Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who died in 1955, developed an interesting concept called the Noosphere which “is best described as a sort of ‘collective consciousness’ of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega point, which he saw as the goal of history. The goal of history, then, is an apex of thought/consciousness.” (from Wikipedia)
Teilhard’s Noosphere concept is so compelling in our digital age that he’s sometimes called the patron saint of the Internet.
Last month, I posted a mind map called “the coming Noosphere”. It was frankly confusing and quite cryptic, heavily influenced by my work at that time: a proposal for an EU research project.
I worked on that concept and I believe the core ideas to be worth exploring. In a sense, they are my plan for a generalized improvement in human productivity and decision making capabilities.
If you lived before the Internet and fully embraced it now, you’ll understand what a cumulative effect it had: the ability to access, process and transfer such vast amounts of knowledge was a true turning point in history. Science builds on itself; improving the speed of information exchange and the size of recipients has an exponential effect on the speed of scientific progress.
I’d like to generate a similar effect in decision making and learning skills, I hope that it will have a great impact on human productivity.
I want to make learning and thinking processes as easy to capture, improve and share as we can grab, change and transfer pictures or videos today. I will focus on us as a collective, not as single individuals. I have a plan.
So long, for now. I’ll leave you with a small hint.
We can model decision making as a process with five activities:
- Gather Data.
- Analyze Data.
- Generate Options.
- Choose an Option.
- Implement it.
Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha opened to the public. It will officially launch next monday. Check it out.
social web + semantic web + computation engines = self-improving data analysis
I could use some feedback on an idea that’s been floating in my mind for the past few days.
You can click on it to go to flickr and see the mind map with hyperlinks.
I don’t know yet what will come out of it: a book? some blog articles? a next-gen e-democracy platform for the EU?
Is it a dead end or worth exploring further in your opinion?
Career Changes: IQ tests, quants and investment banking
August 25, 2008
Long story made short: I am considering a career change. I want to enter investment banking, as an intranet developer. It would put me in touch with quants. Bright people who write algorithmic models for real-time trading in options, derivatives and other kinds of exotic markets.
They make a lot of money and, more important, work on interesting things with interesting tools!
I want to live with this kind of people. Someone who don’t look at me like I am some alien from Mars if I tell them that I spend my weekend relaxing with a book on neurochemistry or studying papers on zinc oxide nanotubes (for a wind electrical generator design that I want to patent). That’s my concept of relaxing: turning my brain on. Most people seems to prefer to turn them off with Big Brother or something like that.
The problem: Quants generally have a highly numerate PhD. I don’t. Life derailed my early academic efforts.
Math and computer science have always been my thing. At seventeen, I wrote a neural networks based speech recognition system. It won a national science award.
I started with and completed 2/3rds of a 5 years course in Electronic Engineering, including all of the heavy math, physics and AI stuff… but hardware was not my thing and my family was short on money, so I left the university for a more interesting career in software.
I joined a media company writing software for their CDROMs, let’s call that company “D”.
After a year, the dot-com book came. I got an offer as an “IT manager” for a ferry company. I wasn’t really a manager, no one were reporting to me, but more like a consultant: I advised the CEO about IT decisions and took care of the local networks at their sale and port offices in Italy. When I left, they were pushing around 4500 passengers per day.
I went back to work with “D”: network management was boring. They had changed their focus on websites and intranets. As a tiny company, we worked hard to carve out a niche in this market. We did good. After 7 years, with no external funding beyond what we made, we can count 2 medium enterprises and 21 banks among our clients, plus more than 50 small media agencies.
In the meantime, I even took some time off to work as a freelance consultant and a sabbatical year working for a startup as a CTO: I spent time in India to setup their outsourcing branch, hiring programmers, training them on the technology we used and on agile software development, setting up business processes and teams. The startup didn’t took off because the product was too complex and the market wasn’t ready yet.
