chain of reaction

One of the most important things in economy is to make predictions about the future. This does not only hold for speculating at the stock market, but also is day to day business for fiscal politics, company development, trend scouts, entrepreneurship, education plans, research funding, climate observation and hundreds of other fields. Some even state, that making predictions on the basis of experiences is the key factor for higher intelligence and complex cognitive abilities in the human brain.

The problem with guessing the future is, that there are too many factors to keep them all in mind. Some are forgotten easily, some are newly discovered, some are controversial. So in the world single entities emerged, busy with keeping track of all factors relevant to one topic at all times, thus creating highly specialized expert systems. Such entities (individuals, groups, etc.) are very important, but can easily fall out. If an expert of a special field dies, it takes a lot of non-experts to keep the network of factors alive. And maybe they won't succeed, and the knowledge/intuition is gone.

In order to not overload this entity, it would be good, to have a digitalized version of this relation network. Not only for causal chains, but also for positive and negative correlations between factors. A wiki would be a great way, to realize such a system. Every article is an event. This article lists all correlations with other events, and it lists all the events that lead to it, that were necessary for it and which events it is necessary for. All these relations have to be supported by research studies/articles. By not restricting the field of events, several networks will spring up at the same time, and maybe get connected after some time.

The gain would be, to not only have a good overview of complex chains of reaction, but also an index of all the research data supporting them. Remote effects could be much better understood or discovered, by revealing complex chains not seen before. And confusions between causal chains and correlations could be more easily uncovered. I think it would be worth a shot, because I have not seen anything like this so far, and a wiki would be a great tool for realizing this with a large base of users to contribute.

Online rating systems need an overhaul

As Brad observed quite nicely in this post, ebay has a problem with its rating system. Well, actually not only does ebay, but all websites who use them do. The root lies in different behaviour of users, and different reasons for them to give ratings. And there's the question of what the parties that are subject to the ratings intent to achieve. In ebay it's mostly a question of finances - the better the score, the better the revenue. In IMDB or youtube it's all about attention, the more votes you get, the better.

In my opinion, it would be better not to hand out negative votes on a quorum-basis like brad suggested, but to overhaul the whole rating system. Ebay has a scale of 1-5, some websites have 1-10, 1-3, 0-10, etc. Most systems don't even have descriptions for the meaning of the scores. And users use these scales differently. There's the question of defaults: some have highest rating as default, some have average default, some have lowest as default. Some tend to rate extreme, not using the full range, some are very careful, not using the full range either. Until now, the companies assume that with large numbers, these effects will all even out into a nice bell shaped graph.

For example, to avoid bad results, IMDB has very special vote rating system for their Top250 list that goes like this:
"weighted rating (WR) = (v ÷ (v+m)) × R + (m ÷ (v+m)) × C" I don't think this is very understandable, and they also have to exclude non-regular voters.

Another problem is, that with the old rating system, many users are influenced. For example they have a look at a movies rating on IMDB with something like 60000 votes, averaged 7,6. and they think, "hey, this movie doesn't deserve 7,6, it should be lower". So what they do is, they don't won't rate the movie at the score, which they actually think the movie deserves. But they vote 1, in order to lower the aggregated result as much as possible towards the score they think it deserves. This is a problem that all rating systems have, where the user has information on other voters choice before they vote on their own. On Websites that is most of the time the case.

So this is my new system:

I think it would be best, if every vote is contextualized with all your other votes, and thus normalized and comparable and aggregateable in a combined rating. If on a scale from 1-5, one user only gives two votes 1 and 5, and another user only the votes 2 and 4, they actually express the same opinion. By normalizing the data, you would have as a result, that the first user has an average vote of 3, with an average variation of 2, which leads to a -1.000 and +1.000 from average vote. The second user has the same vote results, because he has an average vote of 3 and an average variation of 1.

If you ever had a course on variance analysis, this comes naturally to your mind. Apparently it doesn't for the creators of the voting systems, they just calculate the average vote.

