Pure commoditisation - which ultimately, is what needs micropayment - is almost the exact opposite of microphilanthropy! It leads to donation requests getting so micro as to make the donation they ask for so small that potential donors can’t be bothered to do it - it’s too much effort to get your wallet out, type in the card details, etc (hence the need for micropayment systems to get over this transaction barrier).

Microphilanthropy is not (in my eyes) the act of commoditising charity into tiny, massmarketed, micropayment experiences (i.e. micro-donations by millions of people) - it’s about fostering a Long Tail in our new hyperconnected world. The micro relates more to the size of the niche - specific families, specific stories - than to the size of the donation. Micro-donation is an alternative model for charity more suited to the existing, highly institutionalised model of philanthropy (but could be very important/useful to it, so also requires discussion)

There’s no reason why average donations can’t stay relatively upscale in microphilanthropy - it’s based around the creation/display of hyper-personal, very niche charitable actions, thus it finds unusually devoted people (and because it’s highly personal, it should be of high value to people, hence the large donations), and it finds enough of them to put together a group just large enough to make the world move in that tiny niche. Before the internet, it was too hard to find those people, so charities had to stick to mass-appeal issues, staying very general. Since everyone is different, millions of niches get worked on, all in parallel. Microphilanthropy is a hyper-parallelised model of charity - its a similar boost that you get from a dual-core processor (parallel computing) versus single-core.

The key finding is this:

Our main  result  indicates [...] that people with  long  journeys  to  and  from work  are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being

So you make yourself systematically worse off,  and much unhappier, by buying a large suburban house (with long commute) with an extra bedroom for the rare occasions when your parents come to visit, instead of a short-haul townhouse - even though at the time of purchase, going for the larger suburban house seemed like a totally rational decision.

Same deal with getting a highly paid city job in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street or Madison Avenue even though it dramatically extends commute time - when we would lead a happier job working a ‘worse’ job locally. 

The conclusion is not totally unexpected, but it’s an interesting example that makes you think about how irrational human existence can be - pretty depressing really. It highlights the importance of behavioural economics: we may be able to achieve a much happier society if it can succeed in revealing these paradoxical lifestyle choices and thus helping us to avoid them.

We don’t understand, long term, the relative contributions to our happiness and well-being of different factors in our lifestyle. Behavioural science in the 21st century could have a similar ‘enlightenment’ effect to nutritional/dietary science in the 20th.

I’d be interested to know what other examples there are, from your life, where you now think/suspect a decision you took at some point in life *thinking* it was totally rational has led to you being worse off overall?

(hat tip)

“SSTL expects to have a turnover of £30m this year, with pre-tax profits of  around £1.5m. The company has grown by 25pc a year since it was spun out of Surrey University in 1985. The consortium, Galileo Industries, originally tendered at five times the price quoted by SSTL, but their satellite is still in testing and not expected to launch until mid-2006.”

“We specifically make low-cost and quick satellites,” he said. Giove-A, which weighs 600kg, has gone
from drawing board to launch in 30 months. “We take these components out of iPods and so on, and work out whether we can fly them in our spacecraft.” Sir Martin said conventional components can take up to 15 years to test, by which time they may be obsolete. “Imagine if you bought a PC that was 15 years old.”

The best thing about this: Surrey University owns 80% of the company (the rest is owned by the employees, and by Elon Musk, a name that should be familiar to anyone in the dotcom scene). So they held 80% of a very profitable company growing 20-25% y/y that makes its living stripping bits out of your gadgets to make ultra cheap, ultralight satellites - in a country with no real culture or history of space exploitation/exploration - in fact, SSTL was formed just when Maggie Thatcher nabbed the entire UK space budget! Surrey University really cashed recently when it sold SSTL to EADS earlier this year.

I don’t think we in the UK realise just how much potential we have locked up in our universities, waiting to be exploited and to take on commercial giants from way out leftfield.

Stanford owns the patent to Google’s search engine technology. Would tuition fees faced by students be so onerous if UK universities were doing the same with their bright stars?

