Reminded today about geese and their amazing flocking strategies. All seemingly based on simple rules, if you believe the boids simulations. Simple rules like: engaging, encouraging and pulling ones weight (or alignment, cohesion, and separation in Craig Reynolds’ algorithm).

• As each bird flaps its wings, it creates uplift for the bird following. By flying in a “V” formation, the whole flock adds 71 percent greater flying range than if one bird flew alone.
• Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front.
• When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies at the point position.
• The geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
• When a goose gets sick or wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly again, or dies. Then they
  launch out on their own, with another formation, or they catch up with their flock.

I’d accepted as one of those givens, because I’d heard enough people say it, that one of the reasons Nixon lost out to Kennedy in the 60’s election was the media-savviness of Kennedy.

“People who heard the first televised debate on the radio thought that Nixon had won, while the TV viewers thought that Kennedy had won. However, since far more people watched the debate on television than listened to it on radio, this was a net gain for Kennedy. Nixon was so upset by his performance (and sickly physical appearance) in the first debate that he refused to watch any video of the debate for the rest of his life.”

Nixon apparently refused to wear make-up, and looked grim as a result.

But this (again from Everything Bad is Good For You) is a really interesting take:

“What if it wasn’t Nixon’s lack of make-up that troubled the TV watchers? After all, Nixon did turn out to be shifty and untrustworthy in the end. Perhaps all those voters who thought he had won after they heard the debate on the radio or read the transcript in the papers simply didn’t have access to the range of emotional information conveyed by television. Nixon lost on TV because he didn’t look like someone you would want as president.”

This idea - of mass emotional intelligence working via TV - is tantalising. And I’d love to be able to wholeheartedly believe it. But the Clinton/Lewinsky, Blair/Iraq style memories bring me up a little short.

The thing, I suppose, that worries me is not that EQ can’t work. It’s when it doesn’t. What if the mechanisms for making corrections are much more awkward than a more ‘rational’ approach? What if you stay wrong for longer, in the same way a Juliet can be blind to a Romeo’s faults? And if there is this divide, then which is preferable: a system that is more frequently flawed but easier to correct, or a system that is less frequently flawed but harder to correct?

I’d plump for the former.

“If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks.”
- Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You

Blogs, comments and traffic are one reward system presumably.

• Online Help For Parents (from This Is Local London)
  My sister Vicky’s been interviewd by the local press about Little Legends. Nice to see a little bit of PR
  Tags: LittleLegends press

June 21st 2007 | Comments(1) | Asides on LittleLegends press

I don’t know whether there’s a scientific explanation for this, but the collective wisdom at school is that something happens to children on windy days. For whatever reason, gust of wind make otherwise well-behaved kids go wild.

June 20th 2007 | Comments(1) | Notes on

• Max Dunn’s Web Site - RoR and Flickr
  how to integrate Flickr pictures into our web site - the rFlickr gem seems to be a better choice to the plain flickr gem
  Tags: LittleLegends code flickr ruby
• Using RMagick with Flickr
  Thinking about using Flickr for all the LittleLegends images, and this came up.
  Tags: LittleLegends ruby code flickr RMagick API

• Spinebreakers
  “Penguin UK today announced the launch of a pioneering online book community for teenagers. Spinebreakers.co.uk will be a stimulating and entertaining portal into the world of books, run by teenagers themselves. “
  Tags: publishing teens community editorial

• Using RailsCron
  
  Tags: ruby code cron
• Agile RSS Aggregator in Ruby - igvita.com
  
  Tags: ruby code RSS aggregator

First off, take an imaginary league table of surgeons. The further up or down surgeons are in that list, the more they get paid. The goal of the table is to make sure that the best surgeons are given the most difficult and dangerous jobs, and so, hopefully, to optimise the system. Brain surgeons at the top, and, er, earwax removers at the bottom.

How do you measure the surgeons? One way would be to score them on results: some fiendishly complicated, combination of number of malpractice suits, of numbers of ensuing complications, of “deaths at the hands of”, etc.

