Jim Jarmusch on artistic thievery and authenticity
31st January 2009
Posted in P2P Culture, Peer Property (IP) | No Comments »
Archive for January, 2009
31st January 2009
Masterly interview of Noam Chomsky by Le Monde, with French subtitles:
Posted in P2P Politics, Video | 1 Comment »
Roberto Verzola: Finite demand makes relative abundance possible
31st January 2009
A very important contribution to abundance theory by Roberto Verzola:
“It is almost by definition that economists predominantly focus on scarcity, when they define economics as the study of “the most efficient ways to allocate scarce resources to meet infinite human wants”. If, indeed, people had infinite wants, then not even all the resources of this finite world will be enough for a single person.
But I contend that consumer demand is not infinite. There exist physical, physiological, psychological and cultural limits – both actual and potential – to consumption which can keep individual as well as collective needs and wants within finite bounds.
If demand is finite, then satisfying this demand becomes a real possibility, and relative abundance is within reach.
The following three concepts will help show that demand can remain within finite bounds:
Satiation. Economists define satiation as the consumption level which the consumer most prefers.
The closer he is to this level, writes economist Hal Varian, “the better off he is in terms of his own preferences”.This satiation level is also called bliss point. Beyond it, the consumer becomes indifferent towards getting more of the same good or may even prefer to have less of the good. While many economists still cling to the hedonist principle that “more is always preferred to less,” some acknowledge, at least in theory, that a satiation level exists for some, if not most, goods. Varian, in particular, says that most goods have a satiation point and that “you can have too much of nearly anything,” which contradicts the “infinite wants” assertion in most definitions of economics.
Saturation. While satiation may apply more to the psychological attitude of a consumer not wanting more, saturation is more about the physiological or physical incapacity of a person to consume more.
Beyond the saturation point, one’s body will either become incapable or involuntarily reject additional servings of food and drinks. One can only wear so many clothes, or shoes. One can listen to only so many CDs or watch only so many videos. There are only twenty-four hours a day after all.
To reach the brain, a sense stimulus takes around 10-20 milliseconds. To respond in a conscious way, neuro-scientists have found out, the brain takes longer – around 500 milliseconds (half a second).2 This suggests that our brain can only enjoy at most two distinct events every second or about 170,000 every twenty-four hours. For a world with some six billion people, that adds up to maximum of one quad (i.e., quadrillion) consumption events per day. That is a huge number, it is true, but finite nevertheless. Most of us will probably be too saturated long before that point.
However, the concept of saturation as distinct from satiation is missing in consumer theory and most economists still cling to the “infinite wants” idea.
Satisficing. Even before we reach our satiation or saturation levels, we may already reach our “satisficed” level, in which the quantity we have of a particular good or bundle of goods already suffices to satisfy, and beyond which we would only weakly prefer more.
The idea that consumers satisfice rather than optimize when fitting their wants to their budget was first raised by psychologist Herbert Simon, who subsequently won the Economics Nobel Prize in 1978.
Any of these “sat” concepts – certainly all of them, together – are sufficient to argue that individual and likewise aggregate demand have finite bounds.
This justifies the following assertion: some consumers have a satisficing level for some goods. We will leave to future research the debate whether the weak assertion of “some consumers” and “some goods” can, in some contexts or periods, be changed to a stronger assertion of “some consumers for all goods”, “all consumers for some goods”, or even “all consumers for all goods”.
The above assertion leads directly to a formal definition of abundance: when a person can afford enough quantity of a good to reach his/her satisficed level, then the person enjoys a state of abundance for that good.
The concept is not new. Gandhi must have been referring to abundance when he said, “the Earth has enough for everyone’s need”. This definition also allows a good’s state of abundance with respect to one person to be quantified. For instance, if a person’s satisficing level is five pairs of shoes, but s/he can only afford two pairs, then s/he enjoys a state of abundance of 40% (two out of five) with respect to shoes. This makes it simple to relate abundance to its inverse, scarcity: the person needs three pairs more to reach the five-pair satisficed level. Thus s/he faces a scarcity level of 60%.
Economics usually assumes that business firms maximize their profits by producing until their marginal cost (the cost of the next additional unit) equals their marginal revenue (unit price of the good). If, in addition to this behavioral assumption, we also assume diminishing returns or decreasing returns to scale, this will eventually result in increasing marginal costs. Thus business firms will, in theory, reach their satiation level when they reach their maximum profits.
This also means, however, that profitable firms employing technologies with constant or increasing returns to scale will face constant or decreasing marginal costs. They will therefore have no profit maximum and likewise no satiation level. These firms will conform to the theoretical hedonist image for whom “more is always preferred to less”, and whose desire to purchase is limited only by their budget and nothing more. They will also try to keep increasing their scale of operations, as they go after higher and higher profits – making them an engine of globalization. Here is a possible answer, by the way, to what some economists consider a mystery, that “neoclassical theory has no full explanation of why firms grow at all, nor why it is that the typical pattern of the growth rates of firms seems to lead inexorably towards persistently increasing aggregate business concentration.”
