Contextualization, humans still "rock"!!!

The human brain is the most powerful “computer” we know. Despite the fact that computers have been replacing humans in several activities there are still some fields where our “computational” power cannot be beaten. Humans can in seconds understand context with thousands of variable and a huge number of layers where computer would fry its circuits to understand it in a rudimentary way. While some engineers still struggle to create more and more complex algorithms – that try to emulate artificial intelligence – others have putted their money in humans with free time.

Born out of crowdsourcing – a way of out outsource a service to a huge number of third parties – the human based computations seems to be the solution to the “simplicity” of nowadays algorithms. This area of computational science believes that a lot human performing small – although complex for computer – tasks would create the most powerful computer ever built. There are several methods of human based computation like: Darwin (programs written by several programmers competing to survive), wiki (several people contributing in a same direction), Human based genetic-algorithm (humans selecting, contributing, mutating and recombinating – Yahoo answers), Social search (humans ranking searches - Cha-Cha search, Google Image), Guessing Games (extract knowledge from people through funny games). These are an example of how human intelligence can be used to make a more complex, complete and relevant experience in several fields.

Let us take contextual market for example, while several companies (Google, Yahoo…) use complex algorithms to deliver marketing to content, boo-box developed a very elegant service that believes humans “rock” when it comes to contextualization. The first group works like a guy with machine gun trying to kill a rat in a dark room, the second like a sniper that shoot just once and delivers the right message to its target – bulls eye all the time!!! There are a few decades ahead before a computer understands what I am saying – even I don’t – until then I am gonna use boo-box. What about you?

Aid a curse in disguise

Africa received in the last 50 years more than US$1 trillion in aid (values brought to its present value), but from the 48 poorest countries in the world 38 are African states. This “cheap way” to buy guilty-relief that the developed world found it has prevented Africa to reach its real potential and condemned its citizens to a beggar’s life. That is why it should be found a new approach to tackle this old problem.

First it has to be analyzed what are the effects of this money inside African societies. Most of the donations do not come with clear goals and the proper planning, therefore do not reaching the wished effects. And moreover it has some side effects that just help to increase the problem itself, those side effects are:

• Creates an enormous bureaucracy (68% of the money donated to health in Uganda are used to overhead costs);
• Makes corrupt governments richer (from US$20 bi donated to Congo US$5 bi ended up in Mobutu’s account in Switzerland);
• Suffocates local entrepreneurs (in 2003, 650.000 tons of grain were donated to prevent the effects of a probable drought that never happened, and made the local producer to swallow a big drop in their prices)
• Favors a beggar mentality.

Those are the reasons why the Quenian Economist, head of the NGO that try to find new solutions for Africa, says – “For God sake stop helping Africa”!

The new path that Africa and those who are trying to help should tread is good and old-fashioned capitalism. It worked for East Asia – Africa of the 60s – and should work now for Africa.

Education, fair trade and productive investments are the key to rescue millions from poverty in the continent. Money shouldn’t be given it should be earned. When capital is invested in productive activities it creates a virtuous circle. First it wakes the entrepreneurs within the population, then it creates jobs, then generates wealth, then it is used to wake more entrepreneurs, and so on and on. The more this circle grows the more it makes corrupt governments and mammoth bureaucracy unacceptable and thus, creating an urge within entrepreneurs and consumers to get rid of then.

If instead of see Africa as a continent to be helped developed countries see Africa as partner for business, they would then be really helping pull the continent out of poverty. It is imperative to stop patronizing Africa and allows it to achieve the real independency - the economical one.

The almight Smashing Pumpkins

The best album of the year is out and it rocks!!!
Hear are the highliths of this record.

1- Doomsday clock
A crunch-bone-heavy-metal song that will make you want to bang your head on the wall.
A new characteristic from this new pumpkin formation is the background
vocal that have improved a hundred time and this song has a lot of good background vocals.