Failure is very important, I learned a lot on management and product design at that startup. I went back to work with “D” and, at the same time, got a BSc in IT and automation engineering.
Why do I want to leave “D” now? Because it’s a dead end in my career and I am getting bored again, doing the same (unchallenging) stuff over and over.
My dream work would be at the convergence of IT, cognitive science, bio tech and/or nano tech. There will be opportunities but they are not yet mature. I am just planning ahead, a decade or so ahead.
So a job in an investment bank is a good alternative. I will be able to get in touch with people with right background, learning about larger organizations and management, working with math and computer science and making decent money at the same time.
The problem (again): I don’t have a PhD.
On the other hand, I am 30 years old and have 10 years professional experience in software development (as a lone developer and as a lead for teams with up to 14 members) with a particular emphasis on agile techniques (extreme programming and FDD). I can code in (in order of experience) Python, PHP, C, Delphi, Javascript, Objective C (both iPhone and Mac development), C++, Java, Perl, Scheme, Prolog, Matlab, Ocaml, Erlang, Haskell, Oz 3 / Mozart, Mercury. I have about 9 years of experience with CMSes (mostly, a home-brew Zope-based one and Plone) and web development, but also experience with media-heavy (as in HD video) embedded Linux development.
So… if anyone want to help me plan a path to a new career, I’d love to hear your advices in comments.
Oops, I almost forgot about IQ tests. I just took one for the first time (this one from Mensa DK) and got 130.
Modern financial markets
October 26, 2007
From Marc Andreessen’s blog, I got this really funny gem about how financial markets work and worked in the subprime crisis:
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Tuscany in Second Life
March 30, 2007
Today was the grand opening of a sim project that I worked on as the lead builder: the government of Tuscany, the Italian region, has an official region in Second Life: Toscana.
You can look at the snapshots on my RL-related blog (in Italian).
IP law is dangerous
February 7, 2007
Indonesia decided to stop sending H5N1 strains that is collecting in the country to the World Health Organization; they are seeking an agreement based on intellectual property law with one of the Big Pharma multinationals.
Indonesia is doing so because of fears that their citizens won’t otherwise get access to the vaccines in case of a global pandemic.
Am I the only one scared that the vaccine of a potential pandemic will be put in the hands of a single commercial entity whose main obligation is making money for its own shareholders?
Effect Measure: “Indonesia has signed a preliminary agreement with vaccine maker Baxter international an arrangement to supply with with viral vaccine seed in exchange for an unknown compensation…
…The deal with Big Pharma Baxter International puts viral seed strains from the world’s current bird flu hotspot and plausible origin of a future pandemic in the hands of a single manufacturer…
…The Indonesians, like other developing countries are angry that viruses isolated on their territory from their citizens and provided voluntarily to the international community would be used by companies in rich countries to produce a vaccine they can’t afford and in any case would be far down the queue for available supplies…
…The Intellectual Property fascists have gone beyond suing elementary school students and grandmothers for downloading a few songs. Time to stop this nonsense before it kills us all.”
(Via Marginal Revolution.)
Phishing targeting SL businesses
January 30, 2007
In the last days, I’ve seen a huge increase in phishing emails targeted at my SL public email. A phishing attack is done using emails that pose like legitimate messges coming from sites such as Paypal (but I’ve seen some posing as Amazon and Ebay too) and trying to lure you into clicking on links to open fake sites; when you login, they record your username and passwords and generally they forward those requests to the legitimate sites, so you can’t tell that you’ve been compromised.
Since Paypal is used by a ~94% of SL businesses to cash out money, attackers seem to be concentrating on this service.
These attacks are pretty well done, but I know not to ever click on a link in an email to access an online services.
Be careful, fellow Second Lifers, these attacks may be widespread and targeting your emails too. Do not trust links in emails. Do not click on them.
