Innovation, economics, society at large – Page 55

Romantic (Star) Wars

Ah, the romance! That will be proven to be the basis for the Star Wars movie (original one, the rest is after(sic)thought; also, future tense, as we near the future of Back To).
Since the many that say it so much clearer than Yours Truly, e.g., in this concise piece: When AGI / ASI (Don’t know when or rather if ever we would have a clear distinction between the two; re Asimov’s shorthand for magic) takes over, the ultimate control humankind had always sought over the universe, will flip to ultimate non-control. When hybris strikes, it backfires into annihilation.

Which is where the original SW was wrong in painting a picture as if some outpost could hold out against the Empire, being the ultimate Rationality that by time of making the movie, couldn’t be explained on screen (sic) other than through extreme unemotion(al characters). The ultimate emotion, love, resisting being razed off the face of the universe and conquering in the end. Yeah, right.

Or we start the Sarah and John Connor saga today ..?
The trick being the ultimate trick is so very much 100,000000….% effective, or the same, ineffective. How good is humanity so far, in achieving the former in stead of the latter ..? Proof, however anecdotal…?

Well, let’s not dwell on the negative and keep the rosy blue pill outlook:

[Dunno what this does here. Just a pretty ballroom; Palazzo Nicolaci, Noto]

Is the Valley over the hill ..?

This, about real estate. How some current wave of innovation is in its tail stages, like this. Is that bad, or is it a sign of health to enter the unhealthy stage ..? Riddles…
Or rather, it’s about how the dam break of the app effect gravitated to the black hole of Mountain View Et Al. But the wave of innovations that it spurred, or had spurred before and in parallel to it, too, now pulsars its way to other places as well, into the ‘outer space’ that the world is. As the collective built stuff that is unbound geographically, so the development (capabilities) spread as well. The ‘placelessness’ of the innovation is pulling ahead for real, finally. New (?) economies (China, India, Latin world) may have bigger natural language and native (sic) market areas, and the vast unrealized talent pools [I don’t mean the tiny fraction of happy few that transfer to CA but the other 99,5% as well]. Where the latter, in CA, natively there, may have lost steam, handicapped by the head start (law) in e.g., education and through the rising overhead of non-productives, the consumerists burden. And awaiting Schumpeter’s triumphant return.
So, the real estate might not matter too much, soon. All will be free to travel, anywhere, much more often, and still be innovation-productive. Ah, the ideal!

[Yes you figured that out correctly… Marzamemi again]

The End (of the week) Is Nigh

A couple of weeks ago, there was this little discussion on history writing re the birth of the Third Industrial Revolution. Walking by my own bookshelves — desperately trying to keep the Unread under 50, the Read explode anyway — when I realized that there were some that were and are desperately underrated as for their Told You So farsighted predictive value and hence need much more attention and re-reading, again keeping this sentence at suitable length period
To be more precise, just three biggies (in terms of their Value, not page number ;-):
Eric von Hippel (luckily, also available for free here!), Bruce Sterling and Adam Greenfield:

Just sayin’: Get your copies, and study the sage’ ness of them three.

The definitive Top 2000 of 2015, already

Which of course isn’t; it’s the Top 2266 for one thing and Definitive is slightly understating it.
And yes, it is downloadable in plain Excel, for your own tinker and play, in this file; checked and clean (no subversive content).
Next, a few little notes (repeated from last year):

