A Networked World

Logos and meaning

There's a fierce amount of BS that gets spouted around the launch of a logo, especially where its a rebranding exercise. Millions have to be justified by some tiny graphic object and many pages are spent going into its deep psychology; how "it" represents some deep yearning we have for the company's products and services etc etc etc ad bleeding nauseam.

So, I thought I'd turn it inside out. Here's the logo.

What does it represent and whose logo is it?

If you know for a fact, ie you have stopped by the forum I found it on or the original, please hold off identifying it, I want to know whether it conveys anything by its essence.

My take is that logos mean whatever we vest in them over time, none of them have any inherent meaning so they can't express anything at all until they have been in use for a while.

This has meaning


But this

Doesn't.

Although once it did. It meant failed product and the name still does, but the logo, not so much

Or, never mind changing the shade of the lipstick, what have you done with the pig

Expertise and analysis

This in Marketwatch today. U.S. job losses accelerate to 263,000 in September

Nonfarm payrolls fell by a greater-than-expected 263,000 in September, the Labor Department reported. It marked the 21st consecutive month of job losses.

None of that is a surprise to anyone paying attention to what is happening in the world but something that troubles me is beautifully shown in the attached graphic.

The orange marker is what the experts and analysts agreed would be the number. But it was wrong, not just a bit wrong, but badly wrong. Its been happening all over the map; the only thing that experts these days appear to agree on is something that is wrong. How come they are still experts? I'm a bunny, I dropped out of University in my first year but not only did I see all this coming, I took actions to prepare for it and I now work on the assumption that my analysis of the situation is pretty good - supported, led, guided etc by other people for sure, but people I have chosen because they appear to have a realistic understanding of the world, ie, my analysis of their performance is also good. So I have to wonder what the hell these experts are looking at and how they are able to reach their inevitably erroneous conclusions. And when it comes to analysts, what in hell are they, in fact, analysing, and what kind of analytical tools are they using on these data?

And above all, why don't they seem able to learn that what they are doing is SNAFU? seems to me that the only part of their title that is valid is the anal part, they seem to be pulling a lot of their work from there.

The only answer that I can come up with is corruption. There's almost certainly some of the "if you give me the words I want I'll pay you lots of money" kind of corruption, but I think it goes further. I think we have reached the point of "this file cannot be opened because it is corrupted". Somewhere deep in the workings of our system, things are not right, the DNA appears to have been corrupted, mutated into a form that may not be compatible with survival. Convince me I'm wrong

Updated responding to Brane and Robin below

Pretty much agreed with both of you.

It seems to me there has been a marriage (make that a prostitution) between mathematics and magic called economics.

But what really gets me is that we are all dealing with pretty much the same data and drawing such hugely divergent conclusions. Which means that there is something seriously wrong with the psychological algorithms governing their thinking.

You and I look at the entrails of a dead chicken and we see entrails, and maybe dinner, they see things that make their owners happy.

There is a market for economic theories and those that feed the preferences and predilections of those already in power will get the attention, regardless of how wrong they may be.

Or to use the infamous words of Tony Blair and co, they "fit the facts around the policy"

Unfortunately, this works pretty well for a long time (the universe appears to be very tolerant of stupidity and corruption) right up till the moment when it fails completely.

No doubt the Roman divines managed to read endless success for their owners until the barbarians smashed down the gates of Rome. If only those smashing our gates were no more than a more successful tribe. They are not, we have pushed our habitat to its limits and now we are hard up against the laws of physics and genuine mathematics.

BTW, I tried to post this in the comments field and got the response "We're sorry we cannot accept this data. Anyone else experienced that?

Disingenuous but very cool phone app

This is another one of those things we mean by open governance. Dodgy restaurants exposed in new iPhone app

A new iPhone app will tell you if a nearby restaurant has been fined for breach of food safety standards.

The application, FoodWatch NSW, brings the Food Authority's name-and-shame list to your fingertips by using the iPhone's GPS to show you a list of restaurants near your location that have been added to the list.

The software was developed by mogeneration and sources the data from the NSW Food Authority list on its website.

