Beyond the effort was the challenge of getting different families to work together. When matters as personal as education, values and children are at stake, intense emotions are sure to follow, whether the issue is snacks (organic or not?), paint (machine washable?) or what religious holidays, if any, to acknowledge. Oh, and in many cases, forming a co-op school is illegal, because getting the required permits and passing background checks can be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming that most co-ops simply don’t. (“The Pre-K Underground“, The New York Times, December 16)

Read the whole thing, and then give some thought to how effectively those policies, combined with the drug war, are de-legitimizing governments, and convincing people that to live their lives involves avoiding government rules. Eventually, even legitimate and necessary functions of government like courts will fall apart.

Think I’m exaggerating?

“There’s a fairly stringent code and byzantine process for getting certified and code-compliant,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, a Democrat from Brooklyn, whose office held a meeting over the summer for any co-ops interested in pooling their resources and securing permits. “Some are genuinely for the safety of kids, and some are more debatable.”

There’s a city councilman driving doubt over the system. What does that do to the legitimacy? What happens to the social contract?

Will the war on coop kindergardens join the war on drugs?

I think capitalism is a good thing. I’ve taken a salary from (venture) capitalists who were able to pay me because they captured “surplus value” from startups, and ploughed some of that profit back into more startups. I use the Marixst term of “surplus value” because I understand the Marxist critique, have lived it, and still think it’s a better system than all those others that have been tried from time to time. (I also think that Marx’s critique of capitalism is excellent, and even more so in light of the poorness of his suggested fixes.) The accumulation of capital in private hands greatly expands the range of entrepreneurship, allowing new products and services to emerge. And for those new products to succeed, they need to serve needs better than what preceded them. So we all benefit to a degree from the capital that accumulates in the hands of investors (even with the costs of creative destruction and externalities.)

At the same time, I think that there’s an emergent system of what we might call corporatism that I think is incompatible with a free society, and is in fact incompatible with free markets. By a free market, I mean one in which people contract with each other and with companies, and the court system enforces fair and predictable limits on those contracts. Fair limits might include that the parties came to a genuine meeting of the minds before exchanging value, that contracts are severable (so no indentured servitude or slavery), that interpretation favors the party that received the contract (rather than the drafter), and that neither party engaged in deceit in advertising their services.

Corporatism, at its heart, involves twisting the free market via government intervention in a number of ways:

• Lobbying for rules that allow the company to exclude competition. See, for example, AT&T’s gradual re-monopolization of the phone system.
• Manipulations of the contract system in ways which prevent fair redress. These include mandatory binding arbitration, prohibition of class action suits, clauses that allow the contract to remain in force even if the drafter puts in many clauses which shock the conscience of a court.
• Un-knowable systems (in particular, the American credit system) in which companies work together to ensure that you do what they demand, even if it’s wrong, because if you don’t, they will destroy your ability to contract with anyone else on fair terms.
• Convincing the government to take all the downside risk and none of the upside of the banking crisis, and then failing to prosecute those who enriched themselves via a game they knew full well was rigged.

Corporatism comes from the discovery that rules and meta-rules (the rules that are used to set the rules) are manipulatable. Of course, this is nothing new:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.” (Smith, “The Wealth of Nations.”

There were a good number of frankly anti-capitalist signs and groups at Occupy Seattle. It’s a free country, they’re entitled to their opinion, and I can disagree.

But they were not the only signs. I saw lots of signs which seemed to take aim at the unaccountable: the bankers, the corporations (“I won’t believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one”). And I think that responses to currently unaccountable corporatism is going to be one of the key outcomes of the Occupy Movement.

For non-Twitter users, the RT means “re-tweet,” amplifying things that others have said and MT means modified tweet, where the RT plus comment don’t quite fit.

If someone has php code to resolve t.co URLs into real URLs, that would be nice, and the Twitter Tools plugin seems easy to hack on.

For more than a decade, California and other states have kept their newest teen drivers on a tight leash, restricting the hours when they can get behind the wheel and whom they can bring along as passengers. Public officials were confident that their get-tough policies were saving lives.

Now, though, a nationwide analysis of crash data suggests that the restrictions may have backfired: While the number of fatal crashes among 16- and 17-year-old drivers has fallen, deadly accidents among 18-to-19-year-olds have risen by an almost equal amount. In effect, experts say, the programs that dole out driving privileges in stages, however well-intentioned, have merely shifted the ranks of inexperienced drivers from younger to older teens.