3 - Bleeding Orchid
With a multi-vocal intrduction, the dramatic and heartful mood of the song is introduced. This is one of those songs that has it all: powerful guitars, variated druming, killer vocals and good lyrics.


5 - Tarantula
Heavy and fast! With good vocals and a bluesy feel on it. It has hitted big on the radio.


7 - United State
A marathon of lound guitars and tribal druming with a colossal ending (if you won't hear the complete song at least hear the last 2 minutes)



Those are the songs that should be highlighted on this album. Pick up yours and have fun!

Economic Growth and sustainability, are they at the same side?

The last minute says it all!

Mankind faces now a dilemma: go green or go dead. Which one would you choose? Even though a five-year-old could answer that question, still is not clear if we have perceived the urgency of the matter. China and US have their private contest of who pollute the most; developing countries fight for their right to destroy earth; we still have a locust-swarm behaviour devouring careless all the planet resources.Is there any hope?

In the last two years, especially after the Katrina disaster, mankind seems to have awoken of its golden dream of infinite growth with no consequences and have opened its eye to the nightmare we brought ourselves in. DVDs like Al Gore’s inconvenient truth, the enlargement of Bush’s vocabulary adding to it the word global warming, the growth of the media space upon ecological issues, it has increased the awareness of the problem. But what can be done to amend it?

First of all we have to change the mindset that has lead us hear. We must get rid of those economics models that do not consider our most precious possession - our home the mother earth. Economists love to put a price on everything, why “d´a hell” they think all nature resources are for free? That is the reason why they created the false trade-off between economic growth and care about preservation. Everything we consume is underpriced and companies that do not care about the pollution their value chains generate are getting rich by destroying the world. Our responsibility on this process is to start to demand green companies, if they do not carewe do!!!

Second, we are a major part of the problem; our ways of doing things also gives a hand to the destruction of the planet. We must start to analyse what we can change in our behaviour to make a better world, the first step is to discovery what is our ecological footprint and then start to reduce it. There are several sites on the Web that shows how with a moderate effort we can help to change the world. Always have in mind you are one, but we are 6 billion, so if we all push to the same side, who knows what we can do !!!

Would know the difference between fly and fall if you could not see the ground? Right now our society is on a free fall thinking that it is flying. And if it do not wake up soon it will hit hard the cemetery of civilizations. A great quote I have seen about that it was on Al Gore´s DVD and it was said by Churchil.

“The time of half-measure has passed. We are entering a period of consequences,"

Think about that!!!

Cool websites about it:

Incovenient Truth web site
Natural Capitalism web site (You can read some chapters of the book - it will blow your mind)
EcoWorld web site (good articles)
Footprint Calculator

Perched at the edge of the abyss

If you were at the border of the roman empire when the first German tribes started to move in, would you know that everything you knew was about to change? If you saw the Spanish vessels coming on the horizon would you envisage the massacre that was about to take place? If you heard about the fall of the Bastille would you image that all you once hold sacred would become a thing from the past? And now are we living at one of those times? Can we say what come next?

The (not so) modern nation-states
(soundtrack)

Capitalism is extremely dependent of flows (i.e. flow of capital, goods, services, workers) the faster it occurs more wealth it generates. In the last 30 years the world has seen an intensification of those flows and the figures generated by then are rocketing out of the charts. Along side with that the problems we face, nowadays, often escapes the capability of governments to deal with it. Can local governments not be a barrier to those flows and not become obsolete and irrelevant?, it is the question that keeps resonating in the mind of those who are pay attention.

The last and current US governments have been sabotaging every attempt to create organizations that regulates nation-states (i.e. by not signing the Kyoto Protocol, attacking Iraq without the approval of the Security Council, creating barrier to liberalization of commerce), because this is what nation-states, especially the biggest one, are used to a land with no law. All our societies are based and regulated by laws, but countries are not, they are used to solve their problems like thugs outside a bar. Nevertheless can a world more and more integrated cope with that hooligan’s logic?

