Notes from the session titled:
I just don’t trust you: how the Tech Community can reinvent risk ratings.
by: Toby Segaran (Metaweb), Jesper Andersen (Open Data Group)
There are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion. There’s the US and there’s moodyu’s bond rating service… And believe me; it’s not clear sometimes who’s more powerful. – Thomas Friedman 1996
Credit agencies are broken safety net.
Our economy is fueled by debt. Moody is the gatekeeper to that debt. Credit risk measures trust. People are good at fufiling their obligations.
Our system promotes gaming.
4 most important problems facing. Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch provide ratings. You pay to get ratings. Companies will pay to get the best rating. This is a lot like bribery. But it is pricing.
Our Risk Rating System has a patent without the disclosure. They have no incentive to say who’s method is better. They just want us to trust their ratings. What does AAA rating really mean? It doesn’t really tell you what risk factors are involved.
After Lehman declared bankruptcy Moody’s downgraded them from AAA to C. This is not good. We need transparency. We need to know the method. We need full disclosure of how companies get ratings.
Lack of Ecosystems create bad ratings. Risks are hidden. Good predictions are ignored because our system rewards the ignorance of problems until it is too late.
Beverly McClean. Celbrated after the fact. She wrote for Newsweek for 6 months at the rating agency took notice. John Paulsen: He made the single biggest Hedge fund return in 2007. He figured out that the ratings on CDS was wrong. We have incentives for secrecy.
Single Sourced Information Creates Bad Ratings.
$45 Trillion problem. It has to be solved now! A lot of dangerous problems. A lot of big problems. Engineers don’t have problems, they have requirements.
FRS: Rating creation needs to be accessible, open, diverse, and transparent.
Ratings should be a commons. Risk management is way too important to be a competitive advantage for a company.
Freerisk is an… Authoritative Data Source, User Contributed Data Source, Set of Contributed Algorithms, Testing Frameworks.
Open Data: Consume data that’s on the web and publish it for others to use.
Becoming a nationally recognized statistical rating organization requires national recognition. We don’t need cash, we need passionate people.
http://freerisk.org/
March 10, 2009
Low-cost & Low-power computing - Mary Lou Jepsen from Pixel Qi
97% of adolescents alive today live in the developing world. What are we doing to serve them? If you want to change the world we need to figure out a way to give them a chance. Get the cost of computing and access to computing down. OLPC – thought to be impossible (Jobs, Gates, Dell). 1 Million children across the developing world have laptops as a result of OLPC. Who cares what CPU is inside of it, we just need a low cost, low-power machine with decent battery life.
Innovation: High-end, Hight-Tech Research at the top of the pyramid.
OLPC/Pixel Qi: Innovation at the bottom of the pyramid. If you can pull it off you can increase the base of the pyramid. Sort of like trickle down economics is high end innovation. Work at the bottom of the pyramid to help the bottom of the pyramid.
Low power is the real key. ½ the world lives without steady access to electricity. How to design something that can be human powered. 1-watt laptop (10x lower than next laptop up). Redesigning the screen. Why not just self-refresh the screen? Why is the CPU/Mobo/fan on in every computer in the room. Until you get a keyboard event or internet packet. Screen and audio are our interaction point. Human computer interaction.
OLPC is greenest laptop ever made (Someone tell Apple). Keys for designing efficiency are things you would do naturally for the developing world. Make it user serviceable. All screens should not be HDTV quality. Keys for portables – low power, sunlight readability, high res for reading, paper white. You don’t want to stare into a flashlight.
3Qi screen. 3 displays in 1. Full color LCD TV mode. Low –power, highlight color, sunlight readable transflective mode. Very low power, paper-white, sunlight readable, reflective e-paper mode. This is beyond the XO screen. Fully saturated color option. Reflectivity is key.
People want TV even if they don’t have power to sustain it.
The CPU wars are over; it’s the screen wars now. iPhone is basically a screen. That is where the future of hardware.
Innovation: High-end, Hight-Tech Research at the top of the pyramid.
OLPC/Pixel Qi: Innovation at the bottom of the pyramid. If you can pull it off you can increase the base of the pyramid. Sort of like trickle down economics is high end innovation. Work at the bottom of the pyramid to help the bottom of the pyramid.
Low power is the real key. ½ the world lives without steady access to electricity. How to design something that can be human powered. 1-watt laptop (10x lower than next laptop up). Redesigning the screen. Why not just self-refresh the screen? Why is the CPU/Mobo/fan on in every computer in the room. Until you get a keyboard event or internet packet. Screen and audio are our interaction point. Human computer interaction.