6 notes and references available here.
Posted in P2P Economics, P2P Theory | 1 Comment »
The self-policing of DIY Biology communities
31st January 2009
Is it a good idea, though, to encourage “freelance” researchers to experiment with DNA, however well-intentioned they may be?
This particular issue is examined in an article by the New Scientist, which warns:
“someone might intentionally synthesise or recreate deadly pathogens like the 1918 flu strain, which killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide. “That is on the edge of being within the technical capabilities of someone working outside the laboratory environment.”
However, it seems that the DIY Biology movement, or ‘garage genome hackers‘ as they are called in the article, are aware of the issue and have imposed a number of limitations on their activities.
Here are the details:
“In response to such fears and in anticipation of calls for the group to be shut down, DIYbio has begun policing itself. Cowell says there is now “a self-imposed moratorium on ‘wetwork’”, or all synthetic biology experiments, until researchers can show that what they are doing is safe. For the moment, the group is focusing on DNA fingerprinting projects, with the analysis carried out by commercial labs, rather than manipulating genetic information themselves.
Church argues that licensing and monitoring would-be DIY biologists is better than alienating them. “It’s going to happen anyway; you can make it go underground or you can try to shape it,” he says.
Church has agreed to act as an adviser to DIYbio, which will give the group greater academic oversight and could allow it to resume experimental work with less fear of being shut down.
As for Aull, she is coming out of the closet with plans to help DIYbio set up protocols for safe lab practices.”
Posted in P2P Governance, P2P Manufacturing, P2P Science, P2P Technology | No Comments »
Eliminating bad nodes in a distributed network
30th January 2009
One of the biggest threats to a P2P network is a bad node. A bad node — which occurs through either malicious insertion or malfunction — can block/capture/falsify information flow in the network and thereby threaten its very existence.
It seems to me that an efficient peer production project needs to do three things good:
1) generate input, i.e. be attractive to the volunteer peer producers
2) have adequate post-hoc validation and selection mechanisms
but also:
3) protect itself from malicious attacks or internal participants, i.e. the bad nodes referred to in the quote by John Robb cited above.
It is this third aspect that is dealt with in an interesting paper.
* New Strategies for Revocation in Ad-Hoc Networks. Tyler Moore, Jolyon Clulow, Shishir Nagaraja, and Ross Anderson. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
John Robb provides a summary of the 3 main strategies that are reviewed.
Posted in P2P Governance, P2P Warfare | No Comments »
Principles of openness in education
30th January 2009
The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.
The Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto, which beautifully expresses the value of openness in education.
Excerpt from the Manifesto:
“5. The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.
8. The multi-purposing and multiple channeling of humanistic knowledge: no channel excludes the other. This is an abundance based economy, not one based upon scarcity. It values the COPY more highly than ORIGINALS and restores to the word COPY its original meaning of abundance: COPIA = COPIOUSNESS = THE OVERFLOWING BOUNTY OF THE INFORMATION AGE.
10. Co-creation is one of the founding features of the digital turn in the human sciences, because of the greater complexity. But this collaborative turn doesn’t exclude … perhaps there is a space of hermetic works of the mad individual.
12. Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution.
13. Dedefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.
14. Wiki-nomics is the new social, cultural, and economic reality. Technologies and content are mass produced, mass authored, and mass administered. Social media produce culture.
19. Digital humanities promote a flattening of the relationship between masters and disciples. A dedefinition of the roles of professor and student, expert and non-expert.”
Posted in Open Models, P2P Education | No Comments »
A milestone for open standards for additive manufacturing
30th January 2009
Via the Wohlers Talk blog:
“This week will go down as an important milestone. On Tuesday, January 13 in West Conshohocken (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, a group of more than 70 individuals from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Africa approved the formation of an official ASTM Committee to create industry standards around additive manufacturing technologies. The need for standards has been argued for at least a decade. Finally, it is happening, and in a spirit of cooperation and sense of urgency. I could tell that people at the meeting were passionate and felt strongly about the need. Why else would have some of them flown 15 hours to attend the 1.5-day meeting?
If manufacturing applications have any chance of widespread acceptance at major corporations, standards and guidelines must be developed and adopted that will help ensure quality, consistency, and repeatability. Today, each organization must deal with these issues on their own as they attempt to force fit a wide range of prototyping machines and materials into manufacturing environments. Some have experienced degrees of success; most others haven’t tried.
