Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Halley’s pithy Comment on Bob “I’m In The Habit Of Keeping Secrets” Woodward: “Crazy me, I thought he was a journalist there for a minute … “ This reminded me of yet-another great Ira Flatow remark, from across some restaurant table or other in Cleveland: “Nobody wants to be a journalist any more. Everybody wants to be a celebrity journalist.” There was a time when we all, even Robert Redford, wanted to be Bob Woodward*…

* Once a great investigative reporter, Robert Woodward is now spinning nightly on a TV set near you in his new role as Bush White House stenographer…

Some quotes that should inspire or constrain us when we try to improve online reputation systems:

“Knowing your neighbors is more important than knowing karate. And in both the real and virtual world, nothing improves security more than gentrification. “

Bruce Schneier

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“It remains to be seen whether folksonomies will implode under the weight of immense numbers of users, or flame or spam out under the malignant attacks of free riders and rip-off artists.”

Bruce Sterling

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“Closing a security hole is like dodging a bullet.”

Dave Winer

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“As we put more and more good stuff up on the web, and democratically encourage folks around the world to get out there and find it–maybe we should take some responsibility for the risks they’ll encounter. “

Betsy Devine

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“I think that identifying which social needs ought to have priority over others should be a key driving force in the discussion about technology and law.”

Joi Ito

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“Fairness means knowing when to make exceptions…That requires being sensitive to individual needs, understanding the larger context, balancing competing values, and forgiving transgressions when appropriate. “

David Weinberger

I was out of town for the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture, but got to hang out at two fine afterparties, the first hosted by Charlie Nesson and the second one BlogHer-centric but gender-mixed.

It was great to meet (finally!) BlogHer-oine Lisa Stone and to share lunchtime musings with Liz Lawley. Not enough time to hang out with the hellacious Halley Suitt, or with IdentityWoman Kaliya Hamlin, David IsenbergDavid Isenberg, Phil Wolff, Kevin Marks…

(And curses on the evil forces that kept away conference-attenders David Weinberger or Frank Paynter or Tony Kahn, folks I would have loved to see there.)

Thanks to the tag-errific Mary Hodder for inviting me and to all of you guys for letting me rant about reputation systems.

Suppose it’s true that mathematically speaking, a trustworthy reputation system is exactly as good as genetic kinship in promoting prosocial behavior by group members.

Boiling that down into an online model, reputation systems are critical to social software, which depend on their users behaving in positive ways.
The motivation of A to add value to an online commons depends critically on A’s belief that good users are labeled as good and bad users as bad.*

It also follows that any social software can benefit simply by publicizing its reputation system.

The fact that eBay’s reputation system is digital and public while wikipedia’s reputation system is complex and unevenly enforced may account for the more frequent trollish disruptions at wikipedia.* *

A portable online reputation system could be somewhat like the “online citizenship” model proposed by
Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster, and expanded at today’s Symposium on Social Architecture by Kaliya Hamlin. I look forward to re-seeing Kaliya tonight, to ask her about it.

* Your public reputation score doesn’t have to jeopardize your right to privacy for personal data like real names, etc.

* * The reputation systems used by eBay, wikipedia, Amazon, SlashDot, etc. are very different. (So are the kinds of behavior each hopes to promote.) The type of reputation system doesn’t matter, however–just its accuracy, as perceived by users. The only detail of desired behavior that matters is its cost-to-benefit ratio.

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“I make a point of going to other people’s funerals because otherwise they won’t come to mine.”

Yogi Berra

Mathematical biologist JBS Haldane famously declared that he would lay down his life for two brothers or eight cousins. Craigslist and Flickr are two of my favorite reminders that lots of webfolk imitate Yogi Berra instead of Haldane.

I’ve been reading a fascinating article in Nature*, “Evolution of indirect reciprocity.” It gives mathematical models where reputation systems provide a very good substitute for genetic kinship. That is, it benefits me to behave altruistically toward someone who’s adding value to the commons, even if I don’t get my own direct payback from that specific person.

The article is by Martin Nowak, a friend from our Princeton days and Karl Sigmund, whose many benefits to our common commons include feeding 3 year-old Sergei Brin his first guglhupf.

* (Nature 437 , 1291-1298 (27 October 2005)

Headed home from Cleveland this morning (at 5:45 a.m., ugh!) to Cambridge, where multiple BlogHers are in town for Corante’s Symposium on Social Architecture. I’m looking forward to exciting blogdish and tagtalk from Mary Hodder, who doesn’t get to Boston often enough, not to mention Lisa and Halley, and Liz, whom I just don’t get to see often enough, except by way of their blogs.

Throw a box into a cage full of chimpanzees, they fight for the box.
Throw a box into a cage full of bonobos, they have sex inside it.

Ira Flatow

Just a small sample of outside-the-box chitchat over breakfast this morning, with Ira Flatow and Star-Trek-deconstructionist Lawrence Krauss, not to mention Frank Wilczek. In other news, Frank is playing Sudoku with Mathematica, Lawrence has a new beard as well as a new book (Hiding in the Mirror : The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond), and Betsy Devine has much more good stuff than she can blog.

Fans of Science Friday, do you recognize this picture?

Well, if not, why not? It’s on the very first page of results if you Google-image-search for
ira flatow.

The image comes from a website describing a new book called
Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci–that sounds pretty good. Which goes to show you won’t go far wrong searching for Renaissance podcast-man Ira Flatow.

I just found out that my breakfast chat with Dave Winer made his very short list of podcasts that exemplify his “Vision for Podcasting.”

Wow! Thanks, Dave!

Now, although I’m one of the few people on the planet not podcasting yet, this was already my second Betsy-Devine-getting-podcast-by-podcasting-bigshot. (Tony Kahn of WGBH was the first; scroll down his podcast list looking for “Betsy Devine.”

Now, just like you, I’m thinking about starting my own podcast, so maybe the best place to start is a mashup of these two I’ve already done? Start with…

• Gladiator-striptease sound-effects, followed by….
• Singing a showtune about Massachusetts, followed by….
• Re-enactment of Halley’s Boston Blogger Beach Party, followed by….
• Limitations of “Don’t be evil” exemplified by gang warfare…

In fact, I have something quite different in mind–but then, don’t we all?

“…not as smart as he thinks he is. There’s a lot of that going around.”

Another awesome quote from Frank Wilczek. (He was talking about somebody who will *never* read my blog, so I can just about promise it wasn’t you.)

Microbiologist Rita R. Colwell addressed today’s APS meeting on “Oceans, Climate, and Health: The Cholera Paradigm.” Epidemic diseases now fly over the global travel networks “almost as fast as money.”

Although cholera outbreaks rise, and fast, in response to rising ocean surface temperatures, the US isn’t likely to be hit severely because we have good infrastructure delivering tapwater.

But mosquito-borne diseases may be another story. As air temperatures rise (spring flowers come two weeks earlier in DC than they did a decade ago), disease vector mosquitos travel north, adapting in realtime to shift their reproduction to shorter days and earlier spring seasons.

Scary stuff, fascinating talk. Just one of many, this year at the APS meeting.