Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Happy Independence Day!

Since 2005, this blog has had a holiday tradition of posting “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Never in our wildest, most chaotic dreams, did we imagine that the British would one day quote these opening words: When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to […]

 

The Evolution of Secure Things

One of the most interesting security books I’ve read in a while barely mentions computers or security. The book is Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things. As the subtitle explains, the book discusses “How Everyday Artifacts – From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers – Came to be as They are.” The chapter […]

 

The Unexpected Meanings of Facebook Privacy Disclaimers

Paul Gowder has an interesting post over at Prawfblog, “In Defense of Facebook Copyright Disclaimer Status Updates (!!!).” He presents the facts: …People then decide that, hey, goose, gander, if Facebook can unilaterally change the terms of our agreement by presenting new ones where, theoretically, a user might see them, then a user can unilaterally […]

 

The Future Is So Cool

When you were growing up, 2014 was the future. And it’s become cliche to bemoan that we don’t have the flying cars we were promised, but did get early delivery on a dystopian surveillance state. So living here in the future, I just wanted to point out how cool it is that you can detect […]

 

L'Academie Gawker

Via Poynter, we learn that the word “massive” has been banned on Gawker. We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not Buzzfeed writers or Reddit commenters,” new Gawker Editor Max Read says in a memo to the publication’s writers. Words like “epic,” “pwn” and “derp” are no longer welcome on the site. Read […]

 

Like the birds…

Emergent Chaos has migrated.  It’s a long story, and perhaps better left untold.  Please let us know if you see issues with the new site.

 

3D-printed guns and the crypto wars

So there’s a working set of plans for the “Liberator.” It’s a working firearm you can print on a 3d printer. You can no longer get the files from the authors, whose site states: “DEFCAD files are being removed from public access at the request of the US Department of Defense Trade Controls. Until further […]

 

Gamifying Driving

…the new points system rates the driver’s ability to pilot the MINI with a sporty yet steady hand. Praise is given to particularly sprightly sprints, precise gear changes, controlled braking, smooth cornering and U-turns executed at well-judged speeds. For example, the system awards maximum Experience Points for upshifts carried out within the ideal rev range […]

 

Can Science Improvise?

My friend Raquell Holmes is doing some really interesting work at using improv to unlock creativity. There’s some really interesting ties between the use of games and the use of improv to get people to approach problems in a new light, and I’m bummed that I won’t be able to make this event: Monday Dec […]

 

Regulations and Their Emergent Effects

There’s a fascinating story in the New York Times, “Profits on Carbon Credits Drive Output of a Harmful Gas“: [W]here the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity. They quickly figured out that they could earn one carbon credit by eliminating one ton […]

 

Washington State Frees Liquor Sales: some quick thoughts

I hate to let an increase in liberty go by without a little celebration. For the past 78 years, Washington State has had a set of (effectively) state-operated liquor stores, with identical pricing and inventory. Today, that system is gone, replaced by private liquor sales. The law was overturned by a ballot initiative, heavily backed […]

 

Please Kickstart Elevation of Privilege

Jan-Tilo Kirchhoff asked on Twitter for a printer (ideally in Germany) to print up some Elevation of Privilege card sets. Deb Richardson then suggested Kickstarter. I wanted to comment, but this doesn’t fit in a tweet, so I’ll do it here. I would be totally excited for someone to Kickstarter production of Elevation of Privilege. […]

 
 

Kind of Copyrighted

This Week in Law is a fascinating podcast on technology law issues, although I’m way behind on listening. Recently, I was listening to Episode #124, and they had a discussion of Kind of Bloop, “An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.” There was a lawsuit against artist Andy Baio, which he discusses in […]

 

The Pre-K underground?

Not my headline, but the New York Times: 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 […]

 

Slow Thoughts on Occupy Seattle

I headed down to Occupy Seattle before a recent vacation, and have been mulling a bit on what I saw, because the lack of a coherent message or leadership or press make it easy to project our own opinions or simply mis-understand what the “Occupy” protests mean, and I wanted to avoid making that mistake. […]

 

Twitter updates

I’ve decided to experiment with pushing my Twitter feed onto the blog. What do you think? 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 […]

 

Emergent Effects of Restrictions on Teenage Drivers

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 […]

 

Emergent Map: Streets of the US

This is really cool. All Streets is a map of the United States made of nothing but roads. A surprisingly accurate map of the country emerges from the chaos of our roads: All Streets consists of 240 million individual road segments. No other features — no outlines, cities, or types of terrain — are marked, […]