ASTM International was established in 1898 and is responsible for 12,000 standards by technical experts in 115 countries. Through a process of consensus, standards are drafted and then voted on by the members of ASTM. Anyone from anywhere can join and participate. I was fascinated by the simplicity and effectiveness of the process. But then, it has been tested and fine-tuned for 110 years, so it should be good.
Those present at the meeting formed five subcommittees, each of which concentrate on terminology, testing, processes, materials, and design (including file formats). Creating standard methods of testing and comparing additive systems and materials is arguably the most important activity of this effort. Soon, users of these systems will have standards that guide them through a process that has been, at best, haphazard in the past, and certainly not universally accepted. The average length of time to produce an ASTM standard is about 11 months.
The results of the meeting will be published over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can read the documents that led to this week’s meeting at wohlersassociates/astm.html.”
Posted in Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Standards, P2P Manufacturing | No Comments »
Dean Baker’s proposals for the Obama stimulus package
29th January 2009
Great example of how stimulating/promoting/funding open and participatory processes makes economic and policy sense. I’m only quoting the 3 ‘p2p’ related policy proposals out of a total of seven.
For some personal details about Dean Baker, see the book information at the bottom of this entry.
By economist Dean Baker:
1. Policy proposals:
“President Obama could not find any economists who were able to see the housing bubble for his economic team. Fortunately, he indicated that he would be willing to listen to those of us who did in designing his stimulus package.
In response to his request for ideas on how to make his economic recovery package more effective, I have put together the following list of seven proposals.”
Publicly Funded Clinical Trials
“Start a system of publicly funded clinical trials. The point would be to take the conduct of trials out of the control of the drug industry so that doctors and researchers would have immediate and full access to all research findings.
As a quid pro quo for paying for the trials, the government would get control of the licensing of the patent. The drugs developed through this system would all be sold as generics costing somewhere near $4 apiece at Wal-Mart. The payback from this would be enormous, instead of spending $330 billion a year on prescription drugs in 2012, we might spend closer to $30 billion. We’ll be paying $30 billion a year or so for clinical trials, and maybe close to that much in licensing fees, and getting much better medicine.
And, as a side benefit, people in developing countries would get cheap drugs too. We could put an end to “free-trade” agreements that try to jack up drug prices in poor countries through stronger patent protections. Total cost: $30 billion a year.”
Funding for Writers/Artists/Creative Workers
“In the New Deal there was both a federal arts project and a federal writers project. These programs employed thousands of young artists and writers. A creative stimulus package can extend this idea for the Internet Age. Suppose that President Obama made $10 billion a year available for state and local governments to support various types of creative and artistic work. This could include music, movies, writing books, even journalism. The one condition for support is that all material be made freely available in the public domain. (Better yet, it could have copyleft protection.)
This funding would be sufficient to employ 200,000 people a year at an average of $50,000 each. This would put an enormous amount of creative work in the public domain that people all over the world could download at zero cost. In the first year or two, we could have this program administered through public agencies, but in later years we can have people choose for themselves which work they want to support through a tax credit. The cost would be approximately $10 billion a year.”
Funding for the Development of Open Software
“In the same vein, the government can spend $2 billion a year to develop open source software. This money can be used to further develop and simplify open source operating systems such as Linux, as well other forms of free software. The payoffs from this spending would be enormous. Imagine that every computer buyer in the world would be able to get a computer for which the operating system was free, as was almost all the software that they would ever use.
This would surely save consumers an average of at least $200 per computer. With sales at close to 20 million a year, the savings in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development. Adding in the benefits (and presumably some contributions) from the rest of the world, we will be way ahead by going the route of publicly funded open software open software. The cost would be $2 billion a year.”
2. Book: The Conservative Nanny State
“A new voice for me is that of Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. whose book, THE CONSERVATIVE NANNY STATE; How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer, is available for download on line link here under a Creative Commons license. The book is about much more than IP, as the subtitle indicates, but this review focuses on the IP issues Baker covers. He calls the chapter, “Bill Gates Welfare Mom: How Government Patent and Copyright Monopolies Enrich the Rich and Distort the Economy”.
He begins by examining the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and Microsoft, noting that it was not Gates hard work or brilliance, or the superiority of his software, but his government provided monopoly based on IP law that made him today’s Croesus.”
Posted in P2P Public Policy | No Comments »
Open Green Maps for sustainability
29th January 2009
Via Springwise:
“New York-based Green Map System has made online maps of sustainable initiatives accessible to keen greens everywhere. Its selection of hand-picked mapmakers in 50 countries are responsible for the site’s 450+ maps, facilitating global sustainability from a grassroots level. Ethical stores, green spaces and recycling sites are just some of the sites the maps help people discover.
