All posts by Paul Raven

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The hardest Futurismic post I’ve ever had to write

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OK, folks, I have a difficult announcement to make. I’ve just shut off the Futurismic fiction submissions webform, and after two more stories – one in November and one in December – we’re not going to be publishing any more fiction for a while.

First of all, what this doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean the end of Futurismic, which I’ll be continuing to maintain as a journal of futurism, socioeconomic and technopolitical oddities, science fiction and related topics, and which I hope will retain all of its current columnists for the foreseeable future.

It doesn’t mean the permanent end of Futurismic as a fiction venue, either. Indeed, if there were any other options available to Chris and myself at the moment, we probably wouldn’t be taking this one. This has been a difficult decision for both of us… even more so for Chris than for me, as he’s been Futurismic‘s fiction editor since before I even came on board as a naïve (and grammatically challenged) blogger back in 2006. We’re very proud of the work we’ve published here, and we’d very much like to publish more.

But sadly, the economics are unforgiving. As I hinted in my open letter to the hucksters of the Media Mayhem Corporation, the funding for Futurismic‘s fiction purchases have come from my own pocket since we recommenced publishing short stories in March 2008 with Eliot Fintushel’s “UXO, Bomb Dog”. My hope was that, by reinvigorating the fiction section with great new stories, we’d increase traffic and, as a result, increase revenue from advertising. As the Media Mayhem post also suggests, that plan has not come to fruition, to say the least… and thanks to other unplanned changes and upsets in my personal life of late, I simply don’t have the spare money to keep doing it at the moment. As such, and with great regret, Chris and I have agreed it’s time to close the doors for a while.

If you’re thinking “well, there are other ways to make money with Futurismic, surely?”, then you’re probably right; if you’ve been following along with my blogging, you’ll have noticed me keeping a weather eye out for web publishing business models, of which there are a multitude, ranging from the utterly untested to the promising-but-unproven. There are any number of them that I’d love to try out: perhaps we could do a Strange Horizons and go non-profit, asking for donations from loyal readers; perhaps there really is such a thing as a sub-100,000-pageviews ad broker company that isn’t run by duplicitous hucksters, and which would net us the necessary funds to pay for the fiction; perhaps we could run a Kickstarter-type project, sell scarce goods (limited anthologies, maybe?) and community kudos in exchange for financial support. Any or all of these things could work.

But planning and realising them would take time… and when money’s short, time becomes a commodity in and of itself. Running Futurismic just as a blog is time consuming enough, and I’d have given it up long ago were it not for the fact that it provides a psychologically vital part of my intellectual routine, not to mention an outlet for the stuff I think and write about which would never find a home elsewhere. I’ve always accepted that Futurismic would probably never pay me a penny, but I’ve long believed that it could – and it should! – pay its own way, at least as far as rewarding the contributors for their hard work is concerned.

And I hope that one day it will… but the arrival of that day is contingent on me finding more money or more time, or (more realistically) both. Offers of advice and assistance in the interim will be received with great gratitude*, but for now I have to lay the burden down for a while and concentrate on the work that pays my rent; Chris, meanwhile, plans to devote more time to his own fiction writing.

I’m still hugely proud of what we’ve done; all I have to do is click through the fiction archives and look at the excellent stories we’ve published to know that I was doing something worthwhile. And trust me – as soon as I have the resources to spare, Futurismic will return to being the foremost paying venue online for the near-future subgenres of science fiction, with all the vengeance I can muster.

At this point I should take the time to thank everyone who’s helped along the way: our fiction authors, obviously, for submitting their wonderful work to us; our columnists and guest bloggers, who continue to contribute for no reward other than whatever satisfaction it gives them; and the other bloggers and editors and reviewers and fans who’ve linked to us, talked about the stories and made Futurismic a part of the genre machine.

But most of all, I want to thank you, Futurismic‘s readers. Knowing you’re all sat out there waiting for new stories has been one of the big forces that’s kept us buying new fiction, and it’s also the big force that will push me back to buying fiction as soon as I’m able. From myself, from Chris, and from all the authors we’ve published: thanks for reading, and please don’t be strangers. Don’t go calling us a dead venue; we’re just gonna hibernate for a while. 🙂

And to end on a high note, don’t forget that we’ve got two great stories in the bag to take us up to the end of the year. The first will be up at the start of November, so mark your calendars.

[ * Offers of donations – of which there have been a few – are also very gratefully received, but the legal status of Futurismic as it stands means that we cannot actually accept donations, simply because I have no idea how to legally account for them. However, offers of advice from professionals who know the ins and outs of registering and running non-profits arts organisations (and the tax obligations thereof) will be exploited as fully as their makers will permit. 🙂 ]

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Twitter’s mood predicts the stock market?

I can’t really reword this one to sound any less (or more) incredible, so I’m gonna go straight to quotes:

The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington.

You and me both, Johan, you and me both… but then, it’s a weird old interconnected world we live in, isn’t it?

“We’re using Twitter like a psychiatric patient,” Bollen said. “This allows us to measure the mood of the public over these six different mood states.”

As a sanity check, the researchers looked at the public mood on some easily-predictable days, like Election Day 2008 and Thanksgiving. The results were as expected: Twitter was anxious the day before the election, and much calmer, happier and kinder on Election Day itself, though all returned to normal by Nov. 5. On Thanksgiving, Twitter’s “Happy” score spiked.

Then, just to see what would happen, Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.

As daft as it sounds on the surface, this is probably pointing at some sort of core truth; it’s pretty much established that markets are emergent systems born of human interaction, so why shouldn’t you be able to get an idea of where things are going by finding a way to sample the mood of the planet?

