profiles. Here's Fake Grimlock's social profile, for example.

There is even a "fred wilson feature." At Disqus, the "fred wilson feature" was the ability to get an email for every comment and the ability to reply to the email and post it to the comment thread. At Engagio, the "fred wilson feature" is the ability to "mute a site." I get so many comments on AVC that my Engagio inbox is filled with them and I see nothing else. When I mute AVC, I see all my other commenting activity on the web, at Twitter, at Foursquare, at other blogs. This single feature has made Engagio way more useful to me. To "mute a site", you go to the Sites page via the left nav section, and click on the icon next to the site name.

Finally a disclosure. Engagio did a small seed round to given them runway to execute the "build the user base" stage of the business. My wife and I made a small angel investment in this round. I've been encouraging William to do this project since he first mentioned it to me in the fall. It seemed only right to encourage with both words and capital.

Please let William and me know what you think of the progress Engagio has made since it launched 45 days ago in the comments.

Today Warren Bradley is not just facing the courts but has also been permanently excluded from the Liberal Democrats. The Lib-Dem regional office sent an email to key party members last night explaining his permanent ban. It states: "Two weeks...

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“Critical thinking is difficult to do in large groups. Criticizing in a group setting tends to polarize it, and there are immediate and overriding political considerations of doing so. What’s more, some people hate to speak out in a group, while others thrive on so doing. This guarantees that the group will be led by personalities and personal interests more than it will be by the quality of ideas.”

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one of many reasons that a small venture capital partnership is a good venture capital partnership

I had a request for some Russian recipes, so I'm gonna hit you with Salad Olivier over the quiet internet weekend.

The problem with Russian Cuisine and Me is that I don't like dill and I don't like sour cream. These ingredients are prominent in like 90% of Russian dishes. So I end up altering things a lot, because I want to be able to eat it. I'll eat the cow tongue and the pickled herring and dammit, I'll even have the chicken jello if I get salt and some thick bread to put it on, but the smell of dill turns my stomach and unless it's swirled in borscht, sour cream is just foul.

All of this brings me to Olivier, which is a traditional and much beloved Russian/Ukrainian adaptation of a French dish (far more of Russian cooking is French-derived than you'd think, thanks to pre-Revolution courtly connections with France) often served at holidays. And how you feel about it depends on how you feel about potato salad in general.

Here in America, potato salad is an equally traditional dish, served in the summer for some terrible, quasi-demonic reason, since the heat renders this beast even greasier and more inedible than it started out, at picnics and the 4th of July and every barbecue ever. I have begun to suspect that potato salad is an entity unto itself, a pale, globby, tentaclular protrusion from an uncanny shadow universe. No one prepares potato salad, but if you host a barbecue and arrange your picnic tables, grill, loved ones, and beer in the right arcane positions, potato salad will simply appear, glistening white and alone, tasting of interstellar despair.

I have no idea if it is a thing that exists in the UK--I never came across it while living there, but then, I would hardly seek it out. Here's how you make a potato salad: get some potatoes, skin them, microwave them, chop them up, dump a jar of mayonnaise into them, and you eat that shit and you like it or you'll hurt your mother's feelings.

Salad Olivier is potato salad's inevitable Pokemon-like evolution into its next stage. Potatortle! In addition to the potato and mayonnaise, you add ham, canned peas and carrots, pickles, diced egg, and yes, dill.

I know it is beloved. I know altering the recipe in any way is basically a crime against humanity, God, and Russia. But ever since I turned it down the first time, I have thought: we have got to be able to do better than this. I am foodie, here me roar! Why would I use all these sad ingredients when I might actually be able to make this into something I can eat without shaming myself in front of the possibly-sentient potato salad?

So here's the thing. Don't serve this to your Russian family members or in-laws. You will never hear the end of how it's not "right." Call it Salad Olivrizard if you must. But for those of us who, like me, cannot handle potato salad on any level, consider this version.

Firstly, why the hell would we ever use gross, quivery store-bought mayonnaise? You make mayonnaise by mixing an egg and some olive oil at high speed. You can add anything you want to this in order to flavor it--I really like to add some rich curry paste or hot peppers and honey, but for Olivrizard, I suggest lemon garlic. Start with 1/4 cup of olive oil and one egg, add...well, I really like garlic so I'd probably add half a head, but you most likely want more like 2-4 cloves, plus the juice of a lemon and about a 1/2 teaspoon of zest--salt and pepper to taste. Whip it up in a food processor and when it's blended, drizzle in another 1/3 cup of olive oil slowly until it emulsifies. Now you have mayonnaise (aioli, really) that is not a tasteless 1970s abomination.

For the ham, substitute pancetta, for it is what bacon hopes to be when it grows up. Again I feel more is better, but chop up enough pancetta (thick chunks) to make about a cup, fry it up and put it aside on a paper towel to cool and drain. Give a piece to your cat to propitiate her, watch while she kicks it around for awhile with her huge paws before gnawing on it; laugh at her.

Get FRESH peas at the market, shell, and blanch. (Blanching means dump them into boiling water for 1 minute, remove and dunk in cold water.) Ditto with carrots. Fresh, peel, chop, and blanch.

If you want diced egg, go ahead and boil up 2 and set aside to cool. If you want to be SUPER FANCY, soak the boiled, peeled eggs in a mixture of soy sauce (2 tblsp), orange juice(1/3 cup), two tea bags of whatever tea you prefer, and cinnamon (two sticks) for 3-4 hours. You'll get deep dark brown beautiful eggs lightly flavored with tea and citrus and cinnamon and salt. I have an unfair advantage here with my chickens, because honestly, fresh chicken eggs are kind of unbeatable in that they possess actual chicken flavor. But not everyone has an ornery pack of hens out back.

Now, for pickles, I make my own. I do not suggest that this is necessary. In fact, the pickle part is kind of unnecessary, even in the classic dish, where it's optional. If you want to make malosolne ogurski, though, which means not-much-salt pickles, go ahead and slice up some pickling cukes, boil 1.5 liters of water with 2.5 tablespoons of salt and once the brine is cooled, pour it into glass jars containing cucumbers, 2 crushed cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of mustard seeds, 1/2 teaspoon of fresh horseradish, a sprig of cilantro (or dill or parsley if you hate cilantro), a sprig of thyme, and a couple of white peppercorns. Seal and wait 3 days. Then you have amazing crisp pickles with a totally unique taste, as there's no vinegar in this recipe.