The project’s impact will hit a whole new level with the introduction of Open Green Map: a community site that makes the project accessible to all, letting users add new locations as well as exploring the recommendations of others. Participants can bring entries to life with Flickr photos or YouTube videos to support their text descriptions. The site has also boosted its usefulness with the development of applications for mobile devices. Users can now upload content the moment they discover it, and log in to find the nearest fair-trade coffee shop or ethical fashion store whilst out and about.”
Posted in P2P Ecology | 1 Comment »
Five years of civic hacking in the UK
29th January 2009
“Using our services, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister.”
Quite of the entries in our wiki section p2p politics would fall under the rubric of ‘civic hacking‘, i.e. the “development of applications to allow mutual aid among citizens rather than through the state“. These kind of initiatives are not against the state, and in fact, rely on access to a myriad of government services, such as for example, the capacity to contact the services responsible for fixing potholes. But neither are they simple ways to contact government, mere adjuncts to representative democracy. They are between the concept of absolute democracy, i.e. democracy without any representation, and the concept of representative democracy (i.e. choosing the people who will do it for you), representing a rather nascent form of peer-informed ‘participative democracy’.
It’s really an expression of what I have called, inspired by a concept I saw first used by Italian political scientist Cosma Orsi, a “partner state” approach, which calls for public authorities to enable and empower the direct creation of value through civil society. The provision of public funds for the creation of such mutual citizen applications was the idea behind the call for ‘civil hacking funds‘ in the UK by Tom Steinberg, in 2003. It has since come to rather significant fruition in that country, though the projects that were born out of that call, such as mysociety.org, no longer rely on government funds exclusively (they’ve gone the way of social enterpreneurship, aiming for sustainability without aid), and the rather ugly term of civic hacking is no longer used.
David Wilcox’s Social Reporter blog has an entry dedicated to those five years, with some videos of the main players, such as Tom Steinberg, featured below.
At the bottom of the list is a selectiion of audio and video material on open source politics, from our full list in the wiki.
Tom Steinberg at mySociety 5th anniversy party from David Wilcox on Vimeo.
More videos (and podcasts) on open source politics:
(access through this URL)
1. The effect of the internet on politics
* Andrew Rasiej on how Social Media are Transforming Democracy
* Clay Shirky on Collective Action through Social Networking
* Clay Shirky on Self-organized Online Cause Groups
* Clay Shirky on Social Networks and Politics
* David Weinberger on Blogs and U.S. Politics
* David Weinberger on the Web 2.0 for Politics
* Howard Rheingold on Smart Mobs for Democracy
* Jeffrey Juris on Networking Futures
* Jon Warnow on Open Source Activism
* Justin Oberman on Advocacy in the Mobile Age
* Mark Pesce on Hyperpolitics
* Marty Kearns on Netcentric Advocacy in a Socially Networked World
* Nicco Mele on the Impact of Web 2.0 on Politics
* Ricken Patel on Trends in Global e-Advocacy
* Robert Hackett on Networked Advocacy
2. The Obama Election
* Barak Obama on the Use of Social Media in his Electoral Campaign
* Bruce Bimber on the Internet in U.S. Elections
* Clay Shirky on Social Networks and the Obama Campaign
* Elisabeth and John Edwards on the Impact of the Internet on US Politics
* Henry Jenkins on the Role of Civic Media in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
* Jascha Franklin-Hodge on How Obama Really Did It
* Joe Trippi on Obama as Internet President
* Matt Bai on the Web and the Next U.S. President
* Paul Selker on the Obama Works Experience
3. Open Government
* Bill Allison and Greg Elin on Open Government Initiatives
* Ellen Miller on the Sunlight Foundation and Transparency in the Political Process
* Greg Elin on Open Data from the US Government
* Lawrence Lessig on Coding against Policy Corruption
* Lawrence Lessig on the Need for Open Politics
* Lawrence Lessig on using Openness against the Corruption of Politics
* Mark Elliot on the Participatory Consultation Process for the Future of Melbourne
* Mark Elliott on Stigmergy, Collaboration and Citizen Wikis
* Pete Ashdown on Open Source Politics
* Steven Lenos on e-Participation for Governments and Parliaments
* Tom Steinberg on Innovations in Online Activism at the MySociety Project
4. How To
* Ben Rahn on Online Political Fundraising
* David Taylor on Radical Web Designs for Social Activism
* Harald Katzmair on Developing and Implementing Social Network Campaign Strategies
* Heather Holdridge on Civic Online Campaigns
* Jonathan Cabiria on Virtual Environments for Social Justice
* Katrin Verclas on Using Mobile Phones for Social Change
* Liam Kirschner on Brilliant Swarms for Personal Transformation and Political Activism
* Todd Main on Effective Lobbying For Open Source
Posted in P2P Governance, P2P Movements, P2P Politics, P2P Public Policy | No Comments »