 

MySpace sells for $35 Million, Facebook to follow

So MySpace sold for $35 million, which is nice for a startup, and pretty poor for a company on which Rupert Murdoch spent a billion dollars. 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 […]

 

Map of Where Tourists Take Pictures

Eric Fischer is doing work on comparing locals and tourists and where they photograph based on big Flickr data. It’s fascinating to try to identify cities from the thumbnails in his “Locals and Tourists” set. (I admit, I got very few right, either from “one at a time” or by looking for cities I know.) […]

 

The Future of Education is Chaotic, Fun and Unevenly Distributed

After I wrote “The future of education is chaotic and fun“, I came across “The Montessori Mafia” about the unusual levels of successfulness that Montessori produces. 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 […]

 

The future of education is chaotic and fun

Lately, I’ve seen three interesting bits on the future of education, and I wanted to share some thoughts on what they mean. The first is a quickie by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, titled “Grocery School.” It starts “Suppose that we were supplied with groceries in same way that we are supplied with K-12 education.” […]

 
 

Microsoft Backs Laws Forbidding Windows Use By Foreigners

According to Groklaw, Microsoft is backing laws that forbid the use of Windows outside of the US. Groklaw doesn’t say that directly. Actually, they pose charmingly with the back of the hand to the forehead, bending backwards dramatically and asking, “ Why Is Microsoft Seeking New State Laws That Allow it to Sue Competitors For […]

 

What should a printer print?

Over at their blog, i.Materialise (a 3D printing shop) brags about not taking an order. The post is “ATTENTION: ATM skimming device.” It opens: There is no doubt that 3D printing is a versatile tool for materializing your 3D ideas. Unfortunately, those who wish to break the law can also try to use our technology. […]

 

Egypt and Information Security

Yesterday, I said on Twitter that “If you work in information security, what’s happening in Egypt is a trove of metaphors and lessons for your work. Please pay attention.” My goal is not to say that what’s happening in Egypt is about information security, but rather to say that we can be both professional and […]

 

Unmeddling Housing

For a great many years, US taxpayers have been able to deduct interest paid on a home mortgage from their taxes. That made owning property cost roughly 20% less than it otherwise would have (estimating a 25% tax rate on interest on 80% of a property). So everyone could afford 20% “more” house, which meant […]

 

Emergent Chaos has TSA "trolls," too

Over at We Won’t Fly, George Donnelly writes: I was about to delete an offensive comment on this blog – one of the very few we get – and thought, hmm, I wonder where this guy is posting from? Because, really, it is quite unusual for us to get nasty comments. Lo and behold, the […]

 

The Emergent Chaos of Facebook relationships

This is a fascinating visualization of 10MM Facebook Friends™ as described in Visualizing Friendships by Paul Butler. A couple of things jump out at me in this emergent look at geography. The first is that Canada is a figment of our imaginations. Sorry to my Canadian friends (at least the anglophones!) The second is that […]

 

Animals and Engineers

It’s been hard to miss the story on cat tongues (“For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue:)” Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces. …After calculating things […]

 

Turning off the lights: Chaos Emerges.

See what happened when Portishead, England turned off their traffic lights in September 2009 in this video. And don’t miss “Portishead traffic lights set to stay out after trial” in the Bristol Evening Post.

 

Collective Smarts: Diversity Emerges

Researchers in the United States have found that putting individual geniuses together into a team doesn’t add up to one intelligent whole. Instead, they found, group intelligence is linked to social skills, taking turns, and the proportion of women in the group. […] “We didn’t expect that the proportion of women would be a significant […]

 

Money is information coined

In the general case, you are not anonymous on the interweb, but economically-anonymous, which I propose to label “enonymous”, and that’s not the same thing at all. If you threaten to kill the President, you will be tracked down, and the state will spend the money it takes on it. But if you call Lily […]

 

AT&T, Voice Encryption and Trust

Yesterday, AT&T announced an Encrypted Mobile Voice. As CNet summarizes: AT&T is using One Vault Voice to provide users with an application to control their security. The app integrates into a device’s address book and “standard operation” to give users the option to encrypt any call. AT&T said that when encryption is used, the call […]

 

The Next Unexpected Failure of Government

In looking at Frank Pasquale’s very interesting blog post “Secrecy & the Spill,” a phrase jumped out at me: I have tried to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt during the Gulf/BP oil disaster. There was a “grand ole party” at Interior for at least eight years. Many Republicans in Congress would […]

 

Redesign BP's Logo

I like this one a lot. Go vote for your favorite at BP Logo Redesign contest.

