The market price called hormone

Read another book during the holidays - "The Truth about Hormones" by Vivienne Parry. The basic point was that the body has two ways to communicate internally, either quickly via the nervous system or more slowly distributing chemicals via the blood.

The book described in great length the interaction of the glands and the different substances released but failed in my opinion to give a fundamental explanation to the different ways of communications and to the fact that why totally different levels of hormones are needed for "normal" people to keep the bodily functions in balance.

Maybe the answer is evident. The nerves do not reach all cells, while the circulatory system does and that would also explain why hormones are involved in large scale developments in the body - growth, starvation/times of plenty, internal clock synchronization to daytime, sexual maturity and decline, menstruating cycles etc. The hormone levels in the circulatory system would be the new "market prices" to which all cells have to adapt one way or the other. These things would be very difficult to coordinate like a centrally planned economy giving orders to each cell. The radically different levels of hormones of different people considered healthy would then just be the "market" level managing to strike the balance in that individual and since all individuals are - individuals - with different nutrition and circumstances then there is no reason why everybody's "markets" would be the same.

The odd man out is adrenaline, which also messes with the nervous system allowing the synapses to let through more stuff.

Scarcity challenged

Just finished a book "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. I read it with mixed feelings.

See, the whole reason for my pseudonym is my firm belief in the market mechanism to solve allocation problems via the communication of a price (with a spice of game theory and externalities) and Tim has put it so elegantly and concisely in his book. It is exactly how I would have liked to put it and how I have been arguing the issue over the years. Read the book, not my blogs!

I see this mechanism as one of the most fundamental laws of nature, well demonstrated in traditionally non-economical fields as biology and evolution as well as in information theory. The world revolves around creating scarcity and fighting scarcity. All seemingly other conflicts are just dressed up differently.

The selfish meme - victory over chemistry

The Jokela incident would indicate that Susan Blackmore is on to something in her book "The Meme Machine".

According to her, since we can imitate, humans are conduits for memes. However, analog to Richard Dawkins, who wrote "The Selfish Gene", she claims that the memes are selfish and care for nothing else than their own propagation. Genes in this respect would be a subset of memes, a subset that are chemically encoded in DNA and not by the linking of synapses.

It would not be possible to explain any premature ending of your days by evolution especially when there is no genetic offspring involved that could benefit from leaving early. Memetically it is possible. The idea will live on for what it is worth even if the genes of the individual lost out.

Jokela, Finland

A few days ago the world had the bad fortune of having to experience another high-school shoot-out, this time in Jokela Finland.

A few questions immediately come to mind:

1) Why does somebody do this?
2) Is there a trend? If yes, what is it?

The piece of the puzzle that does not fit is the the innocent by-stander. I can somehow understand the mechanism of hate crimes. You hate somebody so much that you want to see that person dead even at the price of your own life. But the targets in the school shoot-outs were not singled out individuals but rather individuals who happened to be in range. The school, however, was singled out and potentially some teacher or headmaster.

Throughout history some people have chosen to end their days prematurely. Plain suicides occur. All sorts of anarchists, martyrs and radicals have been fighting for their causes against their perceived enemies with their life at stake. What is new in the high-school shoot-outs? Columbine and Jokela were advertised in advance. Does it mean that there is a cause worth dying for? If so, I can not think of any other that Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame even if the person would not live to see it. Maybe that is the trend. If this is the trend, take the YouTube trailers seriously.

The attention economy, attention to the economy!

Recently I listened to a lecture on a current phenomenon labeled "the attention economy". The idea basically is that anything linking a (person) profile to some content is valuable. It does not matter how trivial the linkage is when these bits and pieces are amassed by the million.

Some good examples of this are Second Life, social bookmarking applications, any Facebook application and for instance microblogging linked to geography.

Obviously this information is collected for commercial purposes mainly for more targeted advertisements.

As long as the profiles are all anonymous then the attention has an equal value. When the person is identified the value goes up (especially if you happen to be somebody). I wonder what this will do to privacy since the temptation to use the person instead of the profile will be stronger as more bang would be got out of the buck. The economy of the attention economy may have a really bad effect on privacy.

Learning to write

My son is learning to write. It must be a fascinating experience to fix some thoughts on paper for the first time.

I noticed that the output is a long string of characters - mostly consonants, sporadically vowels and no spacing between words. Is it so that he intuitively uses the signs that carry most information value first? Is this how the brain works?

The Clash of Civilizations - the meme wars

Read an interesting book, The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P Huntington. He makes a powerful case for a new world order based on culture and claims that the world looks much more like the worlds when I play Sid Meier's Civilizations than anything resembling the old cold war division. According to him it is most useful for policy purposes to see the world as composed of 5-7 civilizations that play their own game and shifting allegiances whenever suitable without a stable friends & foes division.

He mentions specifically that the most dangerous clashes will come from Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance and Sinic assertiveness. He is probably right about that. These three cultures have all long history and are all convinced of the "correct way of life" both on an individual and on an institutional level.

It seems that the strongest memes are cultures.

Which memes survive?

Continuing the previous post this is my best guess to answer which memes disintegrate and which not.

In telecommunications there are two main ways to get a message through intact via a noisy channel, redundancy or checksum/error correction.

The same would apply to memes so one way would be to keep the message short (minimize the possible mutations) and repeat it often. The other method would be to build in some error correction into the message, for instance in forms of rhymes and verse to minimize the possible mutations that still would fit the schema and that still would make sense.

During the time when oral tradition was the only way to carry stories forward, most (if not all) stories that have survived to this day use a strict form of verse as a method of error correction. The other stories disintegrated.

Memes and networks

Memes, the information equivalent of genes, are either successful or not so successful depending on how well they replicate in a network.

Is a weak meme finding the central nodes more efficient in spreading than strong memes finding the peripheral ones?

Which memes disintegrate into Chinese Whispers and which stay intact? What are the characteristics of a successful meme?

Possible applications:
Computer viruses
Viral marketing
Fashion
Reputation in social networking
Political messages
Word of mouth

The intangible asset of the firm

Isn't so that the innovation value of the company is directly correlated to the number of links, not the number of nodes?

Nodes and links

The web = nodes and links
Google = nodes and links
MySpace = nodes and links
LinkedIn = nodes and links
Facebook = nodes and links
Your work organization = nodes and links
Your offline life = nodes and links
The map = nodes and links
Your project plan = nodes and links
Your brain = nodes and links

What is not nodes and links?
Are the nodes different? Are the links different?

Should your brain cells avoid bad neighbourhoods to get top rankings?

Stone, scissors, paper all over the place

Saw an amazing presentation today by an experienced hacker. Internet has become an ecosystem where evolution is happening at a breakneck pace. For every solution there is a crack, for every crack there is a solution and on it goes ad infinitum. For every intended use of any solution there are several unintended - helpful, harmless or harmful.

This in itself is not new. What is new is that so many persons multitask at it - soon a significant percentage of the human brainpower.

When will the attraction of brainpower stop? Maybe it goes in the same direction as stock exchanges, at some point in time there is really very little arbitrage to be made except by automatic microsecond decisions so humans lose interest. On the other hand, human interactions form a complex marketplace of different individual desires so maybe there is no end.

Time to get started

Wow, the new found power to blast opinions without scrutiny by anybody else. I wonder whether this is why blogs are so popular. Does anybody else than immediate peers read them (who were told to)?

I guess you either tackle topics that are immediate and personal or general and philosophical. The rest has no relevance to anybody - unless you are fishing for in-links to your web site.

Not much of an initial post, but it will have to do.