Once you have all these ready, peel and boil about 2 pounds of potatoes, dice them into little cubes once cool--make sure all ingredients are cool or things will curdle and half cook and get gross really fast--and mix everything together in a big bowl along with a whole medium diced red onion. Add salt and black pepper as you will.

This is what happened with me and borscht, too. I figured I could awesome it up some--and my borscht is famous in my social group, but my in-laws assure me it's not "really" borscht. So if you're willing to suffer the shame of it not "really" being Olivier, you can join me in defeating the gelatinous potato salad incursion into our universe with the blinding light of justice, pork, and garlic.

Carbon capture innovation could soak up a thousand times more CO2 than real trees of a comparable size, claims scientist.

Within six or seven years, could we be seeing ‘artificial trees’ in use to combat climate change directly, soaking up carbon dioxide from the ambient air? That’s the hope held out by Klaus Lackner, whose brainchild invention was the star of the recent Air Capture Week at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (ImechE) in London.

The following post is by Andrew Magliozzi founder of FinalsClub.org and one of the developers working on the Annotator project.

Scholars, bring us your ancient, worn, and insightful annotations. We have the tools to help you collect and connect your knowledge of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot and others. Together we can create a comprehensive repository of commentary on the best that has been thought and said.

Embracing a common mission of openness, our source code will always be libre, our standards compliant, and our knowledge free. Organizations from Cambridge, US & UK, California, and Vienna are working together to combine our technologies and innovation to provide you with the ability to annotate and share any text, image, PDF, map, or video online.

We are also on the verge of rereleasing 273 public domain texts with 9000+ annotations from top young scholars at Harvard, Columbia, UChicago and other top institutions. In addition to the web, we also aspire to make our best content available on mobile reading devices, so curious minds everywhere can share a common discourse anytime, anywhere. Because we believe you should always control access to your knowledge, we will ensure your data has simple permissions and measures for portability.

If you are a developer, designer, or scholar, we could use your help to create, curate, and map our global knowledge graph. Together we can transform 21st century scholarship within and without the ivory tower. If you want to get involved, please join the conversation about our software and our scholarship.

Warren Bradley will soon appear in court to be charged with perjury. After a 10-month investigation and plenty of speculation behind the scenes the Crown Prosecution Service have decided to charge the former Liverpool council leader with perjury (making a...

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11 rebellions (476 voters) in vote on Welfare Reform Bill — Third Reading on 2012-01-31

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“Profound digital divisions of labour are evident in all open platforms that rely on user-generated content.

On Flickr, countries in the north are covered by much thicker clouds of information. Google’s databases contain more indexed user-generated content about the Tokyo metropolitan region than the entire continent of Africa. While on Wikipedia, there is more written about Germany than South America and Africa combined. In other words, there are massive inequalities that cannot simply be explained by uneven internet penetration rates. A range of other physical, social, political and economic barriers reinforce the digital divide, amplifying the informational power of the already powerful and visible.

That’s not to say the internet doesn’t have important implications for the developing world. People use it not just to connect with friends and family, but to learn, share information, trade, and represent their communities.

Consequently, it’s important to be aware of the internet’s highly uneven geographies of information. These inequalities matter to the south, because connectivity – though a clear prerequisite for access to most 21st-century platforms of knowledge sharing – is by no means a determinant of knowledge production and digital participation.

How do we move towards encouraging participation from and about parts of the world left out of virtual representations? The first step is allowing people to see what is, and isn’t, represented. After that, there is also a clear need for plans like Kenya’s strategy to boost local digital content, or Wikimedia’s Arabic Catalyst project, which aims to encourage the creation of content in Arabic and provide information about the Middle East.

It remains to be seen how effective such strategies will be in changing the highly uneven digital division of labour. As we rely increasingly on user-generated platforms, there is a real possibility that we will see the widening of divides between digital cores and peripheries. It is crucial to keep asking where visibility, voice and power reside in an increasingly networked world.”

I can fully understand the frustrations many feel about the turn of events in the EU.

Many Eurosceptics thought that once a new Treaty proposal came along, all the UK Prime Minister had to do was to table a series of amendments and opt outs for the UK so we could loosen our relationship, as our price for signing up to let the others move forwards to yet more closer union. After all, they argued, the previous Conservative governemnts had managed to negotiate effective opt outs from the social chapter, the common borders, the criminal justice provisions and the single currency. Labour has now given most of those away, and most Conservatives want to get control back over vital matters like borders, criminal justice and the economy.

The proposal for a new Treaty came along quicker than the government had expected. Mr Cameron asked for less in exchange for UK consent to the others going ahead with more integration than I would have wanted, but had even his modest demands turned down before Christmas. He rightly decided to veto the EU draft Treaty, and renewed that veto this week.

Instead of bringing the rest of the EU round to offering the UK a better deal, it led directly to their decision to create an inter governmental Treaty between up to 25 states. The unresolved issue between Mr Cameron and some of his Eurosceptic critics, is could the UK find a way which works to stop the 25 (or however many finallly sign up if they do) from using EU institutions to develop and enforce their enhanced co-operation in these budget and economic matters? Some think he could. He himself says he will watch it vigilantly and take legal action if need arises.

He clearly cannot see an easy way to stop them using the EU facilities as they choose. Ultimately for the other members these issues anyway will be settled by the European Court of Justice, a federalist court. Labour signed the UK up to Treaties which introduced “enhanced co-operation” and special treatment for Euro members enforced by the EU institutions, undermining the UK position.

So what are the other options from here? The UK could hold a referendum on continued membership, and on the terms of membership, preparatory to seeking a renegotiated settlement or exit if that is the wish of the electors. The UK government could notify its EU partners of its intention to hold a referendum and seek negotations of a better deal to put to the UK electors prior to a referendum. Both these routes have been firmly ruled out by a decisive Parliamentary vote against a referendum when we recently engineered a motion and vote, thanks to the overwhelming wish of Labour and Lib Dem MPs to back Coalition Ministers.

The UK could make proposals for piecemeal repatriation of powers that have some cross party support. The idea of repatriating a third of the EU budget by opting for national control of regional and structural funds described here recently might attract such support. If it did so the government would have to take it up in the EU. Proposals this week that have come from Parliamentary sources to repatriate the lost criminal justice powers would probably attract less cross party support.