 

Life

Today will be remembered along with the landing on the moon and the creation of the internet: Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization, published results today describing the successful construction of the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. The team synthesized the 1.08 million base pair chromosome of a […]

 

Because Money Is Liberty Coined

I really love these redesigns of the US Dollar: There’s a contest, and I like these designs by Michael Tyznik the most. On a graphical level, they look like money. He’s integrated micro-printing, aligned printing (that $5 in the upper left corner, it’s really hard to print so it works when you look at light) […]

 

It's Hard to Nudge

There’s a notion that government can ‘nudge’ people to do the right thing. Big examples include letting people opt-out of organ donorship, rather than opting in (rates of organ donorship go from 10-20% to 80-90%, which is pretty clearly a better thing than putting those organs in the ground or crematoria). Another classic example was […]

 

Some Chaotic Thoughts on Healthcare

Passage of this bill is too big for my little brain, and therefore I’ll share some small comments. I’m going to leave out the many anecdotes which orient me around stupid red tape conflicts in the US, how much better my health care was in Canada (and how some Canadian friends flew to the US […]

 

How to Make Your Dating Site Attractive

There’s a huge profusion of dating sites out there. From those focused on casual encounters to christian marriage, there’s a site for that. So from a product management and privacy perspectives I found this article very thought provoking: Bookioo does not give men any way to learn about or contact the female members of the […]

 

Emergent Planetary Detection via Gravitational Lensing

The CBC Quirks and Quarks podcast on “The 10% Solar System Solution” is a really interesting 9 minutes with Scott Gaudi on how to find small planets far away: We have to rely on nature to give us the microlensing events. That means we can’t actually pick and choose which stars to look at, and […]

 

Another Week, Another GSM Cipher Bites the Dust

Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir have released a paper showing that they’ve broken KASUMI, the cipher used in encrypting 3G GSM communications. KASUMI is also known as A5/3, which is confusing because it’s only been a week since breaks on A5/1, a completely different cipher, were publicized. So if you’re wondering if this […]

 

The Spectacle of Street View

Street with a View is an art project in Google Street View, with a variety of scenes enacted for the camera, either to be discovered in Street View, or discovered via the project web site. via David Fraser.

 

Comment Spam

We’ve been flooded with comment spam. I’ve added one of those annoying captcha things that don’t work, and a mandatory comment confirmation page. Please let me know if you have trouble. Blogname @ gmail.com, or adam @ blogname.com I think comments are working, but most won’t show up immediately. I’m digging into more effective solutions.

 

To the amazing chaos of the 2010s

I expect that there will be senseless acts of violence, planes destroyed and perhaps a city attacked with effective biological weapons. There will be crazy people with more power than we want to comprehend. There will be a billion malnourished, undereducated folks whose lives don’t improve. The first world will continue to be saddled with […]

 
 

St. Cajetan's Revenge

For some time, I’ve watched the War on Bottled Water with amusement. I don’t disagree with figuring out how to reduce waste, and so on and so forth, but the railing against bottled water per se struck me as not thought out very well. The major reason for my thinking is that I never heard […]

 

We've made piracy a community activity.

From BoingBoing: Somali nautical pirates have established a stock-market where guns and cash are invested in upcoming hijackings, with shares of the proceeds returned to investors Emergent Chaos strikes again…

 

Vista Didn't Fail Because of Security

Bruce Schneier points in his blog to an article in The Telegraph in which Steve Ballmer blames the failure of Vista on security. Every security person around should clear their throat loudly. Security is not what made Vista unpalatable. Many people liked Vista. My tech reporter friends not only adored it, but flat couldn’t understand […]

 

Caster Semenya, Alan Turing and "ID Management" products

South African runner Caster Semenya won the womens 800-meter, and the attention raised questions about her gender. Most of us tend to think of gender as pretty simple. You’re male or you’re female, and that’s all there is to it. The issue is black and white, if you’ll excuse the irony. There are reports that: […]

 

Rebuilding the internet?

Once apon a time, I was uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam. Oh, harvard was probably enough, it was a pretty well known host in the uucp network which carried our email before snmp. I was also harvard!bwnmr4!postmaster which meant that at the end of an era, I moved the lab from copied hosts files to dns, when I became […]

 
 

Renaming the Blog to Emergent Chaos (II)

A little more seriously, the identity of a blog is constructed between the authors, commenters and readers, and I’m continually amazed by what emerges here. At the same time, what’s emerging is currently not very chaotic, and I’m wondering if it’s time for some mixing it up. Suggestions welcome.