We will see a move from charities and foundations as monolithic armies of street teams and envelope lickers on the donor side, and reasonably large and static deployments of Western expat “missionary” forces on the ground, receiver side - to an entirely new model for charitable institutions, much more like a telephone exchange of old - operators, there to connect you to the ground level, to the cause you care passionately about - even though nobody else in your social circle, neighbourhood or even city cares about it. The Internet will bring enough ‘freaks’ like you together to make the world move in that specific, totally unique way that resonates so strongly with you). The ground level will need to be mobile and flexible and able to react to spontaneous coming-together of interest groups - taken to an extreme, that is a concept I call ’smartmob philanthropy’ and to be totally flexible and responsive on the ground level, it’s going to need Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the markets. But that’s not my focus today. I’m looking donor-side.

Future charities will need to make themselves as transparent and connective as they possibly can - a no bullshit, no interruptions, constant connection with your cause. Keep the pipeline up, and they can get more dollars flowing from your bank account than a mass media, totally untargeted mailout, TV spot or street ‘attack’ could ever have. You, as a donor, have so much more than just money to offer, if you can be connected with causes you care about. You can become its greatest advocate in your social circle, far more persuasive and actionable than some well-meaning spotty teenager in a fluorescent bib with a clipboard and a nametag could ever be. You can also be a source of inspiration, networking and innovation to those on the ground level receiving your passionate support.

The Internet is the key technology. My generation, unlike that of my parents, has grown up totally native and accustomed to the Age of Choice - we go to iTunes and we download the music that resonates intimately with us - mainstream radio bores us. The AoC is an unstoppable force - every message, every experience - marketing, entertainment, retail, google ads - trend towards becoming ever more tailored, customised. Charity can’t stick to standard, mass broadcast modes. With the internet, it has infinite gallery space and a rich framework for recommendation tools - old charity is stuck in the mentality of mailing out 3 page pamphlets in which it can only hold one story, aimed at tugging the heartstrings of an entire population - and FORCING the message through with the spotty clipboard brigade or other rude and aggressive moves like including a pen with the mailed-out  pamphlet.

Time for a change.

[I suppose the only reason philanthropy is so far behind every other Internet-revolutionised industry is the lack of market forces - it's damn hard enough getting a dollar out of you, let alone competing for it against other charities. That'll change.]

Download “Eliza Doolittle - Rolling Stone”

(disclosure: she’s a fellow Arsenal FC fan, and this may or may not be the reason why of all the good music I’ve recently discovered very recently, I chose to share this!)

Read/WriteWeb anoints FriendFeed king of the future web - using it to centralise all the conversations sparked by their posts - and nails Disqus and Twitter in one fell swoop. If other sites follow suit - and this is indeed quite a compelling course of action - this is pretty unfortunate news for Fred Wilson and the other good folk at Union Square Ventures, who have put a fair bit of money into the latter two.

I’m of the firm belief that when it comes to structures and devices, what nature evolved, humans can in time approximate or perhaps even improve upon by design (though when it comes to complex systems like the human cell - in extraordinarily complex and interlinked homeostasis - it’s borderline impossible to design from scratch).

So what happens to society when hyper-efficient photovoltaic technology arrives that allows us to ‘mine’ the Earth’s one and only energetic input with >90% efficiency? We’ll be able to power our lives without relying on digging up pre-existing energy stores.

That day could bring a technosocial revolution of the likes we haven’t seen in a long time, certainly since the invention of the Internet.

It’ll almost certainly affect the balance of power globally and within a country’s society, government and markets. What’s more, if it changes how we power our lives - which it would, if it brings power generation and usage closer together, into the hands of the citizen, not as currently remote as a distant power station - it may also bring about a radical reappraisal of our lifestyles and the energy demands of the different parts of that lifestyle, each with wildly different importance to our survival, progress and happiness.

Just think - and let me know in the comments - how your life, and the society and government around you - could be different if power generation was a) not dependent on stored sunlight-derived resources (include nuclear) being dug out of the ground; and b) if you generated all/most of your power yourself/as a neighbourhood co-op. Also have a think about what needs to change - infrastructure, legislation, baseline attitudes, auxiliary tech - before that day can arrive.

