Author: Michael Nielsen

I love the BBC:

A North East writer has been given a grant of £2,000 to use sheep to create random poems, which also utilise the deepest workings of the universe.

The money has been provided by Northern Arts for Valerie Laws to create a new form of “random” literature.

Each of the animals has a word from a poem written on their backs and as they wander about the words take a new poetic form each time they come to rest.

But the exercise is not just an attempt to create living poems, it is also, according to the poet, an exercise in quantum mechanics.

The animals being sprayed belong to farmer Donald Slater of Whitehouse Farm Centre, Morpeth, in Northumberland.

Mrs Laws, 48, said: “I like the idea of using living sheep to create a living poem, and creating new work as they move around.

“Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics which a lot of people find hard to understand, as it seems to go against common sense.

“Randomness and uncertainty is at the centre of how the universe is put together, and is quite difficult for us as humans who rely on order.

“So I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep.”

Mrs Laws created a poem for the project, based on the traditional Japanese haiku form of poetry.

Each sheep had a word from the poem sprayed on their back, and when they came to rest a new text was created.

Farmer Donald Slater said: “After last year’s devastation (of foot-and-mouth) we all needed cheering up and this might just do it.”

A spokesman for Northern Arts called the scheme “an exciting fusion of poetry and quantum physics”.

One of the poems created by the sheep reads:

Warm drift, graze gentle, White below the sky, Soft sheep, mirrors, Snow clouds.

Quoted here in its entirety, because I wouldn’t want anyone to miss out. (In the strange event that anyone feels moved to point it out, no, there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot that’s quantum here.)

• Science in the open » My Bad…or how far should the open mindset go?
  • Cameron Neylon on some of the challenges of being open.
• Wikinomics » Music Goes 2.0 — Sorry Paul Anka, You’re Not Invited
  • Wiki-like collaboration for music: “Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.”
• Victoria Stodden: Benkler: We are collaborators, not knaves
  • “[Benkler] sets out to show that there is a sea change happening in the study of organizational systems that far better reflects how we actually interact, organize, and operate. He explains that the collaborative movements we generally characterize as belonging to the new internet age (free and open source software, wikipedia) are really just the instantiation of a wider and pervasive, in fact completely natural and longstanding, phenomena in human life.

    This is due to how we can organize capital in the information and networked society: We own the core physical means of production as well as knowledge, insight, and creativity. Now we’re seeing longstanding society practices, such as non-hierarchical norm generation and collaboration more from the periphery of society to the center of our productive enterprises. Benkler’s key point in this talk is that this shift is not limited to Internet-based environments, but part of a broader change happening across society.”

• disambiguity – » Ambient Intimacy
  • “Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.”
• Warnock’s Dilemma – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • “Warnock’s Dilemma, named for its originator Bryan Warnock, is the problem of interpreting a lack of response to a posting on a mailing list, Usenet newsgroup, or Web forum. It occurs because a lack of response does not necessarily imply that no one is interested in the topic, and could have any one of several different implications, some of which are contradictory. Commonly used in the context of trying to determine why a post has not been replied to, or to refer to a post that has not been replied to.”
• Lawrence Lessig Web 2.0 Presentation
  • Excellent presentation on the role of lobbying and money in the US Government. One of many remarkable facts is a remarkable graph showing that members of the US Congress have, over time, become essentially 100% likely to retain their seats.
• Ben Franklin on error
  • “It is perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, that is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists and does not seem to require so much an active energy as a passive aptitude of soul, in order to encounter it.

    But error is endlessly diversified. It has no reality but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself to display all her boundless faculties and all of her beautiful and interesting extravagances and absurdities.”