The government could take the advice some of us are offering them about the need to play tough on the issue of the use of the court and other institutions to enforce the Treaty of the 25. If the EU intends to use its legal and institutional architecture against us in pursuit of a Treaty of 25, the Uk could counter by legislating in the UK to modify our adherence to EU law in a way which offset or compensated us for the extra legal reach the 25 were asserting. There are all sorts of legal arguments about whether the UK could or should undertake unilateral legal action. Some of us think it is the obvious answer to moves by other EU states to circumvent EU agreement by having a Treaty amongst a lesser number of states, yet continuing to use EU legal process.

I understand many of you just want to leave the EU. As I need to remind you, very few UK voters vote for that view in UK General Elections, so none of the 3 main parties has it as a policy, and the Lib Dems and Labour make a virture out of being federalist parties. This means that it is not about to happen. If this Parliament will not vote for a referendum, it is certainly not going to vote to leave the EU.

That is why come out Eurosceptics have to unite with moderate Eurosceptics to try to reverse the tide of powers flowing to the EU, and to get us a looser relationship. As the last week has shown, even that is going to be very difficult. It is, however, important that for the first time the rest of EU has demanded a Treaty and the UK has refused to sign it in any form. All previous Prime Ministers have signed up to all proposed Treaties, some willingly, some after opting the UK out of important bits. We have to work with the Euroscepticism that there is in Parliament, as whatever Eurosceptics in the country want, it all hinges on Commons votes. People in the country who are very frustrated by the never ending march of EU power can help and can make their voices heard. They need to lobby all those MPs who do not vote in the Commons for less EU control of our lives, or for a new relationship for the Uk with the continental powers.

Networks are usually drawn using a technique called node-link diagrams. While that works well for small graphs (the technical name for networks), it breaks down beyond a few dozen nodes. Better techniques exist, though these are currently focused on specific types of graphs or answer particular questions.

Node-Link Diagrams

When you think of a graph, you likely already think of a node-link diagram – unless you’re a mathematician. This technique is incredibly effective in communicating the basic idea of a network: there are nodes, typically shown as little dots or circles, and they’re connected by links, or edges in graph lingo. Even the difference between a directed and an undirected graph is obvious: little arrows mean that there’s a direction, no arrows means no direction. Lane Harrison gives a good overview on the Visual.ly blog. Carlos Scheidegger is also writing an interesting, if mathematical, series on graphs of the node-link variety.

These images are easy to understand even for people who have never seen such a diagram before, which is not something that can be said about many visualization techniques. Most people would also easily be able to figure out how to answer basic questions using such a diagram, like finding the person with the most friends (i.e., the node with the highest degree) or looking for highly connected groups that only have a small number of links between them (so-called cliques).

Hairballs

There is a catch, of course. The simplicity and beauty of node-link diagrams turns into clutter and confusion when the number of nodes and links gets too high: the dreaded hairball.

Many techniques have been developed to sort out the clutter: edge bundling, node filtering, edge lenses, many, many different layout algorithms, etc. But none of them provide a good, general solution to the underlying problem. The question also needs to be asked if the most obvious visual depiction is also the most effective. It may not be.

Matrix Methods

Matrix visualizations represent a very different approach. These techniques are based on the adjacency matrix, which defines which nodes in a graph are connected to which. Imagine a table with a row and a column for each node. The value in each cell of the matrix contains a value of 1 if there is a connection between the node in that row and that column, and 0 if not.

Matrix visualization techniques display that matrix rather than the node-link version of the graph. No more crossing lines and no more hairball. Seeing structures in such a visualization requires some training and some support from the visualization tool, but the advantage is that there are no more lines cluttering up the view. This illustration from Nathalie Henry and Jean-Daniel Fekete’s InfoVis 2006 paper MatrixExplorer: a Dual-Representation System to Explore Social Networks nicely shows how structures in the node-link diagram translate into the matrix view.

The rows and columns of the matrix can be rearranged, which represents one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of matrix techniques at the same time: order matters. The patterns that are so obvious in the image above will be easily hidden by jumbling the order of the matrix. But given a good clustering and ordering algorithm, in particular one where the user can specify criteria and weights, a matrix view can show patterns very clearly.

Directed, Tree-Like Graphs: Node Quilts

A technique I found particularly fascinating at InfoVis 2011 was shown in a paper titled Developing and Evaluating Quilts for the Depiction of Large Layered Graphs by Juhee Bae and Ben Watson. Node quilts are designed specifically for directed, acyclic graphs (DAGs): graphs that have a hierarchical structure, where most links point from one layer to the next. This technique was originally designed for genealogical trees, but the version Bae and Watson studied allows links that point up as well (though they should be rare).

Node quilts cleverly exploit the fact that most of the action is in one half of the matrix by folding it to eliminate the parts that are (mostly) empty. The resulting visualization is much denser and also more informative: links that skip layers or that point back are shown outside the matrix itself.

This technique takes a bit of time and study to appreciate, but it extends the matrix visualization idea in a way that is very clever and useful – for particular tasks and data. But focus on particular types of questions is clearly a virtue given the issues with node-link diagrams in general. I also wonder how well the technique might work for undirected graphs, where the lower half of the adjacency matrix can be ignored because it is symmetrical. The focus on using quilts only for DAGs so far may be a bit more narrow than necessary.

What Are You Asking: PivotGraph

In many cases, it makes little sense to look at all the individual data items, while an appropriately aggregated view can provide much more useful information. This is the same idea as behind Parallel Sets and also almost all of the views in Tableau. In 2006, Martin Wattenberg published a paper on a technique he called PivotGraph that adapted the idea of aggregation for use with graphs. For the aggregation to work, there has to be data attached to the graph nodes, and it has to be partly categorical. This is typically the case when looking at rich data like email traffic, phone conversations, etc.

The PivotGraph has two interesting properties. First, it is very goal-directed: it requires the user to pick dimensions along which to aggregate, and which to use to lay out the graph. Second, it uses space in a very different way than node-link diagrams. While space in node-link diagrams is mostly there to avoid collisions between the nodes and clutter between the lines, it carries information in the case of the PivotGraph.

The example above shows the communication patterns between people in different departments (rows) and locations (columns). The width of the arrows represents the amount of communication going on (emails, etc.). This is aggregated information, not just along the edges but also in the nodes: each department and location consists of multiple people. What would have been a big hairball had all the individual items been shown has been turned into a much simpler image that answers a question.