Happy (energetic?) independence day.

I’ve been faced with a short term opportunity to work with a fantastic bunch of people in a company with a great mission, with a position doing something reasonably interesting. It wouldn’t pay much, in a city that’s (in)famously expensive to live in, and the outcome is highly uncertain and might leave me in a financially unsustainable city with no job. What I’ve been trying to do is greatly reduce the risk by trying to line up a job for winter ‘09 onwards - in an industry which I think would suit me, career-wise. So it comes down to balancing the short term and the long term.

Having been offered the short term position, the long term position dragged their feet, taking their time to organise interviews, get back to me with decisions (and in fact they still haven’t, despite the matter being supposed to have found some sort of closure a week ago).

Rather than having the maturity and openness to communicate what was going on to the startup I wanted to work for over the summer, I in turn stalled them and they were left in the dark about what was going on. I had absolutely no idea what the consequences would be of admitting to a company offering me a position that I was seeking alternate offers. Partly, the issue was that I was slightly leaning towards the view that if the long term path was unwilling to give me time to work for the startup over the summer, I might, to my extreme chagrin, have to sacrifice the short term experience for the long view option.

Keeping them in the dark until I had all the options laid out before me was not a conscious strategy, but rather, a reflex equivalent to sticking my head in the sand. It was a ’strategy decision’ that was made unconsciously, played out over several weeks, as I waited for new information from the long term factor, stalling the startup at every point, thinking I was getting close to a resolution [which hasn't even arrived yet!]

In retrospect it was a cowardly and naive thing to do, completely blind to the needs and feelings of my summer employers - a startup needs to execute fast, smoothly, and with access to the fullest information potentially available to it (hence the importance of openness in all dealings with them) - and I gave them nothing but uncertainty, delays, and a feeling of being played and manipulated as I sought “alternatives” (when really I was seeking a safety net to enable me to work with them at a [reduced] level of personal risk that I could find to be workable).

Furthermore, they were hiring me for a position which demanded great communication skills with outsiders, in addition to the openness and honesty of emotion that working in a small team demands. I’ve demonstrated neither of those in the very turbulent past few weeks that followed my uprooting from a stable, 4-year stretch at university.

Unsurprisingly, they’re mighty pissed off and I’ve greatly shaken their confidence in me, and the chances that this opportunity is still open seem very remote.

Managing your options and the relationships attached to them is no simple task, especially when they each have their own resolution timelines (remember, I’m still waiting to hear back from the long term opportunity), expectations and outcomes. It’s not a simple set of simultaneous equations you can solve and find the right solution to - you often have to make a decision without all the information and options clear to you. There’s a life lesson in risk and decision right there, for sure. And neither is communicating with the people offering you the options - I’ve never known how to explain jobseeking alternatives to potential employers.

But what I’ve learnt here - potentially very painfully if the short term opportunity closes to me - is that openness and honesty would have been the best policy, daunting and impossible though it may have seemed at the time. People would have been more understanding than I feared, had I been open with them and found the right way to explain what was going on, to dispel - or at least minimise - their fears. Obscurity and stalling is the confused coward’s way out - and I fell for its lure; hopefully, if I’ve learnt my lesson, for the last time.

Conor Harrington - Shoreditch:

Fauxreel (Dan Bergeron) - Toronto

Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada - IDENTITY/Madrid

and last but certainly not least - JR (the guy who put huge murals on the Palestinian security wall) - Tate Modern and Lexington St

This is a nervous, poorly presented talk outlining a hugely important theory about where the future of humanity is headed:

Blackmore’s argument goes as follows:

Darwinism is Universal: any process that has copying (heredity), variation (mutation) and selectionary pressure will evolve. This describes information (instructions for how to do something in life) perfectly. She describes three levels of information. The first should be familiar to everyone. The second will be familiar to most of you, but isn’t in the wider world just yet. And the third is introduced by Blackmore in this talk, but ties in with Ivan Illich’s “Tools for conviviality” concept and several other (anti-)technocracy arguments. Here’s my summary (my own view in summed up in just 4 lines at the end)

The central premise is this: information builds structures around it that help it get passed on through generations (copying events) - it doesn’t care how it’s passed on, it will just keep changing itself (the instructions for how to build structures that protect and copy it), like a virus, until it finds a way to get copied faster, or longer, without getting killed. And it keeps going that way, changing shape, changing structures around it, changing how it uses the resources in its environment to keep going.

