Tag: Predictions

Nation(state)s No More / Not Yet

Recently, Jamie Bartlett posted an excellent analysis of the probability of the return of the nation state of the future of the planet. If only to have so many ‘of the’s in a row.
Yes another one on the future of nation-states, now not from a bottom-up perspective but from an overall view.

The case is strong in that piece. But then, I had been having recurring … thoughts, about the evaporation of the legitimacy of the nation-state as well. Where my subconscious hinted, it was no clearer, that there was, and certainly is, a place in the discussions for on the one hand, Bruce Schneier’s ideas about sizes of societies and the rules one would need to organise them (which may read like a circular argument, I know), and on the other, various well-received (e.g., this) and hardly rejectable works on how we still roam the savannahs of today – at least in mind when operating in myriads of Sloterdijk’ian spheres (op.cit. in particular pp. 408–). And how e.g., cosmo- and anthropogenesis in religious books can be interpreted both as a coming of age of the well-developed human and ditto mind(s), indeed including the formation of societies and their rationale(s).

By which I mean that somehow, we indeed still have many traces of hunter-gatherer ethics deep down in our systems, now with a varnish of ‘development’ (quod non) into farmer/city-centered civilians, currently being thrusted in (evolutionary) asymptotically zero time past neoliberal capitalist/consumerist ego-only’ism into the frenzy of ‘tomorrow’ i.e., the post-singularity ASI age.
Shouldn’t we try to figure out some model of societal organisation that takes into account our heritage, and now that “we” have become sophisticated enough thinkers to finally see (macro-mass introspection-like) how we meddled along in the past from attempt to attempt, we now are also sophisticated enough to design our own macro-history future ..?

OK, that’s deep. In a way. In another:
[Whatever. This is what society wants … bread and circuses (squares?); NY]

Top 2000++ of 2017 – before the herd

Because all sorts of hoi polloi pundits are out there, ‘polling’ (quod non, just repeating the meh mediocrity) for the Top 2000 of 2017 on the ray-the-ohw and elsewhere, herewith the real deal Top 2000.
Which of course isn’t; it’s the Top 2276 for one thing and Definitive is slightly understating it. If you hadn’t guessed, #14 is about me.
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). The result is quite random in the end, too, indeed; some of the last songs ‘should’ be up much higher…
  • 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:]

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 The Red Face (+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.

Continue reading “Top 2000++ of 2017 – before the herd”

Compare the innovation fruits apples and oranges, please

How is it that long-standing discussion-stoppers persist ..? Take, for the sake of argument and for reason of being the raison d’être of this post, the common “One shouldn’t compare apples and oranges”. Or ‘with’, or ‘to’.
What fun is there in comparing apples to apples ..? Since various species are still very much alike, the attention will go to the, certainly relatively, minor differences, losing the bigger picture. Even when including crabapples, mostly it isn’t worth the trouble. Except for a few experts.
Entrat oranges.
They are so different (Well, overall; there’s also many commonalities like being in your fruit salad with other fruits like tomatoes oh wait) that at once, both the main lines and subtleties of differences can be discussed. Because one compares to discuss, right? If not, just don’t compare anything and sit there like a plant.

Actually, this whole post is about the realisation that in business or other organisational life, we should do both when it comes to innovation. There, tradition has it that one competition in the apples-only markets. Slight differences are sought out, and marketed, as significant whereas usually, they’re not.
Until some orange disruptor appears. Then suddenly, the picture changes – for proper anaylsis, one should compare the apples and oranges, to see how they fit market demand including substitutes et al. And do follow that link to see at which touch points the surprise element rests. Or so.

Just sayin’. And:

[A morning’s comparison of premier cru and grand cru grapes, from Ludes towards Reims, is definitely worth the fine nuance ..!]

AI Blue-on-Blue

We keep on hearing these great things about how AI will help us in the battle against no-gooders qua information security. Like, in hunting for bugs in software (as asked for here, borne out in various much more recent cases or rather, news items hinting at pilot prototype vapourware) or hunting for fraudsters, possibly hiding in plain sight (superrrintelligent anomaly detection; unsure how false positives / false negatives are handled…).
Where on the Other side, great strides are also feared to be made. Deploying AI to improve (better fuzzify) attack vectors, and help with improvements in evasion and intelligence gathering in various other ways.