Many questions that are asked about network data are of the same nature: How many people who have done A also do B? How do potential customers navigate the different elements on a website and where do they give up? What classes of products are bought together or in quick succession? etc.

The Graph Beyond the Graph

For a while now, people in visualization have talked about the graph without the graph, i.e., graph visualization without the hairballs. Networks are clearly important and challenging data, and it seems a bit myopic to only look at node-link visualization. Node quilts and the PivotGraph represent promising steps into a very different direction. While they require more work to understand and are more limited in what they can be used for, they are also much directed towards a goal than just showing all of the data. I think that this kind of thinking will lead us to much more interesting techniques in the future than trying to teach the old node-link diagram new tricks.

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Christine was working with us at Copenhagenize Consulting for a month or so. She's from Seattle and...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

Among the 457 letters in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, there is not one love letter. This may not surprise fans of the writer — author of The Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb, and Job, among others — who may know Joseph Roth as a vagabond and misanthrope whose occupation as a journalist had him traveling from one European country to the next, living in rented rooms, wearing threadbare clothes, without a bank account, mostly alone, too miserable for romance, the consummate Wandering Jew. But even Roth the World War I soldier left no love letters, no tender requests to, perhaps, a girl he left behind in the crumbling Hapsburg Empire, asking for solace or maybe a photo. Nor did he write any romantic epistles to the lovers with whom he found companionship and comfort in his final years. There are a handful letters from Roth's pre-war younger days, but they are all written to his cousins in Lemberg. They are letters of encouragement, advice, pontifications, the kind of letters one writes in youth that are more an affirmation of one’s self-understanding: “I am a sworn enemy to etiquette,” he wrote to his cousin Resia (which, in any case, was not true) and “…just like in Goethe’s Faust, which, alas and alack, you haven’t read.” “Who ever would have guessed it: all of nineteen!” he wrote to his younger cousin Paula when he was 22. “But then nineteen years are like a piece of fluff on the scales of eternity. And it’s in eternity that we live. From eternity, in eternity, for eternity. Yes, for eternity as well.”

More here.

From NPR:

For years, scientists thought that dogs were just as genetically complicated as humans, Ratliff says. But that turned out not to be the case. Scientists at Cornell, UCLA, Stanford and the National Institutes of Health have been comparing dog DNA as part of a project called CanMap.

"They took a whole large collection of dogs, 900 dogs from, I think, 80 breeds," Ratliff says. "And what they learned was that in these dogs, if you look at their physical traits, everything from their body size to their coat color to whether they have floppy ears, it's determined by a very small number of genes."

It's actually human interference that's the cause of what Ratliff calls "Tinker-Toy genetics" in dogs. "The way that natural selection works, it usually works on very small changes," he says. Sudden large changes can actually be harmful.

But breeders can introduce large changes in a dog relatively rapidly, by selecting the genes that have the strongest effects.

"If I want a tall dog, a large dog, then I end up selecting for this gene called IGF1, which has a very very strong effect on the size of a dog. And when you do that over a couple of hundred years, what happens is ... it becomes the gene that controls body size."

More here.

From The Economist:

One sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.

How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.

Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.

To carry out the test, Dr Levine turned to those stalwarts of medical research, genetically modified mice. Her first batch of rodents were tweaked so that their autophagosomes—structures that form around components which have been marked for recycling—glowed green. After these mice had spent half an hour on a treadmill, she found that the number of autophagosomes in their muscles had increased, and it went on increasing until they had been running for 80 minutes.

To find out what, if anything, this exercise-boosted autophagy was doing for mice, the team engineered a second strain that was unable to respond this way.

More here.

Firms often have big obvious misallocations of resources, where … many highest status folks in the firm resist … changes. … If a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide. Coalitions can often successfully block a CEO initiative, and yet not resist the further support of a prestigious outside consultant. … Good-looking kids from our most prestigious schools … are the cheapest folks you can buy with our most prestigious affiliations.

What is status? One theory is that status is a commonly-seen summary of one’s value as an ally. In places where physical strength is more useful, strength counts more for status. In places where knowing the king is more useful, knowing the king counts more. And so on. But the consulting tale I tell above seems at odds with this theory.

Imagine that status in a firm was a proxy for one’s usefulness as an ally within that firm, summarizing the threats one could credibly make, the people one could fire, the favors one could plausibly call in, etc. And imagine that the current equilibrium was that opponents of change together held more of these useful resources – they successfully blocked change.

Now imagine that the CEO hires an outside consultant who writes a report recommending change. It should be clear to everyone that this outside firm has no direct power within the firm. It cannot fire anyone, go slow on a project, etc. So if status was just a proxy for relevant local abilities, then this consultant should have little status. Thus if a consultant actually does help the CEO by lending status to the CEO’s side, status must be something else.

So I’m led to consider a sticky-feature concept of status. Long ago coalition politics was important, and foragers had to estimate how useful each person would be if they joined a coalition. So our distant ancestors considered a standard set of features, such as strength, intelligence, charisma, etc., that tended then to indicate that someone would be a useful ally. Humans evolved specialized mental modules for making such estimates, and for estimating common perceptions of such estimates.

Today we have inherited such mental modules, and often use them to estimate which side will win a contest of coalitions. And even though relevant abilities have changed somewhat, our inherited expectations about who will win a coalition contest are somewhat self-reinforcing. For example, if we expect that coalitions of taller people tend to win, then we will be reluctant to cross such a coalition, which will tend to make them win. This can be a self-reinforcing focal equilibrium of the coordination game that is coalition politics.

If the features that define status are sticky, being somewhat locked into mental models that estimate which coalitions would win contests, then outside consultants with no formal power inside a firm could still tip the balance of status by siding with a CEO. Celebrities who know little about a product could make us more willing to buy it by endorsing it, and students could gain status via past affiliation with professors who have no power in their future work world.

If students gain status by graduating from prestigious schools, and if employers hire students for the status they add to a work coalition, is school productive? Well in this situation school is privately productive, both for the student and the employer. The employer isn’t inferring a hidden ability, but buying a visible feature. So this isn’t signaling exactly. But on the other hand, it isn’t obviously globally productive. The gain an employer gets from adding status to his coalition may well come at the expense of competing coalitions.

To close off this festival of the faces. This ballet of the book. I thought it would be apt to finish off world FB day with a little bit of the old Haiku to sum up the day.

After all we've already done Warhol, Bono and Shakespeare over the past month.