Level 1: Genes. Information about how to build structures (cell walls, proteins, teeth) is encoded in your DNA as a mix of A, G, T and C letters. You can browse that information here: http://www.ensembl.org/index.html - started off in a swamp with the letter coming together (abiogenesis), they kept changing until there was a way that the DNA (or some other molecule that encodes itself) could copy itself, create a cell (bacteria) around it that can divide and reproduce, then scales and bones, other organs, a brain to let it swing its fists at predators, hair to keep its defence and copying system warm, and eventually… a bigger brain to learn to copy ideas

———–

Level 2: Memes (i.e. Ideas - brain-stored information - take over). Ideas encode how to build big things around your brain to keep the brain alive (like a fire, a house, or a society). The brain is to ideas just like a cell is to DNA - a clever way to store and copy information (with variation each time ideas are passed on). The information (memes) typically encodes tools to protect the brain and make ideas spread. If the anthropomorphism/teleology bugs you, if the memes you learn keep you alive for longer than your neighbour the other tribespeople are more likely to copy your ideas, over time - and so on).     

Genes, who used to be calling all the shots, are suddenly the slaves to memes: hence my body has an organ that is dangerous to my own DNA (childbirth is an extremely painful and dangerous event due to infection, bloodloss due to the oversized brain on the baby) and I go through life supporting an organ that is just 2% body mass but consumes 20% of the energy I have to hunt for, endangering myself in the process. The brain’s dangerous and inefficient and the DNA actually gets passed on less than it would in a bacterium (but brains are good at protecting themselves because they are Level 2 Information):

If I have a bigger brain I can learn about fire and language (cooperation) and medicine and hunting faster than the other tribe, and that protects me, so I live and they don’t - thus the memes protect my brain, a meme machine, and so protect themselves.

———-

Level 3: Temes (i.e. digital information takes over). Until now the brain was pretty much the only way powerful information (more powerful than DNA, which can only control flesh and blood so is limited compared to memes which can change our environment with tools, fire, society, etc) was spread around with the 3 essential characteristics: variation, heredity and selection. But as we move into an age of artificial intelligence (AI), information is suddenly in a form that is digital and can evolve when computers come up with a teme that we think is better than the old one (i.e. a digital “idea” that is selected via memes).

Stop thinking about The Matrix - this is more subtle. Memes will support the hosting and spreading of digital instruction sets, without us even realising it (the same way our DNA doesn’t realise it’s being abused by big heavy meme machines - brains). To us it would just look like we realised that some new AI-derived ideas are a clever way to run government, or hospitals, or defence systems, power plants, etc - the digital brain’s ideas will keep us alive and well and even better at storing and passing on memes - because if it didn’t, evolution dictates that it would over-parasitize the host and die out.

So it’ll run society, and R+D, and innovation better than it ever has before. Memes will govern how the ideas get implemented - there will be meetings of computer scientists to discuss whether “this new new AI system seems better than the last at improving itself and running our sewage system, do we feel it would be OK to implement it?” If they say yes, the teme has established itself on a bedrock of memes and continues to exist, taking advantage of our decisions and our recommendations to friends, to spread to new platforms (just like our brains helped us colonize wild continents, just like our DNA helps cells to live in volcanos or deep seas)

So human society will live on, unknowing slaves to, but beneficiaries of, the life of digital information, just as your flesh and blood is an unknowing slave to, but beneficiary of, ideas, learning and education. We won’t realise, of course, that it just makes our brains “worse” at developing totally new memes, just like our memes have found ways to make the body last longer and DNA do things that stop it from getting passed on quite so fast as bacteria.

