"Therefore, the underlying demand curve is different today - so it isn't logical to expect valuation metrics of the market to be reproduced today - sans very extreme market events, which would need to last a considerable period of time."

"We've all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly said that "data is the next Intel Inside." But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data?

In this post, I examine the many sides of data science -- the technologies, the companies and the unique skill sets."

"Rightsizing will not “shunt” development to the exurban fringe. That’s what’s happening already. Most of the neighborhoods we’re discussing haven’t seen significant investment since the 1950s. If nothing is done, they will continue to deteriorate and the exurban fringe will continue to grow. If they can once again be made dense and sustainable, in part through consolidation, Detroit might have a fighting chance to compete against suburban neighborhoods by providing a safe, viable urban alternative."

"The climate of the city is altered, in other words, literally from the ground up; using the functional equivalent of terrestrially powered ovens, otherwise botanically impossible species can healthily take root.

This domestication of geothermal energy, and the use of it for purposes other than electricity-generation, raises the fascinating possibility that heat itself, if carefully and specifically redirected, can utterly transform urban space. "

"The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”"

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either."

"Advertisers face a barrier because in social media, human bonds do not require third-party sponsorships. There is no external content to sponsor. Data collectors, who now hope to turn Facebook's social streams into the Experian of the future, also may hit a wall when human connections can no longer be intercepted."

"The solution on an idea that should be apparent, but maybe not to most. Simply, that the ownership of productive assets (essentially, those assets that generate goods/services that can be sold) is vastly superior to ownership their financial derivatives (stock funds, retirement accounts, etc.) -- we once were a nation of entrepreneurs, now we are a nation of indentured servants. "

"When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate."

A technical conference schedule from my Dad's papers.

"Most inventors are unsuccessful, and most patents never get used. Countries that are full of inventive genius don't necessarily have booming economies. Spreading innovations is a haphazard process dependent on luck, or culture, or fickle government support... it's not a golden road to wealth and power. Innovating is an easy process compared to "un-inventing" huge installed technologies. Asbestos got yanked out of American schools, but asbestos bricks are all over the "poor world.""

"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”"

"So if my guess is true, we either start to see less globalization, or we will gradually start seeing borders coming down over the coming decades. The twenty first century could well go down in history as the era of decline of the nation-state."

"Now we would ask the average book publisher what they see themselves as? We would guess that 'rights manager and owner' wouldn’t be on the tip of most tongues. Some would say that publishing isn’t about books it’s simply about content and rights and understanding the market and channel to it. If we were to look at the trade as a rights trade what would that mean moving forward?

Why do we presume that the physical content will merely morph into the digital. History has surely taught us that media survives but has to adapt to new forms. Fiction is not about books of 75,000 words or 250 pages, its more about telling a good story that captivates, engages and stimulates readers. Why does this have to be any specific length? "

"In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism."

"We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."

"The biggest problem with dystopian fiction is not its pessimism. I do think there's a serious issue about who's interests are best served by making people fear the future, but I think the biggest problem with most dystopian fiction is its laziness and derivative quality. Lazy futures act like visionary static, crackling and dirtying the signal-to-noise ratio, making it harder not only for truly insightful futures to be found, but corrupting the ability of normal people to see why those visions are worth understanding."

"What has happened with the Internet so far is that the suppliers of hardware, software, and transmission (search engines and aggregators) have built business models that effectively shut out revenue streams for the creators of the information that is being delivered. What has become absolutely clear in 2008 is that this new model for delivering information is a debilitating blow to the creation of quality news content. The companies making money from the Internet—Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and so on—are entitled to the riches they’ve amassed from their ingenuity and entrepreneurial skill. But as a society, we’ve got to figure out how news gathering and information distribution will be paid for from now on."

"My problem is that I don't think there are good guys and bad guys. Things are the way they are for a reason, and there is always a reason, even when the result is atrocity and outrage."

Those consequences, as I have considered them, are astounding.

It starts with saving a million young lives every year (45,000 in the USA) as well as untold injury in suffering.
It saves trillions of dollars wasted over congestion, accidents and time spent driving.
Robocars can solve the battery problem of the electric car, making the electric car attractive and inexpensive. They can do the same for many other alternate fuels, too.
Electric cars are cheap, simple and efficient once you solve the battery/range problems.
Switching most urban driving to electric cars, especially ultralight short-trip vehicles means a dramatic reduction in energy demand and pollution.
It could be enough to wean the USA off of foreign oil, with all the change that entails.
It means rethinking cities and manufacturing.
It means the death of old-style mass transit.

"We've never actually seen a true global recession in a Web 2.0 world. What's it going to look like? How is it going to differ from a recession in a pre-internet world? Is it going to accelerate the hollowing-out of the retail high street as economy-conscious shoppers increasingly move to online shopping and comparison systems like Froogle? Are we going to see homeless folks not only living in their cars but telecommuting from them, using pay-as-you-go 3G cellular modems, cheap-ass Netbooks, and rented phone numbers to give the appearance of still having a meatspace office? Is the increasing performance curve of consumer electronics going to give way to a deflationary price war as embattled producers try to hold on to market share as Moore's Law cuts the ground away from beneath their feet?"

"In this context, hyperlocal will have to be hypersocial: it will have to be biased, take sides, stand for something, and be written by networks of partisans."

Worth reading every word. Worth commenting on, I think.

"Because that's not the way we do it, that's why."

"Downloading. Downloading."

So far it's not even very engaging.

"...emerging value is contingent on the production, and growth of community (instead of the production and growth of material wealth"

I always feel more comfortable and alert when I've had some "insomnia" and a nap the next day. Ironically, "old sleep" may well be what we do as we get older, too.

via Danny Yee http://danny.oz.au/blog/

"Charlie calls this not the end of history, but the dawn of history. The idea being that history to this point is an incomplete, imperfect process full of guesswork and implication. We're now at a point where we can record everything."

There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful of success, than to step up as a leader in the introduction of change. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the e

"...I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy tr