• Of word clouds and speaker bios : business|bytes|genes|molecules
  • Deepak Singh shows a beautiful seminar announcement created using Wordle. Now, if only we could replace all speaker bios this way…
• Kevin Kelly: Web 10.0
  • “…I decided to skip Web 3 – Web 9 and just speak about the upcoming Web 10.0 and what I think will happen in the next 6,500 days. ” MN: About deaggregating data on the web, and then restructuring it in multiple ways.
• Barack Obama’s photos from election night
  • CC licensed.
• The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry: Don’t Mind Your Language
  • “For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. “
• Last Saturday – Eva Amsen
  • Wonderful post from Eva, capturing poignantly what it’s like to do science, and what it’s like to leave behind.
• New York Times College: Books: The Harvard Guide to Happiness
  • Interesting study correlating what undergraduates did with how fulfilled they felt.
• Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog: And the Survey Says…Publishers Ignoring eReaders
  • “60 percent of publishers who answered a questionnaire neither use e-readers themselves nor download the e-books which can be read on the devices or on computers.”
• Wired Campus: Students Watch Lecture Videos in Fast Forward – Chronicle.com
  • “Some professors report that when their students are reviewing class materials, the students speed up online recordings of lectures and zip through hour-long presentations in as little as 30 minutes.” MN: I’ve often wanted this facility while watching YouTube or listening to my ipod. It’d be even nicer if you could easily change the speed.
• Crowdsourcing and Gift Economies | emmajane.net
  • “Explaining open source is sometimes a little tricky… Depending on who I’m talking to I’ll explain that working on an open source project is a little bit like volunteering to sing with the church choir. Even if the person isn’t religious, they can usually appreciate the beauty of a group that sings in unison. They also understand the more the choir practices together, the better they sound.”
• Inmates conduct ecological research on slow-growing mosses
  • Crowdsourcing is popping up all over the place: “Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni’s team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.

    …Nadkarni has guided her unlikely but productive team of researchers since 2004, as they conduct experiments to identify the best ways to cultivate slow-growing mosses. Nadkarni’s so-called Moss-in-Prisons project is designed to help ecologists replace large quantities of ecologically important mosses that are regularly illegally stripped from Pacific Northwest forests
    … One member of Nadkarni’s research team, who was released from Cedar Creek, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in microbiology at the University of Nevada”

• Joho the Blog » Innovation and the Open Internet: Joi Ito
  • Paraphrasing Ito, on the benefits of Creative Commons as another layer of abstraction: “Way back when, it was difficult to connect computers. Then we got Ethernet, then TCP/IP, and then HTTP (the Web). These new layers allow participation without permission. The cost of sending information and the cost of innovation have gone down (because the cost of failure has gone down). Now we’re getting another layer: Creative Commons. “By standardizing and simplifying the legal layer … I think we will lower the costs and create another explosion of innovation.” “
• The Quantum Pontiff : The DiVincenzo Code
• Time Management For Anarchists – Stepcase Lifehack
• Cosma Shalizi: Economics
  • Cosma’s wonderful list of recommend reading.
• Intrade gets California Prop. 8 completely wrong.
  • A good example of a prediction market getting something completely wrong – Intrade’s estimate probability hovered around 30% for Prop. 8 being passed. I wonder what information people were using to price the likelihood? Was the market simply too thin?
• Wisdom of the markets: climate change | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  • In December, 2007, “Intrade.com, the Irish prediction market company, started trading in a range of financial contracts whose payoff depends on specific outcomes of a post-Kyoto climate change agreement. The contracts, which were designed together with the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics, capture which countries will participate in a post-Kyoto agreement as well as how stringent any pollution reduction targets might be.”