“That’s odd! The usual numbers 1 to 50 aren’t where they’re ‘supposed’ to be by common standards!” Correct. Because I‘m ‘Rekt. The list is mine; why put the Mehhh songs high up there? They’re in there somewhere, but its my list, my preferences..! yes I do like some almost-forgotten songs better, sometimes much, much better, than the expired old hands.
Especially.. see the notes, when the clip (much) enhances the song(s). Wouldn’t that mean the song in itself isn’t fully complete ..? No, it means in (since) the age of video, songs with clips (‘integrated’) can much surpass mere songs by themselves, for a cubed sensory experience.
There’s more than 2000 yes. Because, already after the first 500 or so, determining the relative rankings becomes awkward. Hence, the cut-off would be random …! (why not 2048, that would make more sense in this digital (i.e., binary) age).
If you would still have some (preferably wacky) songs you miss, please do comment them to me. I’ll see whether I’d want to include them still, or not. Hey, it’s my list so I decide, geddid?
The actual end result order is far from definitive (sic). It depends heavily on one’s momentary temper and the memories that spring to mind like Proustian madeleines. And on one’s ability to hear quality. Such is life.
When dabbling with the Excel file yourself, feel free to play around with the ranking mechanism. What worked for me, was to first split the songs into bins of about 250 size (designate some song to be in the first bin that will end up being ranks 1-250, another song to bin 5, which is around the 1000-1250 mark, etc.), then sizing down bin 1 etc. to 8 smaller bins. Then, numbers 1-50 get a personal treatment one by one to their end rank, the rest gets (got) a random allocation within their bracket. After this, sort and re-apply number 1-whatever. Through this, actual intermediate bin sizes aren’t too important.

Then, as a long, very long list. With a Moar tag otherwise it would be ridiculous… [i.e., for the complete list in the post, follow the link:]

Continue reading “The definitive Top 2000 of 2015, already”

1	Hustle	Vann McCoy	Yes, the original
2	Easy Livin’	Uriah Heep	To power it up
3	Heart Of Gold	Neil Young	Hits the heart
4	Hide and Seek	Howard Jones	Same, if you listen well
5	Peter Gunn	Emerson Lake & Palmer	Just for the intro alone
6	She	Elvis Costello	Personal nostaliga
7	White Room	Cream	Nicely powerful, doesn’t wear out too easily
8	74-’75 (+Video)	Connells	The video sublimates the message
9	Windowlicker (+Video)	Aphex Twins	Incomplete, as a work of art, without the video
10	Nice ‘n Slow	Jesse Green	Calm down again
11	One Of These Days	Pink Floyd	Hidden pearl
12	Smoke On The Water	Deep Purple	Of course
13	The Man With One Red Shoe (+Video)	Laurent Garnier	Incomplete, as a work of art, without the video
14	You’re So Vain	Carly Simon	I think this song is about me!
15	Dancing Barefoot	Patti Smith	Hidden treasure
16	Right Here Right Now	Fatboy Slim	Oft forgotten, defined an era
17	The Great Gig In The Sky	Pink Floyd	Appealing complexity
18	All I Need	Air	Mindfulness in musical form
19	Dream On	Aerosmith	Heartburn
20	You Got To Fight For Your Right to Party	Beastie Boys	Appealing. Simply that.
21	California Dreamin’	Mamas & The Papas
22	Whole Lotta Rosie	AC/DC

Starreveld in the Information Age (industry)

@deKokPieter or others (or just one of his interns; grad work?) may have to help me out with yet another crazy (not (?)) idea of mine:
There was (is?) this great theoretic of accountancy called Starreveld, with his value cycle typology for, literally, every kind of industry and on close reading, even sub-industry. Given that we live in times of information processing factories, how would they fit the model or how would we have to read / translate / interpret the model to ‘work’ in today’s day and age?

Since the information processing industry, being almost all of the world’s service industries including (almost) all public sector organisations, works in an extremely devolved form of hyper-mass-single-piece production including storage, and how do we translate e.g. stock type and count to ‘information’ and ‘data point’?
If we take this approach, i.e., from both sides, being from the current industry operation side to Starreveld and the other way around, do we have a complete mapping and what do we learn for control and audit ..?

Just putting it out there. This, too:

[That little theatre of note, I mean Noto]

Golden Oldie Pic Of The Day

Yup it’s time for one of those again.
Oh, how much is it (the question) like your intelligence level …

PIA is KIA and KYD (?)