What will it change? First of all, you won't be confused with interpreting different rating scales anymore. You'll have a good guess, what -0.612 means in contrast to +0.997. Second of all, the influence of prevoting result spotting won't affect the vote so much anymore. This is because, you can't overexpress your opinion anymore by voting more extreme. Extreme votes are only heavier weighted, if you have a lot more moderate votes, and that takes time and consideration.

So, the math is easy and already used heavily in analysing surveys and stuff like that. The voting wouldn't change from the users perspective, so they wouldn't notice much of a difference. Only the results would be much more interesting, because fake-votes are stripped of their power.

picture by Sara and Mike

New applications for wikis

When you talk about wiki, everybody thinks mainly of wikipedia, wikimedia, wikibooks, wikinews and the other projects. They all focus on the article-part itself, and forget the power of the structure a wiki offers. For giving a wiki a more semantic touch, as is proposed for the web 3.0, you don't necessarily need to implement new software features. You can do it with what you have already. But a change in the way of thinking about wikis is needed to do that. I want to outline some ideas for new ideas of realizing a wiki, i think they are somewhat innovative, and would be quite useful.

The food chain
The chain is not so much a chain, but more of a web. The key for it aren't the animals and plants and other organisms themselves, but the combination of who eats what and which parts. Categories could explain groups with same eating habits like carnivores, herbivores, etc. In my opinion it would be nice to visualize small parts of the web. It would be helpful for understanding and creating ecosystems.

Product Parts
There are hundreds of thousands of companies creating products. All of them use products of other companies as product parts, materials, assembly machinery, etc. It would be really interesting to see, how this web is spun, how complex a product is, and what would happen if one element in the web would break down. It would help us to understand the meaning of natural ressources, the importancy of recycling trash, and open positions for further developments.

Water systems
Every river has a spring and ends in the ocean. No wait, they don't. Water is a self-organizing web of streams, from the smallest trickle to the widest stream. They are all in a hierarchy, which sometimes can change, and sometimes is forcefully changed by humans building canals.

Company shares
Everybody knows about it, stock market analysts are the gurus of it, but noone has a full picture. Many companies have shares of other companies, they have daughter companies and conglomerates etc. A wiki for companies could give that information to everybody, and show the problems of the system itself and the impacts of any disturbances in the market.

Can you think of other ideas? Write a comment on it!

pictures by Domenico Nardone and Tobin Fricke

Search Engines 3.0

Ever been on Google Website for Searching something? Have you noticed how 1998ish it looks? Ever wondered why you have to type complicated terms with hyphens in a form field as if there was no 21st century? Are you one of the many who thinks that Google has grown a monopoly that needs some serious competitors?

I think the time has come for some new steps in search engine developments. If you can't improve the database and it's indexes anymore, you always can improve the communication between humans and machines. And when it comes to searching, we are 10 years behind, due to lack of competition.

My vision of a new search engine looks like this. On the start screen you see a tag cloud of the most important web content genre names, as well as the newest keywords in the news. All main keywords are spatially organized by dimensional analysis. By scrolling around and zooming in and out, you can explore less popular areas of the field. The tag cloud is in constant change, because new items grow out of nowhere when something new happens, and old topics shrink and disappear, when noone uses them. The more people search for something, the bigger it is. You can drag and drop any keyword and combinations onto the search field. When you click on a tagword, a new tag cloud opens up with the keyword in the center. But this time, the keywords have undergone a cluster analysis, thus simulating a semantic categorization. So the tag cloud is spatially grouped into clusters.

Search results aren't a list anymore. Noone likes these lists. Rather it is a new tag cloud, this time it is showing URLs of the top level domains. The more search results in a domain, the bigger it is. The URLs are also grouped by cluster analysis. By scrolling and zooming, you can navigate through large fields of results. This also would reduce SEO and Sub Level Domain Spamming a lot.

Similar concepts could be introduced for Image results, where not only keywords but also color, size, etc. could by taken into cluster analysis. News items could have timelines, geographical locations as hierarchies. I think it would be pretty easy to improve search engines, many bigger websites have amazing local solutions, so why doesn't Google crank it up a notch?

picture by Matt McGee

New Year

As it goes for innovation, I want to bring my blog to a new level in the next year, too. So here is what I did: I opened a poll, for you to tell on which fields you want to read more. I'm pretty keen on thinking and developing new ideas, but the more feedback I get, the more productive I am. I also want you to comment on my posts not via e-mail, icq or in person, but right here in this blog, below the entry you just read itself. Don't be shy, I make a lot of mistakes, and only you can help me find them. I can learn a lot from what you're saying and thinking, after all you have been elected Time's Person of the Year!

Thank you so much!

picture by Laura Mundee

courageous city planning

When you look at any larger city in the western world from above, most of the time you see the same pattern over and over again. You have blocks, streets, sidewalks and train tracks. The most important features are the roads and streets, they divide a city into a lot of blocks. Sidewalks are between the roads and the blocks, sharing space with the street. The wideness of the streets correlates with the size of the blocks it separates. Most of the time they have lines of parking spaces for cars. Blocks are a bunch of buildings in a square, that face the roads, forming squares and rectangles, with some larger yards in the middle. The yards are used for gardens, supermarkets, playgrounds, etc.. Towards the yards the houses show balconies, winter gardens, terraces and a lot of windows.

But does it have to be this way? The importance of cars in our society, has made them the main design-theme for our cities. This is why we have to combine streets and sidewalks in complicated intersection systems with traffic lights and long phases. This is why everyone who wants to move around in the city without using a car, has to participate in car traffic and bad air conditions. And this is why we consider cities to be rather ugly and smelly.

In my opinion there's the option for another design. As I tried to point out, we don't have to keep the system that historically replaced our roads for all kinds of relocation to become streets for motorized verhicles only. So here is what I am proposing as an alternative system. Imagine streets without sidewalk and pedestrians. All intersections would be much easier to design, and much more efficient in guiding traffic. But where would the pedestrians walk? There would be a second grid, intersecting the city, but shifted half a block to the southeast. So as a result, these pedestrian walkways would cut every block into half. One block is connected to the next block, not on the corners of the square, but right in the middle. The blocks would need to have at least one gap on each of the four sides, so that connections to other blocks can be established. Guiding pedestrians across a road is much easier and more efficient than at intersections. The buildings would have their entrances toward the center of the block, where it is more quiet and cleaner and nicer to look at. The pedestrians would experience a much greener and quiter city, where they would encounter more neighbours on the streets. the streets would be much easier to clean, and wouldn't need gardens to seperate living space from road noise and smells. Bigger streets could also crossed on a level below or above the ground, so that traffic lights wouldn't be needed at all anymore. It would be just like turning your back on the cars, and turn toward the neighbours and community.

I think such a coexistence would be a good solution between car-free city-centers and traffic jammed surrounding areas.

picture by Jonn 'Dorvak'

put usb flash drives into action!

Nowadays everybody has them, small little devices accessible by USB, to store data on. Some have functionality for playing mp3s too, but that's it. So whenever I want to exchange data with a flash drive, I have to lend or exchange it. But who wants to give away a device he paid for, and wants to keep using without pausing?

My little idea is a device with two or more USB-Slots, that can transfer files from one to the other. So if you want to exchange files, you can just stick your and your friends usb flash memory into the device, select the files to be transferred, hit action, unplug the memory sticks, finished. This is less functionality than any mp3-player has, and should be easily created.

An enhanced version would be memory sticks, that have an USB plug on one side and an USB socket on the other. With the functionality for sending and receiving files implemented in the stick itself. So you could put an infinite number of sticks in a row. This wouldn't only come handy in a situation where you want to share files in a group, but also you could use multiple sticks in a single USB socket thus reducing the need for many slots by virtually increasing the size of the flash memory for other devices.

And now imagine what could develop out of this, keeping in mind that how small flash memories will become anytime soon, how fast transfer rates will become, and how USB could be replaced by Bluetooth or WiFi.

picture by Ian Hampton