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• Barack Obama: How He Did It | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com
  • Gripping behind-the-scenes story describing the entire campaign.
• The Beak of the Finch – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • “The author Jonathan Weiner follows the career of two biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who have spent twenty years proving that Charles Darwin did not know the full strength of his theory of evolution. On a desert island among the Galapagos… the Grants are showing that among the finches of the Galapagos, natural selection sometimes takes place so rapidly we can watch it at work.”
• Technology, Politics and Democracy – O’Reilly Radar
  • This seems inevitable, especially as online tools get more sophisticated: “Online U.S. political communities will morph from a campaign fundraising role to a governing role. Regardless of whether Obama or McCain wins in November, every 2012 political campaign, even the laggards, will be as sophisticated as Obama is today- and any campaign with that much momentum won’t be able to stop community participation at the White House door or the Capitol steps (“thanks for all the money and support, I‘ll see you in four years”). Online communities will follow politicians into their governing roles. This summer when MyBarackObama experienced the FISA revolt within his own community this became clear. This has far more transformative potential than the fundraising juggernaut we are seeing now. Powerful communities may come to dominate the agenda of incumbent politicians providing feedback, direction and policy input. “
• Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog: Newspapers and the A.P.
  • “It seems like the A.P. was a solution to yesterday’s problem. Before the advent of the Internet and all the ways to move e-content from point A to point B it was a very useful model. But haven’t we gotten to the stage where all the newspapers could form their own new federation and accomplish the same objectives? The article talks about some local initiatives where several papers in Ohio formed a co-op to address this; why not take it up several notches and build a worldwide co-op?”
    MN: There are obvious problems here with the potential for free riders (c.f. Mancur Olson’s “The Logic of Collection Action”, and problems with groups action), but this seems worth exploring.
• Savage Minds » The gap between taste and achievement
  • Thoughtful post about work, standards, and achievement. A small excerpt: “people who do mediocre work have some mixture of low standards, low energy, unambitious goals, and a high opinion of their abilities. People who do good work have high standards, work hard, stay hungry, and are all too aware of what the work demands and what they are capable of. Doing good work, doing it healthily, and over the course of an entire career, is not about closing the gap between taste and achievement, it is about keeping it open, and managing that gap in a healthy and productive way.”
• The Happiness Project: Happiness: Six contradictions that will help you to be happier.
  • “I try to embrace these contradictions:

    1. Accept yourself, but expect more of yourself.
    2. Keep an empty shelf, and keep a junk drawer.
    3. Take yourself less seriously—and take yourself more seriously.
    4. Use your time efficiently, yet make time to play, to wander, to read at whim, to fail.
    5. Think about yourself so you can forget yourself.
    6. The days are long, but the years are short.”

• Marginal Revolution: How to read popular non-fiction better
  • “There are (at least) three kinds of useful popular non-fiction works. The first open up a whole new world to you where previously none had existed. Many people felt this way when they read Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene for the first time. For obvious reasons, books like this are increasingly hard to find as you continue your reading career.

    The second kind are to be read in batches. No one of them is good enough to thrill you and maybe no one of them is accurate enough to trust. But if you read five to ten of them you get a sense of a field and its critical issues.

    The third kind are to be read as marginal additions to a body of knowledge you already have a good grasp of.

    The key is to have the kind of book that matches the kind you want. “

• Savage Minds: Claude Levi-Strauss on data mining, in 1962
  • From his book “Savage Minds”, as quoted by the eponymous blog: “The greater our knowledge, the more obscure the overall scheme. The dimensions multiply, and the growth of axes of reference beyond a certain point paralyzes intuitive methods: it becomes impossible to visualize a system when its representation requires a continuum of more than three or four dimensions. But the day may come when all the available documentation on Australian tribes is transferred to punched cards and with the help of a computer their entire techno-economic, social and religious structures can be shown to be like a vast group of transformations. “
• Geeking with Greg: Data is good, code is a liability
  • Based on a talk by Peter Norvig: “more data seems to help in many problems more than complicated algorithms. More data can hit diminishing returns at some point, but the point seems to be fairly far out for many problems, so keeping it simple while processing as much data as possible often seems to work best.”
• Science in the open » Connecting the dots – the well posed question and code as a liability
  • Cameron Neylon on collective intelligence, data mining, and well-posed questions. Excerpt: “A well posed question is one which, given an appropriate dataset, can be answered by easily prepared and comprehensible code”
• Chinese Government Gets In On Gold Farming Action With New 20% Tax
  • “Last year China banned the sale of virtual currency in an effort to shut down “gold farmers” — businesses that hire young Chinese to play video games all day and sell the proceeds (in the form of game currency or magic items) on eBay (EBAY) or online. The Chinese government did nothing to enforce its own ban, so it remains to be seen whether Beijing follows up with its latest edict: Gamers who sell virtual goods for a profit will be taxed at 20% of the proceeds, the same rate applied to profits on real estate or other transactions.

    In December 2005 the New York Times estimated 100,000 Chinese were employed full-time in the gold farming industry, and consulting group iResearch says the virtual currency trade is a $1.4 billion dollar industry growing at 15 to 20% a year.”