Since the whole Privacy thing has gained new traction with both the European Data Privacy Directive regaining (some…) steam and the European Court finally deciding what all with any bits of brain already knew i.e. that ‘Safe Harbour’ was a sour joke (to put it mildly), I realized, when working on a presentation for a forum centering on/around Identity and Access Management, that any Privacy Impact Analysis work comes down to two things; an objects-side analysis in the form of Know Your Data and a subject-side analysis by means of Know your (authorised OR actual) Identities and their Access, with some Privacy By Design thrown in at the solutions end.
Since I just like sentences of the right length, being entities that contain a discrete but complete set of logically coherent and united concepts.

And for those of you in the know; the above contains all there is to Know. Sort of. Maybe add in a bit of this (in Dutch; from the FD newspaper), for implementation. For a lot of implementation…
And, things may change in the somewhat near future with the advent of drones, IoT, robotics (humanoid or abstract), and ANI/AGI/ASI, in the IAM sphere alone. Just read up your huge backlog on this blog, and elsewhere as I cannot really summarise it all here…

I’ll give you some time space for that now. With:

[At the Ragusa Ibla end but of course you knew]

‘bucks sailor went where ..?

Quite some time ago, I came across this, in Lucca:

and considered it as grossy antagonistic “Starbucks opening soon here” sign.
Later, I read up what the co. has on their own site about the logo. Which has some vague story about a 16th century Norse woodcut.
The thing being: The church (it is) in Lucca was built, and veryveryvery probably decorated, long before. So, had some Norse sailor been there? This is much more possible than latter-day non-historians tend to believe… Norsemen even had kingdoms et al. in Italy for centuries, or at least raided there quite regularly so why not? Time to dig deeper; is there really no History major who’d like to do a thesis on this? The co. we speak of, should have some nice study grant ready, right ..?

And of course there’s the research already written out here (in Italian, only just (i.e., entirely) can’t read it) about the origins of it all in the first place — the last pictures referring to the coffee you get ?? [Hm, I’m still a fan for romantic reasons, of their freshbrew]

Ambient Intelligence where is it ..?

Similar to the question two weeks ago about the whereabouts of smart dust, here now the opposite (more on that below): Where has all the Ambient Intelligence gone ..?
And I don’t mean Smart Dust of some kind that the Release of Colorado has dwarfed some niche markets elsewhere (it hasn’t, I gather?), but the dust of nanobots that could be sprayed around just anywhere and drift in the wind, as hard to detect, spread-out snooping devices. Either for the good, puffing around IoT-sensor en masse, or for the bad, (video)eavesdropping invisibly, undetected.

Ambient Intelligence then would be opposite as it would deliver seamless Intelligence of the Watson^3 kind, AGI or ASI, to just where you would find yourself in need (as detected by that intelligence before you realized it) e.g., in the form of hyper-personalized ads. When you walk by a store front window. So you’d be enticed to buy more, more, more. Yes it’s sad but that’s the most clear example that everyone apparently needs; anything more complex is too much asked of your dumbed-down, numbed, nerve center that exist for the pleasure of your iSomething these days.

Before I turn sour: The idea gained traction some five years ago. Where is it; in hiding? In some black programs by DARPA, Fubbuck, Big G et al. so much out of sight we have no clue of the massive budgets being spent to gain control over us all ..? Just a shout-out for your pointers.

And:

[Hard work and easy living, side by side, better not mix]

Vendors pitchin’ — reality’s b… moving elsewhere

Was reminded today that still, a great many vendors in the (Info)Security arena are pitching their worn-out warez to a laggerd crowd — or is it just me to see that, in particular where IAM is concerned, all eyes are still on some vault idea of data storage and systems, behind some mirage of a perimeter of the ‘data center’ (as it is presented ..!).
Luckily, I met this old friend of mine of Zscaler that see that today’s access and wider security concerns are over Cloud (storage, services) and Users (out there, anywhere). How nice would it be if not too much time would be wasted anymore on the classical, outdated (sic) model(s) and we’d all move to this new world ..?

This, for your viewing pleasure:

[Watching the ships go by, Amsterdam]