UPDATE: I did some investigations and I tracked back most of the phishing attempts that I consider SL related to a couple of IPs in a Taiwanese cable ISP:
inetnum: 210.58.0.0 - 210.58.255.255 netname: ETWEBS-TW descr: ETWebs Taiwan Co. Ltd. descr: Taiwan Cable Modem Service Provider descr: Taiwan CATV operator descr: General Internet Service Provider country: TW admin-c: HE6-AP tech-c: HE6-AP mnt-by: MAINT-TW-TWNIC mnt-lower: MAINT-TW-TWNIC changed: hostmaster@apnic.net 20010510 status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20040923 source: APNIC
I expect however that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s usual to use zombie PCs to perform these kind of attacks, to make more difficult to trace them back to the original source.
My marketing experiments in SL
January 20, 2007
Top woman apparel makers should raise their prices according to a study. (I hope they won’t, as I spent inordinate amounts of L$s on clothes. But…)
How do you choose the right price for a product? According to Celebrity Trollop, “most designers, in my experience, anyway, are tortured by setting prices”. I agree, I surely find it difficult and was selling my products too cheaply. It took LillyBeth Filth, Texture ‘R Us manager and owner, to convince me to act.
I am a rational person, so I started to think about a simple way to gauge how sensitive to price changes are my customers that even me, a layman in marketing terms, can apply. How could I reframe the problem in an actionable way? I was trying to separate my customers into two classes: those who could pay more and those who couldn’t. I needed a way to tell the two apart.
Someone who can’t afford to pay the higher price would go thru a little inconvenience to get the lower price. She would be willing to trade a little bit of her time for a discount.
I have various shops in SL, distributed in various places: Technocity, Isle of Phoenix, Amsterdam, Arsheba, Los Altos, Gothika, OpusLabs. I used this fact to my advantage, staging a little treasure hunting game for my customers: all but one location would have the HUD at the higher price and a sign explaining that they could get a significant (50%) discount if they found the right vendor in SL.
I wouldn’t hide my cheaper vendor, it was often in one of the shops listed in my profile’s picks, it was always on one of the shops accessible thru Second Life’s search functions. If someone IMed me asking for help, I’d give them advices about how to find the cheaper vendor.
I ran this marketing experiment for two weeks, then I checked my sales: summing up the total revenue at the two price points told me if it made sense to move to the higher price. It turns out that my customers were much less price sensitive that I thought, so I raised my price. It worked nicely, I earn 30% more L$s now.
Marketing firms finally see SL businesses as potential clients
January 19, 2007
Reuters reports about a marketing study by Market Truth Unlimited. That’s interesting because I have been looking for market research services in SL for a long time, but never found anything promising enough to try.
I could use several kind of services:
- Market research: to find new niches and to gauge the best price-point for new and old products
- Copywriters and Product packaging experts: in particular, I have to find a better way to explain on my vendors what the Teleport Effects HUD do.
- Technical writers: to write manuals and introductions for my products.
Top women’s apparel makers should raise prices: study: “Well-known Second Life fashion retailers should consider raising their prices because consumers are willing to pay more for popular brands, according to a market research survey of the women’s clothing sector.”
(Via Reuters/Second Life.)
EU Telecoms ministers discuss lowering roaming rates, some countries are pressing to include text messages too. The industry will fight fiercely to prevent this change.
If they were wise, they’d have included data plans in the talks. The prices are quite too high and for no apparent reason: roaming Internet access is even easier than voice calls.
The European economy as a whole would benefit from a political agenda involving pervasive on-the-road broadband access, with flat, predictable rates everywhere in EU.
Information Politics | Blog | EU Telecoms Ministers to Discuss Roaming Rates
“Germany, which takes over the rotating EU presidency in January, would like to get a deal in the first half of 2007 so EU holidaymakers can enjoy cheaper rates while abroad next summer. But six countries – led by the UK – are sceptical about the plans of regulating the market by law while France, Ireland and Italy are backing commission legislation but want to include text messages in the scheme.”