 

Entering Our Prime

Today is amazingly enough the fifth anniversary of Adam starting this blog. It’s amazing how fast time flies when things are chaotic. Seems like just yesterday Adam was doing the initial Star Wars posts. Appropriately enough the most recent in the category was just this past Saturday. Thank you to all of our readers for […]

 

For epistemological anarchism

So Dave Mortman and Alex Hutton have a talk submitted to Security BSides entitled “Challenging the Epistemological Anarchist to Escape our Dark Age.” Now, it would certainly be nice if we could all use the same words to mean the same things. It would make communication so much easier! It would let us build the […]

 

Color on Chrome OS

New things resemble old things at first. Moreover, people interpret new things in terms of old things. Such it is with the new Google Chrome OS. Very little I’ve seen on it seems to understand it. The main stream of commentary is comparisons to Windows and how this means that Google is in the OS […]

 

Emergent Traffic Chaos

Paul Kedrosky has an amazing video: As described in the New Scientist: Researchers from several Japanese universities managed the feat by putting 22 vehicles on a 230-metre single-lane circuit (see video). They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in […]

 

Amusements with Alpha

I just saw a link to someone who had broken Wolfram Alpha. Their breaking question was, “when is 5 trillion days from now?” The broken result is: {DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},Hour12Short],:,DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},Minute],:,DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},Second], ,DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},AMPMLowerCase]} | {DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},DayName],, ,DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},MonthName], ,DateString[{13689537044,5,13,16,57,18.5796},DayShort],, ,13689537044} Which is certainly amusing. A quick check shows that even one trillion days gives a similar error. A bit of the […]

 

Democracy, Gunpowder, Literacy and Privacy

In an important sense, privacy is a modern invention. Medieval people had no concept of privacy. They also had no actual privacy. Nobody was ever alone. No ordinary person had private space. Houses were tiny and crowded. Everyone was embedded in a face-to-face community. Privacy, as idea and reality, is the creation of a modern […]

 

Mermaids!

Effects shop fulfills amputee’s mermaid dream:

 

I Know What I Know

and I’ll sing what he said. Ethan Zuckerman has two great posts lately: “From protest to collaboration: Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and lessons for xenophiles” and “Argentine economics and maker culture.” The Paul Simon post talks about the deep history of the Apartheid boycott, Paul Simon’s approach to creating Graceland. Graceland was a collaboration of the […]

 

The Emergent Chaos of Kutiman

So when someone sent me a link to “The Mother of all Funk Chords,” they didn’t explain it, and I didn’t quite get what I was watching. What I was watching: …is a mash up of videos found on YouTube, turned into an entire album by an Israeli artist, Kutiman.

 

Welcome To The (New) Machine

If you can read this, you are now reading Emergent Chaos on its new server. We’ve also upgraded to the 4.x train of MovableType. Let us know what you think. We’re also considering a site redesign, so let us know any feature requests or design suggestions. Thanks!

 

Closing the Collapse Gap

There’s a very interesting annotated presentation at “Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US.” In it, Dmitry Orlov lays out his comparison between the USSR and the USA of 2006. Posting this now because a talk he gave at Long Now is getting lots of attention. In closely […]

 

Let’s Fix Paste!

Okay, this is a rant. Cut and paste is broken in most apps today. More specifically, it is paste that is broken. There are two choices in just about every application: “Paste” and “Paste correctly.” Sometimes the latter one is labeled “Paste and Match Style” (Apple) and sometimes “Paste Special” (Microsoft). However, they have it […]

 

Will Proof-of-Work Die a Green Death?

In the Cryptography mailing list, John Gilmore recently brought up and interesting point. One of the oft-debated ways to fight spam is to put a form of proof-of-work postage on it. Spam is an emergent property of the very low cost of email combined with the effect that most of the cost is pushed to […]

 

Photosynth and the inauguration

So what do you do with the million photos everyone took of the inauguration? Here at Emergent Chaos, we believe that we should throw them all in a massive blender, and see what emerges. A massive blender isn’t a very technical description of Photosynth, but it’s not a bad analogy. The project cleverly figures out […]

 

Abuse of the Canadian Do Not Call List

The Globe and Mail and the CBC each report that Canada’s Do Not Call list is being used by telemarketers both good and bad (where each term is relative). This is a bit sad for Canada. The US’s DNC list has been very successful, and one of the very few places where the US has […]

 

President for Ten Minutes

During a chat I had this afternoon, someone brought up an interesting situation to contemplate. The Presidency of George Bush fils ended today at noon EST, but Mr. Obama wasn’t sworn in until 12:10. Who then, the question was, President during those ten minutes. One mildly unsatisfactory answer is Ms. Pelosi. If there is neither […]

 

Happy Repeal Day!