We'll begin with the question everybody's lips...

The Asia Floor Wage network is organizing Cambodia’s first ever People’s Tribunal on Minimum Living Wage and Decent Working Conditions for garment workers. The tribunal is scheduled on February 8, 2012, in Phnom Penh:

The Community Legal Education Center also posted photos of workers who fainted in factories owned by Hung Wah (Cambodia) Garment Mfg. and Huey Chuen. The Fair Labor Association investigated the fainting cases in Huey Chuen and discovered that workers were compelled to work for very long hours:

Aside from the fainting issue, the tribunal hopes to address the complaints raised by 200,000 garment workers in Cambodia who went on strike last year. Below are the other goals of the tribunal:

Most of my work is confidential (fund raising pitches, sales presentations), but this presentation is not. The style is also a bit different from my usual work, there are hardly any numbers inside. The presentation is meant to run at an exhibition booth on a plasma screen. I adjusted the look and feel of the presentation to match the style of the client Optimove. The video below is running at a higher speed than the actual presentation.

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In a recent discussion I had with Vinay Gupta, Gupta hinted that(as I read him anyway):

1) the American corporate state’s apparent descent into lawless fascism (as evidenced by the passage of provisions for indefinite detention without trial in the NDAA and the recent seizure of MegaUpload), combined with

2) the likelihood of failed or hollowed-out states (especially those like Spain and Greece on the southern periphery of the Eurozone) succumbing to networked resistance movements like the Arab Spring and M15, or the secession of a critical number of states like Venezuela or Iceland from the neoliberal system by repudiating their debt, abandoning the dollar as reserve currency, abrogating neoliberal “free trade” (sic) and “intellectual property” (sic) agreements, etc…

…make it quite conceivable that the American state will fight a last-ditch war against the rest of the world to preserve neoliberal capitalism via large-scale drone warfare, cyberwar, assassinations, and militarized police repression either indirectly through what remains of authoritarian U.S. client states or directly by quasi-private hired thugs like the Pinkertons and Blackwater. The invasion of the British United Republic by remote-controlled UN teletroopers in Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction, coupled with similar actions against other “failed states” in a global full-court press, is a good fictional illustration.

In that case, the street fighting between Occupy protesters and heavily armed riot cops in Manhattan, Portland — and particularly Oakland in recent days — prefigure the coming war of global counterinsurgency in the same way the Spanish Civil War prefigured WWII.

He went on, in a subsequent post, to describe the implications for the future of warfare—including domestic counterinsurgency:

In the most recent post in the series, he argued that the only real defenses against drones are to harden targets and thereby raise the average cost of attacks relative to target value, or to develop a counter-offensive drone capability. Drones, like nukes, shift the advantage almost entirely to the offensive.

Robb’s category of hardening against attack would probably include encryption and anonymizing technologies of all kinds, and open-source alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, in order to reduce the transparency of social media as a source of targeting information. The development of such alternatives is already well underway, and the first drone kills based on social media profiles will hasten the development mightily.

His reference to the availability of drone technologies on the cheap, combined with the primacy of the offense, is also suggestive. Some of Robb’s readers, in the comments to his posts, were quick to connect the dots:

This all stands to reason, as far as I can tell. If drone technology favors the offensive over the defensive, but an implosion in the cost of acquiring it erases the advantage of states over networked actors, then the disadvantage would seem to lie with the side which has the most centralized economic and communications systems and the most concentrated target profile.

It's not been in cinemas sinceSeptember, as Nicolas Winding Refn's indie cult classic is finally released onBlu-ray and DVD this Monday, so rather than regurgitating September's review(which you can find here), below is a brief summary, with a focus on theBlu-ray release: the picture quality, sound, extras and the actual transferitself.

But before that, here's a condensed version of what I had to say for my cinema review last year:

"A roaring success at Cannes this year, Drive wonBest Director as well as a nomination for the Palme d'Or after receiving astanding ovation. Essentially Drive is an indie production,constructed through filmic and cultural influences. It falls nicely into thecult category without the need to follow suit with mainstream conformity, as itshows the quality that can be produced on a mere $13m budget."

"There's nodenying Gosling's appeal: a bewitching, charismatic charm he brings to thetable that gives audiences no choice but to be 'wooed' by his alluring, yetreserved presence."

"Itdoesn't try to be cool, it is cool - he pullsit off with ease, which makes Driver a man with desirable attributes thatviewers will surely be drawn to."

"Drive is a gripping, yet emotionally charged action film withnotable performances from Gosling, Brooks and Mulligan. It's consistentlythrilling, hugely likable and accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack that makes this the complete package. WindingRefn avoids succumbing to clichés as it progressively becomes more intense andviolent before its boiling-point and fitting conclusion"

Now onto the Blu-ray disc and what it has to offer:

PICTUREQUALITY: It's sharp and beautiful to look at. Consistentlyimpressive, it's perhaps the cityscapes that look more spectacular at nightthat not only sets the tone for the movie, but makes it a genuine delight towatch. Close ups of Gosling especially look crisp and the detail in general is visible and adds to the overall enjoyment.

SOUND: Whilst itwasn't experienced in surround sound, the dialogue was clear and the soundtrackwas audibly great. If you haven't got surround sound, then cranking up thevolume will make the songs sound just as emotionally powerful as they did inthe cinema.

EXTRAS: Possibly theweakest element of the release is the lack of bonus content to shoutabout. We're given a theatrical trailer, a TV spot and a slideshow of some stills,as well as the stages of the development of the quad poster for thefilm. The best of the extra features is a 41-minute Q&A session after theBFI screening with director Nicolas Winding Refn, hosted by Telegraph criticRobbie Collins. This was an interesting feature with a witty exchange betweenhost and filmmaker, followed by a selection of audience questions, where WindingRefn offers some nice insight into the creative process.

In aprevious interview he has stipulated that an Ultimate Edition will be releasedlater this year, therefore the January disc is a bare-bones edition, so as longas you don't pay over the odds you're fine (Sainsbury's had the Blu-rayavailable for preorder at just £9.99 for example).

OVERALL DISC& TRANSFER: The main menu has some clips of the film in the background that fade in and out with asnippet of the excellent music from the film. The disc in general ispleasant but lacks the meatiness we all wanted in the extras section. Theincluded content suffices, but it's the actual film punters will buy this for, and it certainly doesn't disappoint in that respect: having seen it once before and beingoverly familiar with the incredible soundtrack, it made a re-watch all the more special.