Chief executive officer of mogeneration Keith Ahern said that, when members of the company saw the list on the website, they thought the information provided was really valuable and useful.

"While I think a lot of restaurants aren't happy about it [the list], you can see the information and make your own decision," he said.

Clearly aware of the potential controversy FoodWatch can create, Ahern points out that the application merely presents freely available information in a more readily accessible way.

"We're not making any editorial decisions on the data, we're really just publicising what is freely available. It's not going to victimise any businesses disproportionately," he said.

The tool gives the user the ability to view the list any time, wherever the user is.

Public information publicly accessible.  cool.

But Ahern is being disingenuous about the effect of the app. If I'm looking for an eatery and I have a choice, I will go to the ones that have NOT been fined for non-compliance.

In the past, these businesses have relied on the protection of the herd, somewhere there IS a list and yes they ARE on it and you COULD, theoretically, find it and read it but they are not required to put that information inside a skull and crossbones sign on their front door.

The problem has always been in getting the right information at the right time and place. Along with FOAF reviews of restaurants in your neigbourhood, their compliance with health codes will make a difference to their business if enough people get access to the tools.

And it WILL be discriminatory, if you are on the list, expect to see your business take a hit.

The linearity problem

Yet another great link from Johnnie that triggers something. No straight lines

I enjoyed Alan Moore's slideshare from Reboot Britain, No Straight Lines. It's worth taking a good look.

Al kicks off with a very funny story about a train journey and an iPod that I won't spoil by summarising. And goes into a passionate diatribe against the limits of linear thinking.

Its not just the lack of linearity that we need to accept, its the lack of sequence. Also not wanting to screw up the joke.

But we almost never learn anything in a stepwise, linear fashion. We grab bits of it passing by, and fiddle with our understanding of them, and sometimes for a long time we "just don't get it" because even when we have all the bits they are like a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, the picture is there but we can't 'see" it.

And some people never do. Especially, paradoxically, those who are best at stuff like computer programming where sequence and excruciating detail is critical. Then one day, apparently without any relevant input, we "get" it.

And I suspect that is where, god help me, real innovation occurs. Someone has most of the bits, but can't make them fit so they create a bit, a new bit that didn't exist before but which connects the thing in an entirely different way

And because the world is NOT a jigsaw puzzle, what happens is that the new bit makes all the old bits fit together in different ways as well. Which is why change can be so disorienting.

We recognise that many of the old bits are there but they are somehow distorted in ways we don't understand. So the response of those who were comfortable with the old ways things worked try to pretend that the old bits still work in the old ways, that its just their perception that is wonky; because to accept that the whole world is wonky is just too much of a challenge.

We are, in effect, betrayed by the proximity to familiarity that wouldn't happen if we, say, suddenly moved to Tanzania and had to learn Swahili to survive. When we shift our entire domain we recognise its foreignness, but when that shift happens around us it takes time to adjust to that suspiciously familiar but actually completely different reality.

That seems to me the problem with peak Oil, with Climate change, with the end of western financial capitalism, it all still LOOKS the same, or closely enough to fool us into believing that we don't have to change anything to deal with the problem.

Wrong.

And one more point about non-linearity, it entails outputs that are grossly inconsistent with the inputs and apparently disconnected from them.

Second strike on the self service web

A few years ago the British Government discovered that people who had tried their eGov websites were beginning to migrate back to the phone. My take was that the problem with most websites is that the user is the person least qualified to use them. We are ignorant bunnies when we are looking for critical information from anyone, that's why we need the help in the first place.

At least the phone centre (when I finally get through to them) can start by asking me what the problem is. If i fail to explain something clearly enough they can ask a follow-up question to get the story right, then they can give me the answers I need. At lest there is one expert in the conversation.

This doesn't mean they all do it, just that they could.

Looks like the travel industry is hitting the wall as well, Flyers Lose Patience with Do-it-Yourself Web Bookings

A report to be released Tuesday by Forrester Research has found that far from embracing the do-it-yourself era, many Americans are "fed up" with the complicated process of planning and booking travel.