• Jeff Atwood compares current computers and the Dynabook
  • Excellent article comparing Alan Kay’s original conception of the Dynabook with where we are today, and what else can be done.
• stevenberlinjohnson.com: The System Worked
  • Rather than blog about the US presidential election, I’ll outsource to Steven Johnson, who I pretty much agree with 100 percent.
• Open Access for inventors
  • About Johnny Chung Lee of Wii YouTube fame: “[…] the patent implication of Dr Lee’s practices. Patenting requires novelty, therefore by making his inventions public before filing for a patent application would invalidate any later request. However, by placing his inventions on YouTube, it also precludes anyone else from trying to patent the invention. This is, for lack of a better word, open source invention….

    Dr Lee’s success point the way towards a new model of invention. Share your ideas and findings on YouTube, and if they are good they will have an impact immediately. Imagine if Mr Lee had tried to patent instead of sharing, he may be sitting on a useless patent with no way to bring it to market. Sharing then becomes a good strategy for the struggling inventor….”

• Asch conformity experiments
  • The famous experiments in which people under social pressure will agree with propositions that obviously contradict the evidence before their eyes. Has implications for collective intelligence, for if a large group comes to strongly held but wrong conclusion, lone group members with contradictory evidence may find it difficult to speak up.
• Overcoming Bias: The Evil Pleasure
  • “We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin. “
• 100 Free Open Courseware Classes About Open Source Everything | BSchool.com Business Schools Directory
• Daniel Lemire: Staying organized without planning
  • “I seriously doubt that anyone can manage his time better than with a greedy algorithm.”
• Questions for James K. Galbraith – The Populist – Interview – NYTimes.com
  • Interview with Galbraith:

    “Q: But there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis?

    A: Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.

    Q: What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?

    A: It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.”

• Is a Political Endorsement Appropriate for a Technical Site? – Tim O’Reilly
  • A thoughtful discussion from Tim O’Reilly.
• Marginal Revolution: How to read fast
  • “Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers. I start ten or so books for every one I finish. I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it. I am ruthless in my discards.”
• Official Google Blog: Putting crowd wisdom to work
  • The story of Google’s internal use of prediction markets.
• The Napster pirates of transgenic biotech
  • A seed company in India pirated genetically modified cotton from Mayhco / Monsanto. The cotton is resistant to infestations by bollworms, which can apparently devastate harvests. The article tells the story of what happened, and the consequences, with many interesting lessons for regulation and IP law.
• Doron Zeilberger’s 92nd Opinion: Twenty Pieces of Advice for a Young (and also not so young) Mathematician
• YouTube – Stand By Me – Beautiful International Version
• …My heart’s in Accra » Twittering the election… and wondering if this is the right tool
  • Ethan Zuckerman on voting transparency. Unsurprisingly, Ethan has much that is interesting to say about transparency around the world, not just in the US.
• Enormously important news from the Free Software Foundation (Lessig Blog)
  • This has been coming for a while now, but is finally here: “the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.”
• Thinking about RaaS: Research-as-a-Service « Freelancing science
  • A good metaphor to stimulate ideas.
• Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley
  • “Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and… condemn the use of intellectual property by others as “free riding.” … The economics of property is concerned with internalizing negative externalities – harms that one person’s use of land does to another’s interest to it, as in the familiar tragedy of the commons. But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities… I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances… economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property. “
• Quantum Collaborations
  • An online platform for collaboration in quantum physics, which Matt Leifer is putting together.
• “Innovation at Google” 2008 Event Notes
  • Many interesting tidbits on internal processes. E.g.: “Google Product Snippets are a weekly email sent out on Monday where Googlers are asked to submit their previous weeks projects and activities as well as their forecasted work for the week ahead. All Product Snippets are then compiled into a database and made searchable to other Googlers so everyone knows what is going on at Google. Data collected via Snippets is then published to the “PDB” or Google’s project database user interface all in real time making information collected easy for any Googler to access as well as comprehend no matter their area of expertise, language or location.”
• Carlton M. Caves: What to do with the Republican rump?
• Plant Twitter Kit
  • “Once the kit is assembled, connect it to the Internet through the built-in ethernet jack, jam the leads into the plant’s soil, and subscribe to the plant’s twitter feed. It will tell you when it needs watering, or scold you if you’ve overwatered it, and report its status in between.”