OLPC is greenest laptop ever made (Someone tell Apple). Keys for designing efficiency are things you would do naturally for the developing world. Make it user serviceable. All screens should not be HDTV quality. Keys for portables – low power, sunlight readability, high res for reading, paper white. You don’t want to stare into a flashlight.
3Qi screen. 3 displays in 1. Full color LCD TV mode. Low –power, highlight color, sunlight readable transflective mode. Very low power, paper-white, sunlight readable, reflective e-paper mode. This is beyond the XO screen. Fully saturated color option. Reflectivity is key.
People want TV even if they don’t have power to sustain it.
The CPU wars are over; it’s the screen wars now. iPhone is basically a screen. That is where the future of hardware.
WITNESS: Capturing Crises – Sameer Padania (NOTES)
Technology now is more fitting for documenting crises as they emerge. Technology is much more affordable and portable now than it was. Sousveillance vs. surveillance. Building new social media communities for activism is not necessarily the best ways forward. Govt. of Burma used activist videos to track down and imprison hundreds of activists. There is power in stories. It is important to train individuals in developing countries and beyond how to best use social media tools to report on unfolding crises. The Hub
Etech 2009
I am at Etech 2009 in San Jose, California. I plan to post some raw notes from sessions here. Potentially I will tighten them up later.
Notes from Alex Steffen's talk
The following notes are from Alex Steffen's Keynote at ETech 2009. These are raw notes just dumped here. I hope to edit and create a polished post soon.
Alex Steffen from World Changing took the stage for this morning's keynote. Here are my notes from this event:
World Changing – Bright Green: A world changing guide to a future that works. (delivering prosperity to more people)
There are many young people in the developing world. ¼ people in the world are under the age of 18.
Most people who will be alive in 2050 will be living in what is currently thought of as the developing world. In places where prosperity has been kluged together
We got rich by using resources to build the stuff that (a lot of our wealth is societal wealth) most of the problems (environmental have been the result of
We have built our wealth on the problems our children will face. Massive inter generational ponzi scheme.
We are the brittle rich. Many of the things we have built our prosperity on are dependent on the developing world supporting our over-consumption.
The dirty secret is that the American prosperous are demonstrably less happy than people who were here 20,30,50 years ago. Wealth is not serving us well. We are utterly depended on the rest of the world doing the right thing for us to do anything. If we sail ahead we will destroy the planet. We need the world to agree to make changes. World divided into 2 groups “poor and frugal” and “rich and wasteful. “ We need to bring people into sustainability. We need to think of a lifestyle that returns value to the planet. Ecological handprint versus ecological footprint.
We need low carbon clean energy. We need more sustainable food (Local, sun-food, traceability) We need to get off coal... and cows.
Root cause is that we don’t understand our prosperity. It is hidden. We need political transparency. From the people and from the government. FUH2 pictures of people flipping off hummers. Transparency is also holding one another accountable.
Revealed useage: That which is measured and shown is used differently. When you know the backstory, people chose the better thing. Tell good backstories!
Smart – Connect things and people and information flows. A lot of our impact comes from stupid waste. Having to have a lot more things than you need. Wasting energy due to lack of attention.
True costs taxation – Price on CO2. In the next few years. The more carbon costs, the more things start to make sense.
Smart Infrastructure – smart grids to allow detailed control of energy. Allow us to have a more finely grained understandable read out of energy used. Bringing an energy meter into the house reduces energy use by 10%. Just seeing it makes you use less energy. When you see it, you can demand responsive energy. Level out the amount of energy people use through the day. Distributed energy, home energy systems.
Finance for transformation – PG&E sell energy services and not just supply. – Location efficient mortgages, (if you live in a place where transportation is efficient you should pay less on your home). pay as you go – car insurance. Bundle car insurance into mileage and/or gas prices.
Compact – create more dense communities and design them better. When you put people close together you dematerialize things. Shared infrastructure – costs less per person.
10 units per acre would put most Americans within transit supportive density. Affordability is out on the fringe. When you factor in cost of driving (direct cost) to the cost of living, suburban fringe is actually more expensive.
The biggest shift will be smarter buildings. Sunlight for passive heating, breezes for cooling. We are capable of building buildings without thermostats, but we don’t do it. We treat water that hits our roofs as pollution. Big storm means water mixes with waste and gets dumped to sea. That is crazy! We need to harvest rainwater.
Lunar-resonant streetlights.