The onlyproblem I experienced was at around five different points of the movie, as anew shot began, the picture would stutter for a split second. Whether this is aproblem with the disc (which it shouldn't be) or the Blu-ray player is in needof an update (which it could be) remains to be seen.

FILM: ★★★★★

EXTRAS: ★★★

Drive is released on Blu-ray &DVD on Monday 30th January

February 01, 2012

Lauren Crothers posts pictures of the recent senate elections in Cambodia. The pictures were taken at Boeng Trabek high school in Phnom Penh.

One of the bloggers I admire most is Linda Tilman of Linda’s Bees – not so much because she is a Master Bee Keeper – which she is – but because she is self-confident enough to share her own failures as well as her successes on her blog pages. That is what makes her blog so damn useful and informative and fun.

So in that spirit, I am going to swallow hard and confess the errors of my beekeeping ways for 2011. I hope that you (and I) learn from my mistakes. Here we go.

1. I forgot about the bees for almost a month after harvesting 10+ gallons of honey. It was the end of the summer and not much was going on…I thought. In those four weeks, the larvae of wax moth pretty much devastated my #3 hive. It really made me feel sick to see those frames covered in webs and feces. Most of the hive absconded. If I had checked on the hive sooner, I could have removed enough frames and fat larvae to prevent absconding.

2. I did a lousy job of record keeping. I didn’t record where I got replacement queens for various hives. And I only had 3 hives but – by the end of the year – I could not reliably remember what I had done to each one. This is important because colonies are like children: they are all different and you cannot treat each one the same. I stopped weighing hives at the end of the year. Ok, I know that most beekeepers do not weight their hives but they don’t know how valuable my pry scale is as an indicator of health. If you look at what I did record (click here to see a timeline of the three hive weights), you will see that hive #3 was trying to tell me something at the end of July (“we’re outta here”). We were able to save the remaining colony by introducing a new Russian queen and putting them in a nuc for the Winter. They are now our healthiest colony.

3. I was lulled into complacency by our most vibrant hive. This hive produced the most honey and had the largest population of bees with 2 deeps full of brood. I figured that it could take care of itself. I didn’t suspect a problem until I started seeing black, greasy-looking hairless bees and bees with shriveled wings. Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus and Deformed Wing Virus probably resulted from a too high Varroa mite infestation. The mites bite the bees and so act as a vector for viruses. We applied HopGuard in September but I believe it was too little too late. The numbers of bees crashed to the point where the once vibrant hive was a deadout by January. There must be 80 pounds of honey left in that empty hive.

Sins #1 to #3 are avoidable. But I do have a plan for improvement this year. No, I am not going to promise to become more diligent. At my age, that would be self delusional and in denial of human nature. What needs to be done is that weights and bee counts need to be compiled automatically and mailed to me as attractive graphic charts. The hives – or small computers in the hives – need to remind me to tend to them and indicate if anything is out of nominal range. I hope I can report progress on this front by this time next year.

So in summary: Wax Moth, Small Hive Beetle, Varroa, Chronic Paralysis Virus, Deformed Wing Virus, egg-laying workers (twice), absconding, dead-out, and 10 gallons of honey. All in all, 2011 delivered a pretty good education and honey to boot. We are planning five hives this year. You can call beekeepers a lot of things but you can’t call them pessimists.

So whats your bad? I know there must be other sinners out there. Step up brothers and sisters and share your story with us.

The best place to follow what’s in it — both the important and the trivial — actually seems to be a well-curated Twitter timeline. I don’t think there’s an easy way to link to a snapshot of my timeline from about 4:30-6 p.m. ET today, so you’ll have to take my word for it. (Facebook itself, it turns out, isn’t very useful for something like this. Nice work, Twitter.)

After that, the best place for a variety of analysis is Techmeme. My colleagues at ReadWriteWeb and my former colleagues at Business Insider are also both churning out some great coverage.

On a personal note, as an early, long-time, and avid Facebook user, I’m very happy for Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and their employees. Facebook, it appears, is a strong and healthy business, and I’m glad that’s the case. Better yet, its commercial efforts, like Google’s, haven’t (yet) gotten in the way of my usage.

Ivan Lett in Open Letters Monthly:

City lights are romanticized just as they are demonized. Urban areas attract the majority of the world’s population, and in the United States, the percentage is approximately two-thirds. Some people feel that life in the grander metropolises—places like New York, London, Tokyo—is too much, too busy, too crowded. Still, as Edward Glaeser writes in Triumph of the City, “On a planet with vast amounts of space (all of humanity could fit in Texas—each of us with a personal townhouse), we choose cities”, and the subtitle promises high returns from this judicious choice.

I am no die-hard New Yorker, but I love the city where I live. In fact, I moved here for many of the reasons described in Glaeser’s book—access to artists, intellectuals, entertainment, and their interconnected cultural circles. Many friends from earlier phases in life preceded me in moving, so I had a ready-made social group when I arrived. And I use public transportation daily, including a work commute back and forth to New Haven, Connecticut, which is easily more than double the average 48-minutes spent on public transportation commutes, according to Glaeser’s research.

Why would I do such a thing to my schedule (let alone my wallet)? It is exactly as Glaeser describes: “Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies. They are proximity, density, closeness. They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection.”

More here.

Tonight in downtown St. Louis the second group of companies to be funded by Capital Innovators will be announced. These will receive $50k in seed funding, free office space and credits toward other useful services as part of their acceleration program. We wrote about their innovative program last fall.

Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. Most have felt the program worthwhile and given them a jumpstart on their operations.

For example, Sam Glines says, "Effectively, NorseCorp, while led by me, born and raised in St Louis, was a stranger in its own town. I spent very little time here in my professional life, so my local business connections were limited. Capital Innovators accelerated access to and recommendations for vetted service providers, two of which we have brought on. One of them is serving a critical role in a new Norse service offering in Web security." The company has some innovative security offerings for payment card processors that we will cover in the near future. They also signed Global eTelecom as a customer, one of U.S.' largest check processors at the end of December. "Our plan is to have seven figure revenues and be profitable by Q3, in addition to to seven new hires by end of the year," he says.

Jim Dolan, the CEO of Action Online, is looking to launch in May and redo their YoJo.com site. Since joining the program, he has seen an increase in ad sales and also received new investment capital.

