“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally — the world’s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.  While I would like to see Wikimedia become a model for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide support, bugfixes, and advice to different/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.  So I offer these questions to all readers – feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.

• What technical and other support do various language projects need to become awesome?
• What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural preservation?
• What sharing of advice or practices would make starting new projects easier?
• How can established projects help new projects with outreach, communication, and planning?

Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early international list were generally in English.  This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.  And this has forked discussions of what language projects need – those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and fluidly among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide policy or affecting all projects.

As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should advance.  Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were largely European, and issues that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (for instance, replacements for Roman-alphabet captchas, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).

What are your examples? What am I leaving out?  How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?  Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.

Then the day after Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham published an article on the arrest, the Boston force found itself in a truly embarrassing spot.  Police officer, National Guard reservist, and self-proclaimed writer and English teacher Justin Barrett wrote an incredible half-coherent racist and sexist screed to a large cc: list — including his fellow officers and Abraham herself.   She responded with style:

I didn’t make it to the part where he calls me a fool and an infidel (he correctly pegged me as Catholic). And I certainly didn’t make it to the bit where he invites me to serve him hot Panamanian coffee and a warm cruller on a Sunday morning.

I wish I had gotten that far. That would have given me a good laugh.

Barrett was soon suspended from his police and reserve positions; but not before making the whole Boston Police Department hang their collective head in shame.

I’ve organized my thoughts about being a good Board member in my platform for the Wikimedia Board.

The most common questions I have heard since this year’s elections began are, what does the Foundation do? and what is the Board of Trustees for? I posted answers to these questions and a few more.

People also ask, how do I qualify to vote? To be eligible to vote,

• You must have 600 edits as of June 1, and 50 within the past 6 months.
• You may need to create a Unified Login to count edits on more than one project; or to vote from your main wiki.
• If you are not eligible, you can still encourage fellow Wikimedians to vote, or leave suggestions for future elections

I am more intent on this year’s election than I have been in any year past – in part because the Board’s role has been shifting away from one that actively engages and challenges the community, something valuable Agnela and Anthere brought to the Board that I miss.  I am deeply concerned by the lack of community growth for the past two years, and the complete stagnation of new project development (despite the growth of new independent educational free knowledge projects that requested Wikimedia hosting). And I was just talking to my friend Bibhusan Bista, who said that there is definite interest in the Foundation in Nepal, and in contributing to Wikipedia’s spirit of openness; but of course few editors there feel they can engage in related discussions (and none, for instance, would be eligible to vote).

So I have two goals for my campaign beyond getting elected: to inspire people to vote and remind them why a good foundation matters, and to encourage them to raise community priorities and requests of the foundation, while attention is on governance over the next two weeks (and while you can get an immediate response from at least three future Board members, something often hard to come by).

My request to you, if you appreciate Wikipedia and want to see it thrive, whether or not you have the edit count needed to vote: please leave suggestions about how Wikimedia should grow, blog about the election and your reasons for caring about it, and help support the election in smaller languages and projects.

When people ask me about myself, I often say I am a Wikipedian and a physicist.   A physicist in that I want to know how things work at different scales, and to estimate specifics from first principles, limiting factors, conserved properties.  And a Wikipedian in that I want to understand what large groups of people can do to fix what needs fixing while learning and enjoying themselves.

I regularly have to explain what I mean by this last bit – not a desire to add to Wikipedia itself, or to contribute tidbits of knowledge to something, but the quick check for the edit button when you find a mistake in any environment, the urge to improve things on the spot – the sense of turning to someone next to you and saying, “let’s fix this”.

Let me give you an example from recent memory.  Last week I was visiting my local clinic in Cambridge.  It is a quiet building, competently staffed, with more security and information desk staff than is absolutely necessary.  Noone would say they were struggling to make ends meet.  They have a few vending machines throughout the clinic – offering drinks and snacks that are decidedly unhealthy.  I couldn’t find a single healthy product in them, aside from bottled water (and there are water fountains on every floor).

Clearly a fine idea gone wrong.  This didn’t sit well with me, so I started asking the staff about it.  Noone could say for sure how they were chosen; and all agreed that while the convenience was nice, they should at least be limited to healthy foods.  I asked if there was anyone I could talk to about it (not really), and left a request card suggesting a replacement.