"What we've seen is growing frustration," said Henry H. Harteveldt, a Forrester travel analyst. "Consumers see other Web sites becoming easier to use -- retail Web sites, banking Web sites, media Web sites. But travel is treading water as a category."

"There are very few travel companies that are really looking to improve the planning and booking process," he added.

Customers are required to educate themselves about destinations, flights and hotels; figure out extra fees; wade through fine print; and understand industry jargon like the difference between deluxe and standard rooms, Mr. Harteveldt said.

"Travel companies expect the consumer to behave like a travel agent," he said. "The question I always ask these guys is, 'Could your mother-in-law use your Web site without having to call you for help?' The answer is always no."

In fact, Mr. Harteveldt said, a growing number of consumers appear to be interested in using traditional travel agencies, if they can find one.

I've never used travel sites unless the request is "get me the cheapest flight to X and return, starting on this day and returning on this day at about these times".

For everything else i go to a travel agent.

The airlines got into this game to increase their profits by outsourcing the booking to the customers not the agencies who, bizarrely, wanted a commission for doing the work.

By being unable to simplify anything but the simplest booking, they are shooting their business model in the foot. It may well be that the cost and complexity of being able to simplify the process enough for you and me is just too high and there is too much of their process not under their control; other airlines' policies, government regulations especially. But all that means is that the profitability of an industry already under serious threat, is further compromised.

For the rest of us it means that we need to understand what really happens in our own processes and to look hard at how they actually interconnect. We also need to remember that when it comes to complexity, Reeds law applies.

Every time we add a factor, the number of possible interactions within our system doubles - and the cost of creating a flawless system to manage all those possible combinations squares.

And, sadly for the accountants, the only system that can deal with all that complexity will turn out to be people.

Those Aussies

They are SUCH kidders. Aussie firm sells Twitter followers

Australian media marketing firm uSocial is offering a new paid service allowing organisations to buy Twitter followers to aid their marketing campaigns.

According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year.

USocial says it profiles Twitter users to ensure a good fit with their clients, then suggests they follow the Twitter feed of that client – the user then decides whether to follow or not.

OR

These guys need to lay off the brainstorming and get back on the meds.

Cool health issues mapping mashup

I came across this thanks to Tim O'Reilly's tweet on it. EpiSPIDER Map Exhibit

It spiders a whole bunch of sources, including online jnews for health-related stories and tries to locate them on the map. You can filter by disease type, country, province or state, Human development index, population, GDP and report age.

Now it also picks up some false positives like an NZ report on global swine flu numbers and locates them in NZ, but it also lets me know within an hour of the report that NSW has reported its first swine flu death.

List under cool tools

Wasting their time

The thing I like about the net is that everyone gets to have a say, even pontificating jerks like me, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. Given the underlying mischievousness of so many net based stuff, I'm betting this is a have. But if it isn't, the StupidFilter is a cool way to waste their time.

The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise.

HAH! The net has ALWAYS been littered with drivel, egos, flame wars, cods, gags and stupidity. Get over it guys.

The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

Diddums. What we USED to have was a filter called the media but it too has largely joined the baying, as distinct from Bayesian, pack of  pavlovian droolers

It's time to fight back.

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Yep, this is a send up.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

Wot? No Twitter filter?

Seriously, they should read Shirky, the net IS the filter.

In other news, Michael Jackson, having been dead for a number of years, has finally decided to lie down. The media is full of, even more than usual.

Back to the garden.

Update: I fed this page into the filter and it picked not one as stupid.

Fail.           

Jeff Jonas is an idealist

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this look at how Jeff Jonas Explores the Nature of Data

On a trip to Washington D.C., Jonas spoke with a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst at a governmental agency. "What do you wish you could have if you could have anything?" Jonas asked her. Answers to my questions faster, she said. "It sounds reasonable," Jonas told the audience, "but then I realized it was insane." Insane, because "What if the question was not a smart question today, but it's a smart question on Thursday?" Jonas says.