Sign off this wonder-system and see how the surgeons do…

Enter the brain surgeon, at the top of the table, with a scalpel as sharp as his mind. He has two types of surgery open to him: brain and non-brain. Brain surgery is high-risk and as well-paid as you can get, but why would anyone do it? High-risk means that there’s a high chance that you will be scored down, which means there’s a high chance that s/he’ll have fewer first choices on surgery, which means that it’s more likely that you’ll get given higher-risk jobs (because nobody really wants them).

Effectively, if the personal goal of the brain surgeon is to do the best surgery he can and at the same time get as well paid for it as possible, he will sub-optimise the system. In fact, won’t there be a whole talent scramble to avoid risk and so sub-optimise the system?

“Who wants art that looks nice these days? We live in a world of strikes and bombings.”
- 77 Clocks, Christopher Fowler

Not sure how I got there, but I’ve just finished reading “Democratic Institutions, Traditional African Institutions, And the Role of Liberian Youth In Conflict Resolution“, a speech by Charles Kwanulo Sunwabe, Jr. and found this little nugget in it.

“democratization is a tedious process, which has the potential to lead to war”

If anyone knows who the “Roberts” is that’s meant to have said this, I’d love to know.

June 08th 2007 | Comments(2) | Notes on democratisation war

This made me think.

“The concepts of a ‘mainstream’ and an ‘underground’ are laid to rest by networked culture. There are only open and closed networks. Everything is flat.”
- via the very bright Anil Bawa

Hmm … instinctively like the idea, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it.

• Yahoo!: The Web’s Future Is Not In Search
  Kind of required reading
  Tags: online future
• Page Flakes
  Over 1,000 Schools Worldwide Arrange ‘Flakes’ on Customized Web Pages (SocialComputingMagazine.com)
  Tags: education school_2.0 teaching tools

Peridot is a green jewel. Most of it comes from the San Carlos Native American Reservation. But the unemployment rate there is 76%. In Jewels, the author meets a local called Franklin:

‘Outside the reservation, you see news stories of people worrying about a recession,’ Franklin told me the day before … In the reservation we don’t worry about it. Our recession has lasted for generations … Boredom, that’s the worst thing.’

I wonder whether boredom is community’s kryptonite?

Gems and precious stones are something I knew nothing about. So I’ve been reading Victoria Finlay’s wonderful book Jewels.

One thing that caught my eye was the Mohs Scale. In 1802 a Viennese banker bought eleven of the best mineral collections in Europe. Like lots of collectors, he wanted the stones catalogued and classified. To do so, he hired Friedrich Mohs, a young mineralogist. One of Mohs’ big problems was measuring the hardness of stones, and how to quantify how much harder a lump of topaz is than a lump of gold.

Rather than go for something absolute, he opted for a comparative scale.

So he chose ten minerals ‘of which every preceding one is scratched by that which follows it’, and gave them each a number according to his new scratching order. The softest was talc, which scored one, while the hardest was diamond, which therefore got ten. Everything else came out somewhere in the middle … He acknowledged that the values were arbitrary … but the system was at least easy to use. You can do it at home: anything that can be scratched by a fingernail is below two; anything that takes a mark from a pocket-knife blade is below five; anything that can scratch quartz is above seven.

Apparently seems that

the materials engineer and metallurgist find little use for the Mohs scale

Fair enough. But what I liked was the huge power of a rough heuristic for most people.

• Money, Not Spare Cycles, Drives Open Source
  “big open source projects … are built not by the mythical open source volunteer, but by paid programmers working for large corporations.”
  Tags: OpenSource Wired
• Searching quicker than a ferret
  acts_as_solr jump-off point
  Tags: ruby rails code search
• Twitter Gem: Twitterize Your Ruby Application
  
  Tags: ruby code twitter
• RFaceBook
  Ruby library for FaceBook’s new API
  Tags: code ruby facebook
• Screencast-O-Matic
  Lifehacker shows how to make screencasts online
  Tags: screencast help guides
• Quantum Mechanics and Web Design
  Dan’s Reboot presentation - looks interesting
  Tags: design web physics DanDixon
• Everybody’s wearing my pants.
  Lloyd’s pants are on display
  Tags: LloydDavis funny

Matt Jones talking at Reboot on the new Dopplr.

Jones wanted to stress that Dopplr “is a feature of a larger service, called the internet”.

He said: “We’re trying to be a beautiful part of the web.”
- Source: BBC

[My emphasis]