This was deeply unsatisfying.  I wanted to fix this right away… it seemed clear this would make everyone better off,  and I had an idea of what to do.   I could imagine a process of replacement running like this:

1. Define a proposal to replace the machines with healthier options
2. Find the person in the clinic heirarchy responsible for such things and make the recommendation
3. Research alternatives and present a few options with their costs, including the general cost of replacement and of cancelling any existing contracts with the current vending vendor.
4. Talk casually to staff and patients to get their input, since as long as such a change is being made, it should be enjoyed afterwards.
5. Pursue this through the gears of hospital bureaucracy.

All of this would take a fair bit of time and persistent followup.  (Despite a personal fondness for things that vend, I don’t know the first thing about the world of vending machine vendors and their alternatives, and I doubted people reading that card would either.)  Certainly more than my personal benefit would merit if I had to do it all myself.

But if there were a natural way to pursue this as a community, I would gladly get it started.  And if there were a way to make such a proposal, and then extend it to all clinics in the country that might be in the same situation, I could recruit health advocates who would delightedly devote a hundred hours to the project — doing so would be the highlight of their year.  The benefits are so obvious, and the implications for our culture as well as individual patients would be tangible.  I’m inclined to find my local community-health group and see if they are up to the challenge.  But they tend to think in terms of political advocacy.   And my idea isn’t to stand outside with placards and digital petitions shouting for legislators to mandate clincial change — it is to research, plan, design, suggest, and help implement a change directly and quickly.

So among other things, being a Wikipedian means : the recognition that things can be directly changed; the sense that collaboration of neighbors, and the promise of scale, can make any challenge worth the effort.  (As for what being a Wikimedian means… there’s less consensus on that point!  I tried to answer that in a recent Q&A.)

Wikimedia has been advocating for this change for some time, and with much effort from the FSF and Creative Commons a solution was worked out last November: such a transition would be available only for massively collaborative projects, and only for a limited time.  If a project opted for this transition, it could not incorporate any new GFDL material after the release date of the new license (November 3, 2008); and it had to decide by August 1, 2009.

Given the first date, one would assume a site would want to move as quickly as possible to decide, to avoid a prolonged period when no outside material under most any free license could be incorporated.  Nevertheless, it took us over 6 months to decide to make the transition.  Now we are faced with two hurdles: ensuring that no GFDL material has been migrated into a Wikimedia project since November, and far more complex, communicating with the hundreds of smaller GFDL wikis who chose their license for compatibility with Wikipedia, to ensure they know about this change and what it means for them.  They only have until the first of August to figure it out.

So I’ve started compiling a list of GFDL wikis and other collaborative sites that have not yet indicated any awareness about the license switch or considered switching themselves.  This includes at least half of the 20 largest GFDL wikis other than Wikipedia, both major medical wikis (Medpedia and WikiDoc), PlanetMath, and the old Spanish Wikipedia fork.  Please help contact these sites and update their status on this project page: [[m:Licensing update/Outreach]]

I’m trying to build support for continual, detailed statistics generation from Wikipedia data, possibly at the Harvard-MIT Data Center.  There is still time to come up with good ideas for lightning talks and discussion groups at Wikimania 2009 this summer in Buenos Aires.  And there is a research-related Wikimedia job available starting this summer.

I am uncomfortable with many of the details of said job posting*, but as long as its up the best people should apply.

* My discomfort stems from a few reasons:

• The focus on people with a background in commercial website research strikes me as uninportant — this is different enough that it hardly matters.
• The effort to spend money on an industry vet rather than attracting a couple insightful / innovative graduates & wikipedians doesn’t seem optimal.
• The idea of posting this first as a job rather than clearly defining roles for talented researchers in the community doesn’t scale and hides the community’s natural talents.
• There is always the overarching point that as long as the Wikimedia Foundation remains staffed primarily by noneditors and does not aggressively direct spotlights onto contributors (including the many community researchers who already answer questions such as those listed in the posting above), every increase in official staff weakens and obscures the core strength of the projects.

And if you want to discuss open issues surrounding the future of free textbooks, come join us on IRC in #okfn on irc.freenode.net today at 1300 EST / 1000 PST .