That said, I’d very much like to know how wide-ranging the Twitter sampling was: did they use multiple languages, for instance, or just English? I suspect that Twitter’s demographic in geographical terms is still very white, Western, male and middle-class, too; would these results be strengthened by using more data from wider sources, or has a sort of accidental cherry-pick taken place? (White Western middle-class males are more likely to be stock owners or investors of one stripe or another, I’m guessing, so there’s probably some sort of inherent bias in using Twitter as a sample source.)

Even so, I’m fascinated by research that treats human civilisation as a system-of-systems with observable properties, and the rise of social networking is probably the catalyst for this growing field. Whether knowing how the system reacts and correlates will allow us to control it more effectively is another question entirely, of course… feedback is a powerful thing, but as any guitarist will tell you, it comes with risks. 😉

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Bruce Sterling on the shallow erudition of Google

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I’d be remiss in my relentless Bruce Sterling fanboyism if I didn’t link to this interview with the man himself at 40kbooks (which looks to be a digital-only publisher focussing on essays  about digital culture and short-form fiction from notable authors; the Chairman’s recent Interzone-published story “Black Swan” is available from them, for instance).

And I’d also be remiss in my blognautic self-aggrandisement if I didn’t point out that interviewer Rhys Hughes riffs off of an answer Sterling gave in my interview with him back in 2009…

Rhys: I believe that you were once asked to state the major difference between the methods of research you employ as a writer now and the methods you employed when you began your writing career. You responded with the single word, “Google.” This might seem a perverse question, but do you think there are any perils for a new writer in the fact that research has now become so much easier?

Bruce: That’s not a perverse question.  It’s obvious.  It’s a simple matter to examine almost any contemporary text and see that Google was used to compose it. Contemporary writing is loaded with strange little details of erudition that used to be expensive and difficult to research. For instance, let’s consider an obscure, dusty figure like, say, Massimo d’Azeglio.  Or rather, Massimo Taparelli, Marquis d’Azeglio (October 24, 1798 – January 15, 1866), the author of the Italian historical novels, “Niccolò dei Lapi” and “Ettore Fieramosca.”  No American should properly know anything about this man. It took me 57 seconds to research that on Google, and that included cutting and pasting the text here.

The peril comes in thinking, as a modern writer, that you can truly understand something about Massimo Taparelli in just 57 seconds. No, you can’t. To access facts is not to understand them. The Marquis d’Azeglio was an intelligent, creative and cultivated 19th century aristocrat. He was deep and broad and subtle and human, and very alien to us moderns. Modern writers may fail to understand him in this sudden electronic blizzard of  bland facts about him.  We may  know less of him because we seem to know  more of him.

Lots more good stuff in Hughes’ interview, so go read.

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Wikiversity

What would further education look like if it was run more like Wikipedia? That’s the question asked by a chap called David J Staley at the Educause conference in Anaheim, California last week, who thinks it’s a pretty good idea [via SlashDot]:

First, it wouldn’t have formal admissions, said Mr. Staley, director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at Ohio State University. People could enter and exit as they wished. It would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students “not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages,” he said. Its curriculum would be intellectually fluid.

[ Those of you who’ve read Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance may be reminded of Phaedrus’ University… ]

And instead of tenure, it would have professors “whose longevity would be determined by the community,” Mr. Staley said, and who would move back and forth between the “real world” and the university.

Universities “seem to be becoming more top-down and hierarchical at a time when more and more organizations are looking more like networks,” said Mr. Staley…

Not everyone agrees with Staley, of course:

“… he clearly understands Wikipedia about as well as he understands universities. That is, not very well. Wikipedia is peculiar. Its brilliance is in its peculiarity. It’s also more static, intellectually conservative, and elite-governed than most people believe.”

Valid points, but I think the problem is due to Staley using a specific institution as a placeholder for a more general set of ideas and methods; yes, Wikipedia is flawed (just like any human institution), but its underlying principles are symptomatic of a phase change in the way we look at organisation, which is what I suspect Staley was getting at.

We’ve discussed further education’s increasing unsuitability-for-purpose before, and much of that unsuitability comes from the rigidity of its hierarchical approach to both organisation and the categorisation of knowledge; a more open, flexible and fluid system might not produce the same numbers of people equipped with expensive pieces of vellum, but I suspect it would produce a lot more people with knowledge that was actually useful to them in the chaos of the contemporary economy. That said, until you manage to convince employers to hire people on the basis of their actual skillsets instead of their paper qualifications, you’re going to struggle to convince academia to abandon the business-like model that it currently operates under.

Interestingly, this chimes with a UK-based project I’ve been invited to get involved with, which I will discuss further when it’s more fully developed…

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The trouble with drones

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When military hardware and software IP disputes meet: via Slashdot we hear of a pending lawsuit that may ground the CIA’s favourite toys, the Predator drones. In a nutshell, a small software firm called IISi alleges that some of their proprietary software was pirated by another firm, Netezza, who then sold it on to a government client which was revealed by further presentations of evidence to be none other than the Central Intelligence Agency. Plenty of grim irony in there, even before you factor in the allegations from IISi that the hacked software may render the drone targeting systems inaccurate to the tune of plus-or-minus forty feet. So it’s not all bad news for the CIA: at least they can start blaming collateral damage on shoddy outsourcing.

In other drone news, Chairman Bruce draws our attention to Taiwan, whose ministry of defense confirms that it is developing UAV designs of its own. We can assume that, in the grand tradition of Taiwanese electronics products, these will be cheap-and-cheerful alternatives to the more respectable brands of the Western military-industrial complex, ideal for tin-pot totalitarians and networked non-geographical political entities working to tight budgets. Hell only knows where they’ll get the software from, though.