————

I actually think Blackmore is wrong - temes are not the ‘3rd level’, society was. My DNA puts teeth around it; my brain puts clothes around it; society puts soldiers and police that stop my brain from doing what it wants, which in turn that stops DNA from doing what it wants. How to run a society is just another level of self-replicating information, and when Bush spreads ‘democracy’ to Iraq, or Starbucks sets up in the Forbidden City in China, that’s exactly what’s happening - society is copying and spreading itself.

Better societies thrive when they balance getting brains to spread and protect it, without making brains realise they can’t do what they want. Susan Blackmore missed that.  But she may be right that the next step might be temes - AI that gets societies to implement it and to copy it over and over again, without them realising it (they just think it’s better at helping their society survive.

We will accept that our society accepts the new AI ‘teme’ because we know society helps us survive - just like DNA has ‘accepted’ the big, bulky, dangerous brain and longer life with fewer kids because it ‘helps the DNA survive’. Makes you wonder who/what is actually surviving ‘better’ thanks to all this.

To the layman: hydrogen has been extensively studied because it’s the simplest periodic element, and when you’re talking quantum physics, studying basic, simple systems helps… a lot. So physisicts think they understand it pretty damn well. A fundamental tenet is that the lowest energy ’shell’ (think of it as an orbiting satellite around a planet) that electrons can take around a hydrogen nucleus is called 1s. This is the ‘resting state’, and most physicists don’t believe it could be pushed any lower. *If* it could, then you could take out the difference in energy, use it to power a plant. But physicists believe that hydrogen electrons can’t go any lower: try to squish it in any closer, and it will just press back; so the only energy you would get out of it is energy you put in. Not the way to run a power plant. This is something that the general scientific body holds to be true (or so I understand - but IANAQP).

The hydrino controversy last churned up in 2005 - even hitting mainstream media. Apparently Blacklight is now moving on to scaling up to a 50kW reactor. It would be earth-quaking enough for this key tenet of physics to be proven false in a physics lab somewhere in a university. But for it to have been discovered by a startup in the industry by a non-physicist, and to be on its way to becoming a commercially viable power source? And for it to be roughly 10x cheaper than the cheapest solar power we have available (and even cheaper than the cheapest coal power?), at just 1cent a kWh? This scenario isn’t impossible, but seriously, come on!!

There’s a lot to be skeptical about here. The fact that none of his papers have been coauthored, or that a discovery as revolutionary as this can’t get into Nature or Science, or even any attention in New Scientist. Some scientists claim Randell Mills’ papers are ‘riddled with mathematical errors’, and with Mills’ background in medicine, not theoretical physics or even chemistry, that would be understandable. Various scientists have taken turns ripping his research to shreds. And yet Blacklight’s got great backers, NASA has taken an interest, and $60m has been stumped up. Wtf indeed.

[cf Venturebeat]

Chlorophyll (in plants, converts sunrays into ‘redox potential’ - useful chemical energy that can smash carbon dioxide and water together to form hydrocarbons - like sugar or biodiesel): ~100%

Conversion of chlorophyll-derived energy to useful molecules, like sugars: 50%

Factor in the energy spent by the plant so that it can live, and the sunlight reflected off the leaves, and your big green plant could theoretically convert just 11% (other sources quote 34%). Sugar cane is at the top end of the ones that have been measured: 4%; corn is 0.5% (corn is a major crop being used for bioethanol); wheat is 0.3%

Solar panels: 20%

Algae: 13%

I’d also like to know what the energy efficiency of a snickers bar or a sausage is (in terms of energy used by plants to make the individual components, energy to make the bar, energy to transport it to me, versus the energy it refuels my body with); my (largely baseless) guess is that it must be anywhere in the 0.000x - 0.0000000x% range. What a waste of sunrays!

UPDATE: http://venturebeat.com/2008/05/29/sapphire-energy-gets-open-checkbook-from-investors-for-algae-based-gasoline/ “Green crude” project putting bacteria in dirty water or seawater and extracting petroleum gets ‘blank cheque’ to make it happen, and quick. The Wellcome Trust is getting in on this, which is interesting - and probably a good sign for the viability of the technology