“The unintended consequences of these laws have not been well-examined,” said Mike Males, a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, published in Wednesday’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. “It’s a pretty compelling study.” (“Teen driver restrictions a mixed bag“)

As Princess Leia once said, “The more you tighten your grip, the more teenagers will slip through your fingers.”

All Streets consists of 240 million individual road segments. No other features — no outlines, cities, or types of terrain — are marked, yet canyons and mountains emerge as the roads course around them, and sparser webs of road mark less populated areas. More details can be found here, with additional discussion of the previous version here.

In the discussion page, “Fry” writes:

The result is a map made of 240 million segments of road. It’s very difficult to say exactly how many individual streets are involved — since a winding road might consist of dozens or even hundreds of segments — but I’m sure there’s someone deep inside the Census Bureau who knows the exact number.

Which raises a fascinating question: is there a Platonic definition of “a road”? Is the question answerable in the sort of concrete way that I can say “there are 2 pens in my hand”? We tend to believe that things are countable, but as you try to count them in larger scales, the question of what is a discrete thing grows in importance. We see this when map software tells us to “continue on Foo Street.” Most drivers don’t care about such instructions; the road is the same road, insofar as you can drive in a straight line and be on what seems the same “stretch of pavement.” All that differs is the signs (if there are signs). There’s a story that when Bostonians named Washington Street after our first President, they changed the names of all the streets as they cross Washington Street, to draw attention to the great man. Are those different streets? They are likely different segments, but I think that for someone to know the number of streets in the US requires not an ontological analysis of the nature of street, but rather a purpose-driven one. Who needs to know how many individual streets are in the US? What would they do with that knowledge? Will they count gravel roads? What about new roads, under construction, or roads in the process of being torn up? This weekend of “carmageddeon” closing of 405 in LA, does 405 count as a road?

Only with these questions answered could someone answer the question of “how many streets are there?” People often steam-roller over such issues to get to answers when they need them, and that may be ok, depending on what details are flattened. Me, I’ll stick with “a great many,” since it is accurate enough for all my purposes.

So the takeaway for you? Well, there’s two. First, even with the seemingly most concrete of questions, definitions matter a lot. When someone gives you big numbers and the influence behavior, be sure to understand what they measured and how, and what decisions they made along the way. In information security, a great many people announce seemingly precise and often scary-sounding numbers that, on investigation, mean far different things than they seem to. (Or, more often, far less.)

And second, despite what I wrote above, it’s not the whole country that emerges. It’s the contiguous 48. Again, watch those definitions, especially for what’s not there.

Previously on Emergent Chaos: Steve Coast’s “Map of London” and “Map of Where Tourists Take Pictures.”

I think this is the way of centralized social network software. The best of them learn from their predecessors, but inevitably end up overcrowded. Social spaces change. You don’t hang out at the same bar you hung out with in college, and you won’t use the same social networks. Specialized networks like LinkedIn will likely fare better, as long as they stay focused on a core mission.

Ezra Klein says “killer app of Google+ is the ability to start your social network over w/benefit of years of Facebook experience.” I hate to say it, but that doesn’t strike me as a killer app like Lotus 1-2-3 did.

Phil Windley says “just realized G+ is using asymmetric follow.” I think this is right and important. “Friend” relationships are rarely perfect mirrors of each other, and the software asymmetric follow pattern is closer to the human patterns of friendship, respect and fandom.

I suspect that Google has gone further, and consciously built on those patterns with friend, family, acquaintance. That’s cool, and it’s a obvious outgrowth of Flickr’s default circles of friends and family, and adds making new circles easily.

So what does this mean for you?

First, it’s time to start thinking about leavingFacebook. Get your social network back in email where it belongs. Start trying to get your data out of Facebook’s databases before everything about you sells for pennies on the dollar.

If you’re a product manager for one of these things, you’re building on the happy dopamine releases we all get when we get positive social feedback. (That’s why Facebook only has a “Like” button.) You need to realize that the dopamine-release cycle requires bigger and bigger hits of wuffie over time. And the grimaces and hesitations add up. People remember the negatives for a long time. So the bad graph builds, and over time the happy graph drops away, and with it your eyeballs, minutes, options and stock options.