Preserve natural capital. We are utterly reliant on ecosystem services to support our civilization. We are losing 2-5 trillion dollars in ecosystem services. Climate change is ony 30% of that. We need to think of flows and not stocks.
Nobody realized how depended on bees we were until they went away due to Hive Collapse Disorder. Having to pollinate by hand is pretty expensive. We need bees.
Water needs for Seattle and Portland. Water supply problems are based on lack of beavers.
Topsoil is important.
Shared goods, building lasting quality. Not owning a car takes ecological impact away. Closed loops and zero waste.
Real happiness and knowing what makes us happy is the key. Flying private home theaters.
We need to share innovation across borders. We are all in this together. What is not right
We need a sense of obligation beyond ourselves. If our triumphs are only our own they will turn to dust in our hands.
Alex Steffen from World Changing took the stage for this morning's keynote. Here are my notes from this event:
World Changing – Bright Green: A world changing guide to a future that works. (delivering prosperity to more people)
There are many young people in the developing world. ¼ people in the world are under the age of 18.
Most people who will be alive in 2050 will be living in what is currently thought of as the developing world. In places where prosperity has been kluged together
We got rich by using resources to build the stuff that (a lot of our wealth is societal wealth) most of the problems (environmental have been the result of
We have built our wealth on the problems our children will face. Massive inter generational ponzi scheme.
We are the brittle rich. Many of the things we have built our prosperity on are dependent on the developing world supporting our over-consumption.
The dirty secret is that the American prosperous are demonstrably less happy than people who were here 20,30,50 years ago. Wealth is not serving us well. We are utterly depended on the rest of the world doing the right thing for us to do anything. If we sail ahead we will destroy the planet. We need the world to agree to make changes. World divided into 2 groups “poor and frugal” and “rich and wasteful. “ We need to bring people into sustainability. We need to think of a lifestyle that returns value to the planet. Ecological handprint versus ecological footprint.
We need low carbon clean energy. We need more sustainable food (Local, sun-food, traceability) We need to get off coal... and cows.
Root cause is that we don’t understand our prosperity. It is hidden. We need political transparency. From the people and from the government. FUH2 pictures of people flipping off hummers. Transparency is also holding one another accountable.
Revealed useage: That which is measured and shown is used differently. When you know the backstory, people chose the better thing. Tell good backstories!
Smart – Connect things and people and information flows. A lot of our impact comes from stupid waste. Having to have a lot more things than you need. Wasting energy due to lack of attention.
True costs taxation – Price on CO2. In the next few years. The more carbon costs, the more things start to make sense.
Smart Infrastructure – smart grids to allow detailed control of energy. Allow us to have a more finely grained understandable read out of energy used. Bringing an energy meter into the house reduces energy use by 10%. Just seeing it makes you use less energy. When you see it, you can demand responsive energy. Level out the amount of energy people use through the day. Distributed energy, home energy systems.
Finance for transformation – PG&E sell energy services and not just supply. – Location efficient mortgages, (if you live in a place where transportation is efficient you should pay less on your home). pay as you go – car insurance. Bundle car insurance into mileage and/or gas prices.
Compact – create more dense communities and design them better. When you put people close together you dematerialize things. Shared infrastructure – costs less per person.
10 units per acre would put most Americans within transit supportive density. Affordability is out on the fringe. When you factor in cost of driving (direct cost) to the cost of living, suburban fringe is actually more expensive.
The biggest shift will be smarter buildings. Sunlight for passive heating, breezes for cooling. We are capable of building buildings without thermostats, but we don’t do it. We treat water that hits our roofs as pollution. Big storm means water mixes with waste and gets dumped to sea. That is crazy! We need to harvest rainwater.
Lunar-resonant streetlights.
Preserve natural capital. We are utterly reliant on ecosystem services to support our civilization. We are losing 2-5 trillion dollars in ecosystem services. Climate change is ony 30% of that. We need to think of flows and not stocks.
Nobody realized how depended on bees we were until they went away due to Hive Collapse Disorder. Having to pollinate by hand is pretty expensive. We need bees.
Water needs for Seattle and Portland. Water supply problems are based on lack of beavers.
Topsoil is important.
Shared goods, building lasting quality. Not owning a car takes ecological impact away. Closed loops and zero waste.
Real happiness and knowing what makes us happy is the key. Flying private home theaters.
We need to share innovation across borders. We are all in this together. What is not right
We need a sense of obligation beyond ourselves. If our triumphs are only our own they will turn to dust in our hands.
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