Anthony Favazza, CEO of DiningCircle has hired a CTO that will be overseeing a rebuild of our product in early 2012. "We also have an intern from Washington University helping with customer satisfaction and retention, and one of the marketing partners from the program was able to deliver a comprehensive marketing plan for us that included a new logo, website, print marketing, mailers, and a clear message."

Ryan Bell, the CEO of Gremln.com says, "We continue to have advisory meetings to discuss how we will convert free users into paying customers. We have begun the sales cycle with a number of potential clients and are nurturing these relationships during private beta stage and are looking to white label our product."

Jim Eberlin, the CEO of Jbara says, "We are continuing to make enhancements to our current product as sales are increasing. Current customers have helped to improve our analytics. Our customer base pipeline is growing as we're in the process of closing several contracts. We are currently the sole sponsor of a meetup and users group for customer success executives. The group is led by Marqueto, and Exactly, one of our current customers. We have two strategic partnerships in the works that could lead to potential exits. These are in addition to our currently existing partnership with SalesForce."

Hello there! My name is Cat Valente (Catherynne M. if you're ~~nasty~~ reading my business cards) and I'll be your blogger for the next month. I hope we'll have some good times together, some laughs, some tears, and at the end we can sit back and look on our montage reel with a soft focus lens and some mid-90s comfort rock.

For those of you (which I suspect is most of you) who don't know who I am, I present a few Facts before I get into the technofuture thoughttery.

I'm mostly a fantasy writer. But I've branched out into science fiction in the last couple of years. I dig folklore all the way and a lot of what I write deals with that, even the SF, because we don't just stop telling stories to explain ourselves to ourselves when we have shinier tech. A lot of what I write features what gets variously called "rich language" "lyrical prose" or "I couldn't follow it, can't she use fewer/easier words?"

I write a lot of books for adults and have a pretty successful middle grade series going. I've done some time editing but it didn't agree with me. I write fast--I teach seminars on how to write a book in 30 days. I've won some awards, lost several, and I've been at the gig since 2004, full-time since 2006. I blog myself over on Livejournal.

I live on an island off the coast of Maine, which is both more and less isolating than you'd think. I live in a village of a few hundred people, a lot of us grow, raise, and/or fish a fair portion of our own food, and connected through a listserv, we have a unique internal economy wherein we barter for goods and services. Once an object has been brought across the bay, it is such a pain in the ass to take it back that it tends to stay on the island for more or less centuries, traded from hand to hand, sometimes bought with money, but mostly not. This includes your physical body: we have three large graveyards on an island slightly less than two miles long. But we are part of the city of Portland, only two miles offshore, and have regular ferry service.

I have two dogs (Golden Retriever and German Shepherd), two cats (Maine Coon and Stray Extremely Ill-Tempered Tabby Who Came Home from the Park with My Husband Eleven Years Ago and Will Obviously Live Forever Fueled by Her Hatred of the Universe) and six laying hens (I present their names as they probably tell you more about me than this whole post: Pertelote, Billina, Black Chocobo, Dinosaur, Ziggy Stardust and Nanny Ogg). Little known fact: my Maine Coon has a full sister and half brother owned by awesome author Seanan McGuire.

If the Maine thing didn't make it clear, I'm American--I thought I'd throw that out up front since this is a European blog and I'm, well, not. I will necessarily have a slightly different political perspective. Many of you have governments that will take care of you when you're sick! Mine would rather let me rot, most especially since I am a self-employed writer. Good times. However, I actually lived in Edinburgh, a city relevant to this blog, and went to university there (since I know you're all internet research hounds, I'll explain: I went as an exchange student? But then it turned out no one in the history of the program had ever gone in my major--Classics--and few enough in their senior year, so they sat me down and were all: "Yeah, you're going to need to take and pass the full degree exams for both Greek and Latin or you can't graduate from your American university either." And kids, those are no joke. Especially when they only tell you that two weeks before the exam. So by god I feel it's legit to say I went to university at Edinburgh, though my diploma says University of California.) so we needn't discuss cookies vs biscuits or lift vs elevator or any of that. I also lived in Japan for a couple of years when I was first publishing.

Aside from writing I'm an Italian-American woman with no kids, so naturally I cook like a fiend. I'll definitely be sharing some recipes. I'm also an avid knitter, I make pickles (because I married a Russian man and homemade pickles are love-in-a-jar for him) and jams, I sail and blow glass and I am trying to learn the accordion but damn, it is not the easiest instrument I could have chosen to pick up. Other than sailing, which I was raised with as both my parents were sailors, I picked up most of these hobbies when, like Charlie, my hobby became my day job and I suddenly needed something else to do as a hobby.

Part of the reason Charlie asked me to come over here and natter for a month because I posted about his recent series of future/worldbuilding posts a few weeks ago. Basically, he kind of freaked me out. That Stross, he is a convincing guy when he talks about the future!

The kind of science fiction I write is not as concerned with the near future. I take a folkloric approach to SF--these are the stories we are telling ourselves right now about our own nature, this is how we explain the world to ourselves. I like to take those stories apart and put them back together in strange shapes. I think in every meaningful way we are living in "the future" of the 50s, of which flying cars were never the central feature. I am thirty-two years old--I remember life before the internet, but I was a child. My adult life has been characterized by radical technological and political change I, as a classicist who did not even have an email address until she was twenty, could not have begun to predict. (Ok, not true, classicists are really good at predicting politics. It's the tech that stumbles us. I could have predicted my 8 bit games turning into Skyrim, but not that a glorified classmates.com would take over the technological world.) Now that the internet has settled into being a massive an integral part of our lives on Planet Earth, we are starting to see how it changes our culture in the medium to long term, how profoundly it skews even comparatively young predictions of 15 years ago. The internet is not a Singularity with a capital S, but it is a sea change sharing more in common with the Industrial Revolution than simply a new device.

One of the problems that is leading to some of the more dire issues Charlie brings up is memory. Not personal memory (at least not per se) or senescence, but generational and cultural memory. No one is now living who can remember the Industrial Revolution, so the West draws very few lessons from that, so few that we just assume the world created by that Revolution is the one we'll be living in in perpetuity. We think technological advancement means new toys, not new worlds. I lived in Ohio for awhile, part of what is sort of affectionately called the Rust Belt in the United States. It used to be called the Steel Belt. It was where great swathes of American manufacturing, particularly automotive manufacturing, took place. Towns thrived on their auto plants, tire plants, steel mills, came into being purely to fill jobs at those facilities. With only a few exceptions, those plants have been shut for decades now. Some shut down in the 80s, some shut down in the 70s. Yet if you talk to older folk in those once-booming towns, most will tell you that one day the industry will come back. The politicians will make it happen, or somehow they will make their town attractive enough again that magically a steel mill will appear with a big red bow on it. Some of the younger generation knows it isn't so--but only some.