After the dawn of a new millennium NATO, a reminiscence of an even darker time, is discussing whether it should or not be placing missiles facing Russia. Don’t they know most of the energy that warm the halls where they have this great ideas come from those frozen fields? Or “El presidente” Hugo Chavez and his vicious speeches against the country that buys most of his oil. Those are example of how this bar-fighting-behavior is irrelevant and have been keeping the eyes of people away from more pressing matters like inequality, terrorism, piracy, global warming, and so on.

Borders (the real and virtual ones), as well, have become a major nuisance to people and business around the world, capital and information run free on the other hand people and goods do not. What is the logic behind having a border? Is it to protect me? But from what? Human beings that, although do not speak the same language and do not have the same customs, share the same dream of a better world? Can’t they come up with a better excuse?

Nation-States are becoming a thing from the past as they once have made the absolute-states. So what will take its place?

A good example of what I think it should look like the next step (although still far from perfect) is the European Union. A continent that have been for centuries the center stage of wars and massacres (that would have shamed even the devil itself) and that still hold some grudges at each other, however have managed to put it all behind and decided to share their future as one. The process of how the EU achieved its actual stage should be copied not only to integrate a continent but to integrate the world.

We as s specie that share the same fate should put aside things that really aren’t important and start to focus on things that really matter.

Economic Growth and sustainability, are they at the same side?
(Next post)

Information Society, the birth of the quantum man.
(Next post)

Welcome to the brave new word of Web 2.0.

The term Web 2.0 is a term applied to whole a new way of use the world wide web, this new way of use did not born from a major technological breakthrough but instead a concept change. The biggest concept shift was to see the web as platform for programming development, creating a web of services conversely a web of data. And the opportunities brought by that are endless.

All technologies that are being used by developers to create the Web 2.0 were available before like APIs, but the mentality to see the Web as platform and to allow third parts to use its databases or existent applications to create their own application is new.

Web 2.0 businesses are all about simplicity. The old saying – “less is more” - have never being truer. From design to programming, from organizational structure to process, everything is simplified to the minimum necessary to fulfill a need. They present itself as whole new animal, a new subject for business scholars around the world.

A particular specie of these services are the mashups, business and applications that are born from the mix of two or more existent applications to provide a brand new service. There are almost two thousand of these services and they keep appearing in a ratio of 3 a day. They present a lot of opportunities for investment and investors haven’t been strangers to these opportunities and have invested more than $250 million dollars on this market.

Hear an example of a Mashup in a Web 2.0 service.

www.musicovery.com

It is simple.
It fulfills, in a simple way, a need. (Random music for people that are multitask)
It uses a lot of existent applications to make a unique one.
It has an elegant way of monetize its services.

The future of the Web 2.0 is still blurred, but the prospects of this industry are promising.

Music Tip
Rodrigo Y Gabriela

They are back! The ghost of time will get you!

The most original band of the last 20 years is back, after a seven-year hiatus, they just performed a come back show in Paris. This is the resurrection of the band that died for rock and roll. Hears to you the smashing pumpkins!

The departure of the band was a little sample of the mayhem that surrounds their entire career, during the 11 eleven years they were together. Amidst all the fight between members, problems with their record label and plastic music rocketing the charts, they managed to release a conceptual album, a double album for free on the internet and perform a 4 hours farewell-show.

Now they are back and better than ever! The few songs I’ve heard made me comeback to the first time I heard then back in 96. A light and shade battle for the real meaning of live, a never ending experimentation of sounds, and a sad machine that never give in “because when you give in, then you give up”.

Hear a little sample of what I am talking about (live and demo version of the songs)
Gossamer

Tarantula



Their 7th album will be released in July 2007 and will be called Zeitgeist (Ghost of time in German). Certainly I will get myself one more chapter of this fantastic story.