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In my book about the future of science, I’m currently working on the chapters about online collaboration.

As a result of this work, my thinking about online collaboration has condensed sufficiently that I’d like to give a seminar on the topic sometime soon, to get some feedback on my current thinking, and (ideally) to meet more people with related interests. As an indicator of the kinds of things I find interesting, an early draft of part of those chapters is my article on Kasparov versus the World. A seminar would cover far more, though, and include a general discussion of what makes some online collaborations succeed, and others fail, and of the long-term prospects for online creative collaboration.

Ideally, I’d like to speak somewhere in the greater Toronto (broadly construed) area, probably in December, and to an audience with a broad spectrum of backgrounds, including some who are already knowledgeable about online collaboration.

If there’s anyone out there who’s interested in hearing me speak on the topic, and willing to arrange a seminar, I’d love to hear from you (mnielsen@perimeterinstitute.ca)!

I’m an advocate of extreme openness in doing research. I believe online tools are greatly underused by scientists, and that taking a far more open approach to the sharing of scientific ideas and data is one important step to taking full advantage of those tools.

Although there are great advantages to such openness, there are also many problems. The biggest problems, which I’ve talked about here before, are to do with lack of incentives to share information, and the relatively undeveloped state of online tools. While tools like wikis and blogs are great for some purposes, they’re just not all that well adapted to research.

This post enumerates some of the other problems with extreme openness. None are insurmountable, and none change my belief that extreme openness will be extremely valuable to the progress of science. But they seem worth writing out systematically. In the interests of brevity I’ve concentrated on listing problems, not proposing solutions, although solutions to many come readily to mind.

No-one wants someone looking over their shoulder while they work: As I draft my book, there’s times when I’m best off working away in private, without interruption and distraction, and times when I could really do with some scrutiny. It’s plain irritating and disheartening to be flamed by someone for a flaw in your work that you’re already aware of, and planning to fix. A partial solution is to do research in a low-visibility but essentially open fashion. Many open source projects do this – work on the project is carried out via open but obscure channels (e.g., mailing lists), and then major releases are announced in a high visibility channel.

Conversation doesn’t scale naively: In an ideal world, online tools will connect people with well-matched and complementary expertise. What you see instead in a lot of online conversations is experts “connected” to the rude and uninformed. I don’t know that this brings much benefit to anyone. I think this problem can be solved with improved design of the tools, and improved filtering, but it’s a real problem.

Groupthink: Original thinking that goes against conventional wisdom is not always well rewarded in the open. Commentary is often knee-jerk, rather than constructive. As an example, one of the most original thinkers I know is Robin Hanson; Robin often blogs [1] interesting ideas that contradict conventional wisdom. There’s some great comments on his blog posts, but there’s also a lot of noise, and poorly thought-out responses as people see their sacred cows challenged.

Giving offence: This is really an instance of the previous problem: it’s difficult to develop ideas that may give offense in the open. I don’t think I’d want to write a research article about gun control out in the open.

Ethics and IP concerns: Sometimes, confidentiality may prevent disclosure of data, either for ethical reasons or to protect IP, or both.

[1] Robin is only one of many contributors to that blog, and you may need to scroll down to find some of Robin’s contributions.

• Rolling Your Own Newsroom – O’Reilly Radar
• Paradoxes of Happinesss: the sadness of a Happiness Project.
  • A meditation on the fact that, sometimes, committing to your own nature means accepting that you’ll never do things you think you ought to like.
• The Long Tail Internet Myth: Top 10 domains aren’t shrinking
  • Compete’s analysis of the concentration of attention occurring on the internet: according to one measure, at least, people are gradually paying more (not less) attention to the most popular sites.
• Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki – WikiRing Blog
• …My heart’s in Accra » The mines of Ilakaka, and reporting from the edge of the world
  • Photos from Ilakaka, the wild west mining town in Madagascar that supplies 50 percent of the world’s sapphire.
• Tethering the Wii :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
  • Yvette Wohn makes the point that the Nintendo Wii is a fantastic platform for innovation, yet Nintendo is doing everything they can to prevent people from developing on it. A real pity.

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