Because industrial boom is normal, right? The way of life that worked for exactly one generation--the Boomers--will work for everyone from now on. Any bust or crisis is a blip, a deviation which will, which must, correct itself. Because culturally we have about two generations worth of memory, maybe three, and then the black curtain comes down and we can't imagine that life in a 20th century first world nation is itself the aberration in human experience. What do you mean you can't afford a house by the time you're 30? What do you mean there are no good entry level positions? You're just not trying hard enough. The steel mills will come back, you'll see.

Will the internet go the way of the steel mill? I don't know, maybe. We still use steel, but the way we make it, buy it, and sell it has changed profoundly and cannot change back. (Nothing changes back, only forward. I suppose this is a relevant lesson for publishing, really. Radical change is the new black.) Certainly the current state of the internet, which is itself changed pretty radically from just five or six years ago, will change enormously, no matter how many articles I read on the permanence of Facebook. (See what I mean about memory? They said MySpace was permanent, too, and that was hardly a generation ago. I remember thinking Livejournal would go on forever.) Facebook changed the culture of online interaction and it can't change back, but it will certainly be replaced by something else--the question is only how it will be changed. By government intvervention, SOPA 2: Beyond Thunderdome, by independent companies innovating or by enormous corporations cannibalizing each other. Probably all of those. I can't imagine the internet going away entirely, I don't think you can put that massive networked genie back in the bottle--but I suppose that's the point. I live in a company town. It's inconceivable right now that the company won't always be around.

I think everyone is kind of freaked out right now. Which is why they set up tents on the street last year. Why some are still there. We're freaked because we don't know what's coming--but we're reasonably sure it's going to be shitty. Dystopia is the thing to write about these days. We have more faith in dystopia than utopia. SF used to be all about utopia, Starfleet and replicators and living forever. To be honest, Brave New World seems kind of cute to me these days. At least the oppressive government thought to hand out Soma so trod-upon people wouldn't be so goddamn miserable! Our governments just say: suck it up, epsilon assholes. Might as well be stamped on our coins.

It's tough to say everything's going to be ok. Living at the end of one way of life and the beginning of another sucks. Most people just want to be fat and happy and do some meaningful work, have kids, and die. Except for dying, the ability to do all of that is up in the air these days. And that's where we are. Industrial life is in its death throes and it isn't pretty or fair. Daddy Tolkien will tell us it was no treat living in the just-post Industrial Revolution, either. After all, we all know our history: what follows Revolutions? Usually, Terror.

That's why, I think, there's been a small but concerted effort to "bring back" optimistic SF in the last few years. We're looking for ways to know it'll all work out without mass extinction or widespread horror. The trouble is that massive technological change is not optimistic for some people, it's frightening. Terrifying. And not just mainstream "mundanes," or else what is the recent newfound love of the 19th century all about? What else has driven half my generation back to spinning wheels, knitting needles, preserving jars, and livestock? Everything is uncertain--let's go back and pretend it's still possible to live in the Shire. I'm guilty of it, too, obviously.

And I guess the whole point of writing future-oriented SF is to show one possible way it could all work out. Even if that involves dystopia. In some sense, big S Singularity is such an easy answer to that. An escape hatch--we'll all uplift, upload, and upend everything, and sort of skip the problems at the end of this chapter. SF writers don't get to call the shots, but we are meant to show the way.

Of course, once we get there, memory will fade and we'll forget it was any other way.

Francis's News Feeds

February 03, 2012

February 02, 2012

Background

BattleDrones

Hooduku

Buy Or Boycott

NXI Group

Koolaring

Lec 1 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008

Abstract

About the Open Knowledge Foundation

Brilliant Startup Lessons From Moneyball

What is the School of Data Journalism and who is it for?

Panels

Panel 1: News and numbers: from CAR to data journalism (Thursday, 26 April)

Panel 2: How can data journalism save your newsroom? (Friday, 27 April)

Panel 3: You Too Can Be A Data Journalist! (Saturday, 28 April)

Speakers

Workshops

Workshop 1: Scraping data & cracking PDFs (Thursday, 26 April)

Workshop 2: Information wants to be free – Freedom of information requests and how to use them (Friday, 27 April)

Workshop 3: Making data pretty (Friday, 27 April)

Workshop 4: Getting Stories from Data (Saturday, 28 April)

Workshop 5: Spending Stories (Sunday, 29 April)

Workshop leaders

When and where?

How to register?

What do you need to bring?

Questions?

Node-Link Diagrams

Hairballs

Matrix Methods

Directed, Tree-Like Graphs: Node Quilts

What Are You Asking: PivotGraph

The Graph Beyond the Graph

February 01, 2012

Deformed Wing Virus

Subscriptions

Francis's News Feeds

February 03, 2012

February 02, 2012

Background

BattleDrones

Hooduku

Buy Or Boycott

NXI Group

Koolaring

Lec 1 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008

Abstract

About the Open Knowledge Foundation

Brilliant Startup Lessons From Moneyball

Related articles

What is the School of Data Journalism and who is it for?

Panels

Panel 1: News and numbers: from CAR to data journalism (Thursday, 26 April)

Panel 2: How can data journalism save your newsroom? (Friday, 27 April)

Panel 3: You Too Can Be A Data Journalist! (Saturday, 28 April)

Speakers

Workshops

Workshop 1: Scraping data & cracking PDFs (Thursday, 26 April)

Workshop 2: Information wants to be free – Freedom of information requests and how to use them (Friday, 27 April)

Workshop 3: Making data pretty (Friday, 27 April)

Workshop 4: Getting Stories from Data (Saturday, 28 April)

Workshop 5: Spending Stories (Sunday, 29 April)

Workshop leaders

When and where?

How to register?

What do you need to bring?

Questions?

Node-Link Diagrams

Hairballs

Matrix Methods

Directed, Tree-Like Graphs: Node Quilts

What Are You Asking: PivotGraph

The Graph Beyond the Graph

February 01, 2012

Deformed Wing Virus

Subscriptions