Pitted against each other …
When you know what Blue On Blue stands for (first of this), you will now see it coming, inevitably. What if autonomous (for speed of response!) retaliation kicks in …?

Never mind. I’ll like the fireworks show. Plus:

[Yeah, yeah, ships are safe in harbour but that’s not what they’re made for – I’ll just enjoy this view from a truly excellent restaurant; Marzamemi Sicily]

Nationalistic AI fuzzing

No his is not about fuzzing data. It is about accidentally giving away that you don’t understand a subject, and not the stats involved.
It is about this report. That was reacted on in various press – though not nearly enough and I don’t even have shares – by some boiler room country-by-country comparison, even without much of conclusional calls to action, for all…

Also, hardly anyone notices the gross error in it all. Which is the lack of proper definition of ‘AI’, or more expectedly, the widespread panicking brainfreezes of the interviewed.
Which, summa summarum for brevity, created such massive distortions that the figures are grey noise at best.

“Isn’t that harsh ..?” Nope. I did some asking around, for a different purpose, and when even 1% of organisations would do anything with AI yet, that 1% would be rounded up. Ppl were just too afraid to tell the interviewers / pollsters that they had (have, probably) no. single. clue., and babbled their way out of it.

So, what was this title again of the infamous Public Enemy hit ..?
And:

[A prettified prison is your ASI future; Zuid-As Ams]

Fizzle disruption

Since the whole, Original and profound, concept of Creative Destruction was latter-day transformed into something much devolved [using that in a most pejorative way; ed.] called ‘disruption’ and applied in even worse ways to outright illegal stuff that had to be allowed still for … well, for no valid reason at all, certainly not morally or ethically improving society in any way only making things worse or much, much worse for all but the 0,1%,
it deserves some attention that the major true disruptions over the past two decades… either weren’t recognised as such but were straighforward Innovations, rightly so characterised (‘Internet’, anyone ..?) or have yet to come to full fruition, in a balanced new future (profitability of ‘Amazon’, anyone ..?).

Where, also, quite some of the announced disruptions have withered into oblivion. Upstart protagonists, most certainly. But also where complete industries have either resisted the ‘attacks’ or transformed themselves just enough to withstand the onslaught, the Barbarians At The Gate.
My point being: Can the latter variants be characterised, and show predictive value, through the outset sort-of situations not only qua industry (culture) but also qua country culture that the industries were pointed-of-gravity ..? The prediction part of course being the most interesting …

Would love to receive your pointers to the stacks of scientific research done already …
And:

[Art, of old but disruption-resistant: The old stays, the new attempts but is accepted and encapsulated…; Paleis het Loo]

Neo is right

When it is about the way The Neo-Generalist, Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin, is:

The Neo-Generalist is both specialist and generalist, often able to master multiple disciplines. We all carry within us the potential to specialise and generalise. Many of us are unwittingly eclectic, innately curious. There is a continuum between the extremes of specialism and generalism, a spectrum of possibilities. …
Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, our society has remained in the thrall of the notion of hyperspecialism. This places constraints on the way weare educated, the work we do, how we are recruited, how our career progression [say what? ed.] is managed [not; ed.], how we label ourselves for the benefit of others’ understanding. …
Our workplaces, governments, intelligence agencies and other communities and institutions constantly complain of silos, but that is an inevitable consequence of our promotion of hyperspecialism. So too the myopia of expertise that prevents us from seeing properly what is right in front of us, or connecting it in meaningful [sic; ed.] ways with other information, other people. [Preface, almost completely]

The institutionalisation of the label, and the constraints it demarcates, both physical and psychological, is an unfortunate legacy of the Industrial Revolution and its effects on society. The scientific management practices popularised at the turn of the twentieth century retain an insidious hold on how people think and organise themselves for manufacturing and knowledge work, even extending into Healthcare and education. It is a dehumanised and mechanical approach that views individuals not as people with unique charcteristics, knowldge and expertise but as replaceable parts. Their very humanity is occluded by the labels they are forced to bear. We remove this welder and replace them with that welder. When this accountant leaves, we will hire another accountant. Our project managers, nurses, teachers, bus drivers, are considered entirely interchangeable.

