Hyperconnectivity: November 2008 Archives

For all of you who think that you can monitor and control users on the Internet: don't read on.

Person-to-person lending (a kind of microfinancing) has grown fast with the growth of the Internet.

In one of his pieces Mark Pesce (Hyperpeople blog) remarks that nowadays a classroom is an anomaly to kids. It is the only place where connectivity is low, where connectivity is not used for the primary process. Everywhere else they use mobile phones and the Internet to connect and share.

Just this weekend I visited a newly built high school. The school was designed with a specific guideline, based on an old saying amongst teachers " if you hear a name mentioned of a pupil and you have no idea who it is, the school is too big". So the architect and the management divided the space into seperate area's (age groups and education) no bigger than 200 students. Teachers and students "live" within this area most of the time and get to know each other by name and face. Great idea !

In the last million years, as our brains grew explosively - as one scientist put it, "perhaps the most improbable event in all of evolution, anywhere" - much of the potential of all that new gray matter was put to work for social benefit. The "new brain" or neocortex, which is the most dramatically enlarged portion of the human brain, seems to be the area dedicated to our social relationships.
We know this because, in 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar compared the average troop size of gorillas and chimpanzees against the average tribe sizes of humans. He found that there was a direct correlation between the volume of the neocortex in these three species and their average troop or tribe size. This value, known as "Dunbar's Number", is roughly 20 for gorillas, who have the smallest neocortex, about 35 for chimpanzees, and - for us lucky human beings, who have the greatest selection pressures on our social behavior - just under one hundred and fifty. We may not be entirely exceptional, but we're doing quite well.
Essentially, inside of each one of our heads, there are a hundred and fifty other people running around. Yes, that sounds a bit crowded (particularly when they're up partying all night long with their mates), but it's actually imminently practical. These "little people" inside our heads are models of each person we know well: our family, our friends, our colleagues. For each of these people we build mental model which helps us to predict their behavior. (It isn't really them, but rather, our image of them.) This predictive capability smoothes our social interactions. We know how to interact with people whom we have in our heads; with others we remain demure, reserved - in a word, predictable. Only with intimacy do we express the quirks of behavior which make us unique, only with intimacy do we take note of them in others.

Thanks to one of our favorites bloggers, James Enck, this pointer to Oblong.   
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

We humans create simplified simulations of reality in our minds, patterns of behaviour. We use them daily so we can reduce the amount of information we have to digest and to predict what is going to happen "  if.......".

Magicians and spin doctors  can be effective by manipulating our assumptions. They try to trigger us by words en visual clues into assuming that reality fits a pattern we know. They often succeed in locking us into a perception of reality that is more governed by our internal  simulation than what is actually happening. So much we actually do not perceive some inputs any more, as shown in a previous post.

So it pays to be very carefull when words are used that trigger emotions and assumptions, like in advertisements. Look in the opposite direction.

I got triggered by Project Better Place .   

It is a venture to get all-electric cars powered by renewable sources on the road in many countries, starting in Denmark and Israel and Australia. 

The nomer " Project Better Place"  (PBP) has strong connotations with an altruistic goal to improve the world. But venture capitalists who invest over 200 mio USD are most likely interested in high returns. So  where is the beef?

In the Ecogeek blog questions are raised about the business model of the cars of PBP.

A recent presentation by their European Business Development Executive Hans de Boer      gave some indications of a  plan how PBP could make a fortune.

For each country a local company is set up with local partners and local financing. The local company sells or leases the cars, leases the batteries to drivers, sets up a network of charge points connected to the grid. PBP manages how and when the cars are charged up, cuts deals with suppliers of (renewable) electric energy.

The key remark for me was that the business case for a user of the electric car was great....because no taxes were levied on electric cars.

This is not sustainable. Most governments raise a lot of income out of taxes on cars and gasoline If electric cars will become mainstream the governments will need to get compensation for this lost income.