For better or worse, we live in fascinating times.  Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day.  A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:

• Sunday: an unprecedented 4-hour Sunday afternoon org-to-org trading session, part of “last-ditch efforts to prevent toxic assets from ailing Lehman Brothers spilling into global markets and rupturing investor faith in the international financial system”.   The result: only $1B in trades, slightly less panic the following day, and a loosening of the shared global trust in unwavering financial regulation.
• Sunday night?: Banks are told they may use deposits to fund their investment bank subsidiaries, flaunting Federal Reserve Act Section 23A. potentially stabilizing failing banks at the cost of risk to individual investors.
• Monday: a ‘dramatic loosening’ of the standard for federal loans to banks, potentially stabilizing them at the cost of dramatically increased risk of government losses.  Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s S&P AAA rating is vulnerable. Shared global trust in regulation dips.
• Tuesday: The Fed lends $85B to AIG, after refusing them $20B over the weekend.  True, AIG isn’t a bank, but see FRA Section 13(3).  AIG uses ‘all of its assets’ as collateral, giving the Fed an 80% stake.
• Tuesday: the FDIC feels the crunch, says it’s ok for a while, but makes a medium-term request for a $500B line of credit.  Why?  Well, while there are over $6,000B in bank deposits in the US, more than half of them FDIC insured, banks report less than $300B cash on hand. And the FDIC reserve is down to $45B, only enough to cover ~15% of the difference in case of a widespread bank run.
• Wednesday: Banks may count goodwill as capital when meeting regulatory requirements for capital onhand.  This allows a deepening of the leveraging of assets of troubled banks, which only caused trouble during the S&L crisis; what’s different now?
• Thursday: After three Reserve Fund money market accounts drop below $1 a share, Putnam’s Prime Money Market Fund shuts down to avoid losses.  It’s been a while.
• Friday: The Treasury pulls out a few more stops and assigns the $50B in the Exchange Stabilization Fund to current money market funds.

Updates as the week progresses.  The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.

Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold.

Before we continue, you may want to revisit the origins of the modern fractional-reserve banking system.  The international banking scene includes an additional layer of derivatives (”Not Your Father’s Financial Calculus” ), leading to a world with over 15x as many financial tokens as could ever be redeemed for underlying assets.  Here is the liquidity ‘pyramid’ from a few years go; it is twice as top-heavy now :

Bear in mind in the weeks to come : what scares the central parts of global banking systems is the knowledge that their empires are built on air… not just a cushion of air, for a single country, but clouds all the way down, for everyone.  People may talk about 10:1 or even 60:1 leveraging of assets, but even  the 1 in those equations relies on shared standards of value and basic trust.

Other comments:

Wednesday: Kenneth Rogoff suggests a $2T bailout may be needed to ‘contain the contagion’.

Wednesday night: The UK Telegraph reports on the day’s global credit freeze and the ongoing hit to the Moscow bourse, where trading was suspended after the Micex dropped 24% in 2 days.

…

On this motif : compounding the fear of having no fundamental support : our urban centers have in theory no hard backstop preventing total financial collapse, with a loss of faith in any institution to protect and safeguard value over time, and a loss of any shared sense of abstract value or usable currency.  In contrast, the closer one gets to self-sufficient communities with their own natural resources and balanced sets of local skills, the more superfluous these abstractions, and the less deadly their dissipation.

There is something to be said here about the stabilizing value of multiple competing (or even not entirely substitutable) currencies in a community, in comparison with a strong central bank, but I don’t know how to formulate it.

I also discovered a good alternate use to my next-door-street’s name.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Boyish Orator’s style, and give him a leg up over Her Royal Cleverness, but don’t stay up nights worrying about the future difference to world peace their differential election would make (other things keep me up, even in politics), and not because I don’t think peace a devastatingly important realm for immediate change.

At any rate, Lessig taped a Barackish paean, and Ball and Prime started simulscribing in gobby. Gobby sessions exert a gravitational pull on me and soon I was transcribing myself, to exercise day-cramped hands — though I would never have listened to the piece otherwise. You can read the result of our labours.

The promise of making a set of ideas more accessible and revisitable is an infinitely better reason to divest oneself of twenty minutes of life than amusement or boredom… Which makes me wonder why we don’t see dotsub everywhere, at least among the sj crowd of one. Maybe it just needs a gobby plugin, or a way to find two friends and start transcribing in tandem. I’m even feeling the itch to ride a tandem bike or sidecar. Ach. Time for a seaweed shower.

But he provides a quote from one of the policemen who considered killing her that makes my blood run cold.

“A couple of things struck me,” the state cop said, “I thought about what a burst of machine gun fire might do to other people in the area. And then, of course, if it had been a real device, what those bullets would have done to everyone after the explosion.”[1]

… …

…

Borat’s Friend Space:
Borat has 257073 friends.

Update: now slowed down to 484286 friends, 16 months later. talk about pan-flashes.

Welcome to my country. The country of Internets.

Why social networking matters. …