The point is, we cannot assume that data needed to answer the query existed and been recorded before the query was asked. In other words, it's a timing problem. "I said, 'What are the chances you could have every smart question, every day?'"

[...] Jonas related an example of a financial scam at a bank. An outside perpetrator is arrested, but investigators suspect he may have been working with somebody inside the bank. Six months later, one of the employees changes their home address in payroll system to the same address as in the case. How would they know that occurred, Jonas asked. "They wouldn't know. There's not a company out there that would have known, unless they're playing the game of data finds data and the relevance finds the user."

This led Jonas to expound his first principle. "If you do not treat new data in your enterprise as part of a question, you will never know the patterns, unless someone asks."

[...] Getting smarter by asking questions with every new piece of data is the same as putting a picture puzzle together, Jonas said. This is something that Jonas calls persistent context. "You find one piece that's simply blades of grass, but this is the piece that connects the windmill scene to the alligator scene," he says. "Without this one piece that you asked about, you'd have no way of knowing these two scenes are connected."

[...] But large numbers can also work against you. At another federal agency (he wouldn't say which), Jonas got to thinking: What if they had a very large data warehouse in the basement with 4 exabytes (EB) of data, and it was expanding at the rate of 5 TB per minute. "You sit there and you realize you don't get to Friday night and run a batch job to answer the question of what does it all mean," he says. "You could use all the computing power and energy on Earth and you wouldn't be able to do it." The "it" he is referring to, of course, is seeing how each new piece of data affects all the other pieces of data.

"What's happening is data volumes are growing at this pace, yet an organization's ability to make sense of them isn't keeping up," Jonas said. "Today, say you can make sense of 7 percent of what's available, and in a few years it might be 4 percent, and in a few years after that it might be one percent. So the percentage of what's knowable is on the decline."

[...] "I think the only way forward is going from applying algorithms to individual transactions, to first placing information in context--pixels to pictures--and only applying algorithms after one sees how the transaction relates to the other data," he said. "It's the only way that I can see that it's going to close this sense-making gap."

I can see three problems here at least that Jeff can't solve and which continues to give me hope that Big Brother will drown in his own data.

1. The counter terrosim expert problem is not that she can't get her questions answered, nor that, as he asserts, she needs to know what questions to ask and when to ask them. Her problem is that even when she has the right answers to the right questions, they wont be actioned unless they help with “fixing” the data around the policy
2. His approach essentially requires that the organisation and its management continuously reconstruct their view of reality and constantly work without a context into which to fit the data because, by definition, the next bit of data could collapse and reconstruct that picture as something completely new. The level of self confidence that would take for people whose lives depend on structure, order, process, CYA best practise and, above all, control, is wholly at odds with the kind of people you recruit to fill those roles. Oh, and
   
3. You still can't know everything. The data you have can only tell you so much, but the data you are not collecting is what will kill you.

Jeff is, no doubt, a seriously smart guy, but he is also a technologist who believes in the perfectability of human society through technology. But while we are driven by greed, fear, ambition, hatred and pride, fixing our ignorance wont change anything.

terry H buys a bucket of snow job

From  Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog - AP clarifies copyright threat

Thanks to Ars Technica for probing AP news editor Ted Bridis on what the cooperative plans to do to stop theft of its copyrights. Technology soon to be deployed will search for entire stories that thieves have lifted and presented without a license.

[...] “What I’m talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don’t even comment on it. And it happens way more than most people realize.”

Sorry Terry, I don't buy.

These guys are walking back their dumbness.

The clue is in the "And it happens way more than most people realize.” line.

If they have been tracking this use they know how often it happens and they could just say so instead of this "way more than we realise" bullshit. Nobody much has actually bothered to realise it at all until they brought it up, mostly because its not happening to any significant extent, even the automated trackbackers only lift a few words and the subject line.

But they don't know how much it happens and they wont until they actually get their search tool working, and when they do they'll find the problem is trivial and most importantly, it wont make any difference to their cashflowm, their bottom line or their business model.

These people are just dead between the ears and they think that using the muckspreader will solve that; it wont.