So could this be the plan? Local companies bear the financial riscs of both the batteries and a business case that is highly dependent upon a tax advantage which cannot be sustained in the long run. The local company raises the money to build the infrastructure (charging points). PBP only contributes intellectual property (which they continue to own and control) but controls the grid and the charging. They are the exclusive middle man between suppliers of energy and consumers, making money out of every Kwh sold. And cars consume a lot of Kwh's.  If the number of charging points is high enough other EV's will have no choice but to use this infrastructure, creating a de-facto monopoly for PBP.

Pretty shrewd. As a working hypothesis on how to assess PBP until more or contradicting facts become public this is my favorite.

Linked is the title of a groundbreaking book by Prof. Barabasi on the structure of networks (see this previous post).  A network is a broader concept than communication networks. A network is defined by links between actors, such as social relations (the famous " just 6 handshakes away from everyone in the world" ),  the way diseases (or ideas) are disseminated, or links between websites on the Internet. 

The most interesting fact is the way links are distributed. If we would state that most people have a few relationships (links) and some people have many links, everybody would agree. 

As soon as you start to define this distribution more in detail the fun starts. We tend to assume a so-called normal or Gaussian distribution (a bell-curve) . In the graph below a normal distribution is drawn.

The X-axis is the number of links a person has, the Y-axis is the percentage of persons that has this number of links. 

It turns out that in reality many networks follow a different curve, a so-called power law.

The difference is visible : in a normal distribution there virtually no "nodes" with a large number of links, in a power law distribution there are. 

The implication is that in most networks a significant number of supernodes exist with an incredible amount of links (if you assume a normal distribution they do NOT exist). These supernodes turn out to be extremely important for the distribution of information within and the  stability of the network. They are responsible for the fact that indeed you are no more than 6 handshakes away from everybody else, usually no more than 3.

This concept explains for instance the fact that Amsterdam is considered to be an international hub (metropolis) although the city has  less than 10 % of the inhabitants of a midsized Chinese city. Count the links, it is a supernode.

(more to follow)

Started in 2005, online marketplace etsy.com, for buying & selling all things handmade, is now really growing fast. It's a shop and community at the same time. It's mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. It's vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.

Etsy allows thousands of private persons and small shops to find buyers for their goods and thus make a real living. Without this website that would not be possible. Moreover, Etsy has some great ways to search their site, e.g. by color, recently sold items or by their time machine. Now if this isn't web 2.0, I don't know what is...

The freedom of the press is limited to those who have a press. Our hyperconnectivity allows everyone with a bit of tenacity to become a printer. And some print beautiful litte pieces. (Hat tip Robert)

One of the hot debates this decade is about bandwidth. Owners of existing access networks (copper -> xDSL, cable -> DOCSIS Internet) usually offer the standard self-fulfilling reasoning: if there would be demand, we would build it, but we do not see any use beyond what is offered now. Proponents of Next generation Networks based on fiber say that the demand is there, you just need to build out the networks.

One thing is clear: the amount of data that is generated by normal and cheap digital cameras is increasing exponetially. Most people set their camera to the highest resolution, shoot away at a party, and....send you a CD or DVD with all the pictures, let alone video. Storage is cheap, 500 Gbyte will set you back 100 Euros, but bandwidth....
Curently it is absolutely unthinkable to send a series of home made photos and videos through the Internet. It would take more than 4-5 hours to send all the pictures that you can store on a 10 Euro memory card, unless you are the lucky one with a symmetrical fiber-based access line.

So what is adequate bandwidth, if you are not able to share photos and video's with your loved ones without investing time and effort in serious compression and tedious upload?

The gap is increasing fast. See for instance this HD video (hat tip Dirk), made with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II...a camera designed for taking still pictures, but capable of shooting HD-video as well.
Think about the amount of data this baby generates....

Ars Technica  reports that the infamous "three-strikes" plan  has passed the French Senate so it can be presented to Parliament. The plan has started as a memorandum of understanding between the government, ISPs, and Big Content in France. Essentially, repeat copyright infringers would have their Internet connections revoked. Enforcement will be overseen by a new state agency called HADOPI (High Authority for Copyright Protection and Dissemination of Works on the Internet). The EU has pre-empted this by passing a law where revocation of Internet connections without a court order is forbidden in the EU.