In the meantime, however, we have set up a conveyor belt of humanity that is geared towards squeezing people into the correctly shaped holes, ensuring that the label fits. Hyperspecialism is the end goal. … Educational choices made during our impressionalble teen years can have a lasting effect. To select is also to exclude. Opting for certain academic disciplines during high school limits what can be pursued at university or as a trade. For those who aspire to it, a higher-education specialism then narrows workplace possibilities. Qualifications lead to employment, whcih in turn leads to the constraints of a role and job description, the path towards increasing functional expertise. Measurement and performance assessments impel us to sharpen our skill set within the restricted field. The myopia of the expert sets in. The boundaries within which the specialist operates get narrower still.

The funneling has an inevitable consequence: it fosters silo-based practices and behaviours. Corporations, government departments, intelligence agencies and a host of other types of organisations bemoan the disjointness of their departments, the lack of interoperability between IT systems, the hoarding and protection of knowledge. Yet this is the end result of a system that encourages hyperspecialism and narrow, deep expertise. [pp. 24-25]

And so it goes on, with relevance. We may interject a full Book by Quote later, but for now leave it at this and encourage you to Study the work. To weep and learn, how you should not do it. I mean, tag along. Resist!

Oh, plus:

[Cordoníu the Beautiful (~ design by Puig i Cadafalch), San Sadurní d’Anoia Catalunya]

No confidence voting

Why would it surprise anyone that these here results came out of the Defcon 25 Voting Machine Hacking Village ..?
More importantly, where is the true side-by-side comparison of trraditional paper-only voting against all safeguards thinkable by today’s voting protocol science ..? (As here and here, to name a very few of the tons out there)

And, where can blockchain fundamentals be applied to ‘vote’ more equally and/or provide a graceful degradation or (hacked to breach to skew) error correction mechanism ..? Preferably with two-round- and/or multicameral (2+) systems tweakability; that would be grand.

All else that would need to be arranged, would be … [similar to encryption in general practice…] error-free, tampering-boobytrapped implementations… Good luck with that. And:

[Museum of tamper-free hence ?? abandoned voting system ..? No. But a museum, Lissabon/Belém]

Quo ivisti Maker Movement …?

There once was this thing called ‘Maker Movement’ as a rebirth of the Arts&Crafts of our youth.
This was some two to three years ago, mostly. Where has the Movement, and its protagonists, and its followers, all gone ..? Flamed-out by the dunce mass takeover of everything-hipster thus destroying the core concept(s) of the latter hence of the former too ..?

Just wanted to know; if you have a clue. About what I’m talking about, and about the whither.
Because there was something beautiful blossoming, on the mainstreamish generic side of steampunkism, say. Because societal benefits were closer off many an initiative in the MM, than off regular ‘innovations’ that had to go through the motions of corporate mush mountains before being turned down because of too-small markets for the razorsharp-targeted less-privileged, mostly.

Yes you see it’s weekend. Cheers! And:

[ArtfulLille]

Once were warriors of the smallest kind, our promise for the future

Who was surprised when this here piece entered their view? Not I. I not ed that a presentation of Yours Truly of Jan 2015 had:
Ello, Viv, YikYak, Tsu, Whisper, Kik, WeChat, Line, Viber, surespot, Whicker, Treema, KakaoTalk, Nimbuzz, Tango, MessageMe, Slack, HipChat, Peerio, Wizters, Secret, The Insider, Awkward, Cloaq, Chrends, Dropon … just as a sample list, so
To which already then, tons could have been added.

[Intermission quiz: Which ones did I forget then, that have made it big today ..? Or have perished again in the mean time ..? Or are still around but struggling ..?]

Some questions spring to mind:
Have you called your money manager to account over investing in every hype over and over again whereas the returns (after accounting for LGD) are so measly?
Why do we believe the hype, against old but still solid and supreme-quality advice?
How can we do better next time(s) ..?

Poor old/young Yik Yak. So much promise, snatched away at such a young age…
Plus:
[Not a unicorn, but somewhat rare; guess where (wrong, wrong again, and again …)]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord