Monthly Archives: October 2009

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Solar system looking more resource-rich by the day

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There’s water on Mars, and there’s water on the Moon. And now there’s water out in the asteroid belt, too – if spectral analysis of the rock known as 24 Themis is to believed, that is [via SlashDot]:

Analyses of the sunlight reflected off the asteroid also show that organic compounds are widespread on the surface, he added, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, CH2 and CH3.

The new finding corroborates earlier observations of the same asteroid by astronomers Andrew S. Rivkin and Joshua Emery who also used the Infrared Telescope Facility. Over several years, Rivkin and Emery had found evidence of frozen water in single spots on 24 Themis but had not studied the asteroid as it made one entire rotation. Together, the two teams’ findings reveal that the asteroid’s entire surface is coated with frozen water, Campins says.

[…]

The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet.

Well, maybe, but it also supports another theory: the asteroid belt is actually the broken remains of Earth’s twin planet which was destroyed by Xenu in a fit of pique OMFG!!!1

Ahem.

The destructive rage of entirely fictional deities aside, it’s becoming clear that the necessities of life – if not life itself – are more abundant out beyond the gravity well than we thought. So maybe we should lend more credence to speculative work like that of planetary scientist Richard Greenfield Greenberg, who theorizes that not only is Europa’s ocean comprised of water, but that it may be more oxygen-rich than those of Earth, meaning there could be all sorts of weird multicellular lifeforms lurking out there waiting to be discovered.

Isn’t it high time we went out and looked?

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New rules for news

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Via Chairman Bruce, here’s a list of 22 rules for the New New Journalism from Dan Gillmor at The Guardian. As Bruce points out, there more than a hint of the idealist networked society about them, but they’re still worth reading – think of it more as a manifesto for a society where journalism was actually meant to keep people informed rather than confused.

Here’s a few of my favourites:

2. We would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process, in a variety of ways that included crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other techniques. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labour – and will work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a pat on the back – but want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role.

Nothing too new there, but the promise to acknowledge the origin of crowdsourced material is good.

7. We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise language. If someone we interview misused language, we would paraphrase instead of using direct quotations. (Examples, among many others: The activity that takes place in casinos is gambling, not gaming. There is no death tax, there can be inheritance or estate tax. Piracy does not describe what people do when they post digital music on file-sharing networks.)

Translation: “we’ll not advance or defend the political and economic interests of businesses with obfuscation”.

14. The word “must” – as in “The president must do this or that” – would be banned from editorials or other commentary from our own journalists, and we’d strongly discourage it from contributors. It is a hollow verb and only emphasizes powerlessness. If we wanted someone to do something, we’d try persuasion instead, explaining why it’s a good idea and what the consequences will be if the advice is ignored.

Translation: “we’ll encourage people to think for themselves rather than spoon-feed them other people’s agendas”. Probably the bravest item on the list, and – sadly – the one that will lay any venue that adopts it open to being slaughtered by its competition. In a den of liars, honesty is suicide; these rules would be a great manifesto if you were founding a new civilisation on a distant planet, but trying to push them onto the existing media  infrastructure is probably an exercise in futility.

I suspect that if the character of media is going to change, it will do so because the bulk of those of us who consume it start making it as well… and even if that happens, there’s no guarantee that everyone’s going to share the same ideas about how it should be done.

If you could impose one new rule on journalism, what would it be?

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Welcome to the Networked City

urban anglesAdam “Everyware” Greenfield doesn’t seem to have much luck with editors mangling his articles and essays before publishing them. His misfortune is our gain, however, as it means he ends up putting the originals up on his website, as with “The Kind of Program A City Is“, a piece which appears in a more abridged form in the latest dead-tree version of Wired UK. [image by Barbara L Hanson]

Everyone seems to be writing about urban futures at the moment, be it Chairman Bruce cheerleading the Augmented Reality types (who are working on a technology whose utility is far greater when deployed in urban spaces) or Matt Jones writing the most interesting post that’s apperared at io9 in months. Blame it on whatever you want, but cities are changing fast – indeed, as Greenfield notes, faster than even the people who saw the changes coming ever expected – and we need to prepare for urban spaces that are completely saturated by networked technology:

In the networked city, therefore, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists and technologists both, for the foreseeable future, as will ensuring that the public’s right to benefit from the data they themselves generate is recognized in law. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?

The map is no longer the territory (if it ever was). Next time you see graffiti, recognise it for what it is: the echoed report of the first skirmishes and warning shots in a war for public space which is just about to start in earnest, in multiple cities across the globe and in multiple augmented versions thereof. Let’s just hope that war continues to be fought predominantly with art and commerce rather than knives and guns, eh?

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Virtual economies, virtual reputations and virtual business suits

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Metaverse office space?Once the hype over Second Life died out, virtual worlds kinda disappeared from the high-profile headlines. But there’s still plenty of stuff going on in the metaverse, not least its use as a test-bed for theories to apply in reality. [image by Ramona.Forcella]

Economics is a popular choice; we’ve reported before on the bank runs and currency collapses of EVE Online, and now Edward Castronova – author of Synthetic Worlds, which should be your first port of call if you’re even vaguely interested in metaverse economics – is leading a team who’re examining the economy of EverQuest II. [via SlashDot]

Researcher Edward Castronova, professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, said researchers can learn almost anything about human society in games as they really are human societies.

However unlike real society they can be observed and tweaked.

“We can do controlled experiments in virtual worlds, but we can’t do that in reality,” said Castronova.

“Controlled experimentation is the very best way to learn about cause and effect. We are on the verge of developing that capacity for human society as a whole.”

[…]

After studying 314 million transactions within the fantasy world of Norrath in “EverQuest II,” including trading in-game goods like armor, shields, leather, herbs and food, the researchers were able to calculate the GDP of one of the game servers (the back-end computer that hosts thousands of players in one world).

As more people opened accounts and flocked to Norrath, spending money on new items, researchers saw inflation spike more than 50 percent in five months.

Game economies are, much like real economies, predicated on more than just a currency. Reputation scores are a big part of game economies (and many social networks, too), but the problem with “karma” systems is that they’re usually implemented in a way that renders them pointless, and which leads to the formation of in-game “mafias” [via BoingBoing]:

There can be no negative public karma-at least for establishing the trustworthiness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user’s abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bankruptcy. This setup defeats the primary goal of karma-to publicly identify bad actors. Assuming that a karma starts at zero for a brand-new user that an application has no information about, it can never go below zero, since karma bankruptcy resets it. Just look at the record of eBay sellers with more than three red stars-you’ll see that most haven’t sold anything in months or years, either because the sellers quit or they’re now doing business under different account names.

A different (though related) kind of reputation will be bothering the business crowd, however, and the Gartner firm of analysts is convinced that in less than five years, 70% of businesses will have issued avatar dress-codes to their employees [via SlashDot]:

“As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise’s reputation,” said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement.

“We advise establishing codes of behavior that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment.”

This puts me in mind of a recurring motif in William Gibson’s novels, where he repeatedly makes the point that the most powerful and resource-rich virtual environments will be the ones that look subtle and understated, while the low-budget hucksters will dress to impress with excessive bling and extravagant eye-candy. The subtle grunge and mundane decay of reality is harder to simulate than grandiose overstatement; as in real life, it’ll be wise to tread lightly around the ostentatious.

Not interested in playing games or doing business in the metaverse? Well, you could always go learn to speak a dying language.