So finally, enjoy it while you can, Zuck.

This reminds me a lot of Steve Coast’s work on Open Street Map, which I blogged about in “Map of London.” It’s fascinating to watch the implicit maps and the differences emerge from the location data in photos.

Via Data Mining blog and

In my post, I opened discussing how our current system of funding education in the US is to force everything through a government department. That department is constrained by a number of things, including “regulatory” capture by those parents with the time, inclination and skills to engage with the bureaucratic system. It’s also constrained by federal, state and probably municipal laws about what it can teach.

It’s also constrained by an instinctual conservativeness in parents, who think that they turned out ok, and so what worked for them will work for their kids.

But as the Montessori research demonstrates, all of those levels of conservativeness add up to a remarkable degree of sclerosis for the educational system. Now it may be that there’s good reasons to not adopt Montessori ideas for the general schools, just like there may be good reasons to not adopt Khan’s idea’s. But we’ve had a long time to study Montessori, and it seems to produce students who do well in life.

It’s not financial; the methods are old enough that anyone can use them, even if the early writings are probably still copyrighted.

So why aren’t its methods better distributed?

What Khan says about why his cousins prefer him on Youtube rings true. But “rings true” to Adam doesn’t matter here. By deploying the system online, it becomes a testable proposition. That will feed a level of experimentation and improvement that we haven’t seen in education. Before I get to what that all means, one more data point, which is this press release from the Gates Foundation, which covers how they’re spending 7.5 million on games for education.

To bring all of this together, what we’re seeing is recognition of the failure of the “Taylorist” system of education, where we think of education as a mechanistic transfer of information from teacher to student that happens at a constant rate, and the realization that we need systems that handle the amazing diversity of students. To do that, we’re going to need not just experiments followed by reform, but a constant process of experiment and adjustment. If you think the home-schooling movement and the early college movement have transformed school, just wait. Those are like Martin Luther’s theses, and they’re going to kick off layers of transformation. And with that transformation and chaos all sorts of things will emerge. A lot of them are good, but before we get there, there are several risks that we can foresee.

The first is that learning becomes but a set of discrete activities, rather than a lifelong process. That “hierarchy” that Khan discusses is not just a breakdown of learning, it’s inherently an exclusion of something that doesn’t make the chart. For example, research methods for young students will likely be a combination of search engines and critical thinking about web sites, with an ever-diminishing value placed on going to the library. You know, “reflecting the modern world.” Going to the library and really digging for an old book won’t help you stay at the top, and even a great teacher will only be allowed to award a few discretionary points. Another way to think about that is with the addition of game mechanics (the “leaderboard and badges” that Khan discusses) and games for learning that Gates is funding elsewhere, we’ll see a distinct quantization of learning. That the goal is to hit the badge, or top the board. When things become easy to measure, the hard to measure gets ignored.

Another risk is what will happen when teachers can see every moment of goofing off? Will that be used to drive diagnoses of ADHD even higher for normal boys? Will “not living up to potential” be a new and ‘data-driven’ part of the report card?

Yet another risky area is privacy and commercialization. Will digitization lead to marketing of new tutoring systems? Will report cards and transcripts convert from an A-F summary to a computer-readable XML-encapsulated explanation of every problem set that little Robert and Jane have been through? (And note that that the process of making the transcript computer-readable will further drive out non-standardized activities. If there’s no code for “went to the rare book room,” there’s no credit for it, and if there’s no credit for it, why bother in today’s hyper-competitive world of college admissions?)

Interestingly, one of the few broad privacy laws in the US, the COPPA protects those under 13 to some extent, but I don’t think it considers educators as much as commercial web sites, and when Harvard demands the XML file, well, you can opt-in to their admissions process or not.

So even recognizing those risks, we’ll likely get an educational system that will stay with students who are having trouble without holding back those who want to move faster. We’ll learn to give students skills and approaches faster and faster. We’ll have to figure out now to ensure students learn cooperation, project management and other harder to quantify sorts of things. But I do think that we can give kids more skills and knowledge faster and better than we do today. If we do that, the world will have more smarter people than ever before, and even more interesting chaos will emerge.

I suspect there’s other things that will predictably go wrong, and other outcomes that I’m not seeing. What do you think?

Via Investors.com