Today is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of the blanket prohibition of alcohol sales in the United States. Go pour some Champagne, Cava, or fine California bubbly and read Radley Balko’s excellent “Lessons of Prohibition.” Photo: Jensen.Pernille. Thanks to Sama.

 

It’s Morning in America

It’s hard to know what to say after an election that feels so momentous in so many different ways. So, I’ll start from the simple: congratulations to Obama on being elected the 44th President of the United States. Next, let’s add some chaos here and see what emerges. So what’s on your mind? And please, […]

 

Emergence Emerges

This paper, “More Really is Different,” may be one of the most important papers of the last half-millenium. It argues that P.W. Anderson’s concept of “emergence” is provable. It may have even proved it. The idea of emergence, from whence this blog gets its name is the opposite of reductionism. It is the idea that […]

 

Identity Manglement

It was Dopplr that drove me over the edge on this rant. I almost feel bad for starting off with them, because as you will see, they’re just the bale of hay that broke the camel’s back. I was updating my travel schedule, which included a trip to St. Louis. It told me that by […]

 

Quantum Crypto Broken Again

The New Scientist reports that researchers Vadim Makarov, Andrey Anisimov, and Sebastien Sauge have broken quantum key distribution. The attack is described in their paper, “Can Eve control PerkinElmer actively-quenched single-photon detector?” Spoiler Warning: Yes. She can. The attack is brilliant in its elegance. They essentially jam the receiver. A bright pulse of laser light […]

 

Does this mean we can revise our opinion of Friday the 13th?

According to The Daily Telegraph, the Knights Templar are suing the Vatican for all that money they lost in 1307. (The Telegraph has a companion article here as well.) This adds up to a nice round €100 billion. The Telegraph didn’t say whether that is American billions (thousand million, 109) or English billions (million million, […]

 

Leveraging Public Data For Competitive Purposes

The Freakonomics blog pretty much says it all: The latest: importgenius.com, the brainchild of brothers Ryan and David Petersen, with Michael Kanko. They exploit customs reporting obligations and Freedom of Information requests to organize and publish — in real-time — the contents of every shipping container entering the United States. From importgenius.com. There’s a neat […]

 

I’d bet on security prediction markets

In his own blog, Michael Cloppert writes: Adam, and readers from Emergent Chaos, provided some good feedback on this idea. Even though the general response is that this wouldn’t be a supportable approach, I appreciate the input! This helps me focus my research intentions on the most promising theories and technologies. I’m glad my readers […]

 

Not quite clear on the subject

Slyck News has a story, “SSL Encrpytion Coming to The Pirate Bay” a good summary of which is in the headline. However, may not help, and may hurt. Slyck says: The level of protection offered likely varies on the individual’s geographical location. Since The Pirate Bay isn’t actually situated in Sweden, a user in the […]

 

Security Prediction Markets: theory & practice

There are a lot of great comments on the “Security Prediction Markets” post. There’s a tremendous amount of theorizing going on here, and no one has any data. Why don’t we experiment and get some? What would it take to create a market in breach notification prediction? Dan Guido said in a comment, “In security, […]

 

Adam on "Silver Bullet Security" Podcast

The 26th episode of The Silver Bullet Security Podcast features Adam Shostack, a security expert on Microsoft’s Secure Development Lifecycle team who has also worked for Zero Knowledge and Reflective. Gary and Adam discuss how Adam got started in computer security, how art/literature informs Adam’s current work, and the main ideas behind Adam’s new book […]

 

Check out these great blogs!

I’m excited and grateful to the Industry Standard for including us in their “Top 25 B-to-Z list blogs.” There’s some great stuff in there which I read, like “Information Aesthetics

 

Quantum Uncertainty

Technology Review has a pair of articles on D-Wave‘s adiabatic quantum computer. Quantum pioneer Seth Lloyd writes in “Riding D-Wave” about quantum computing in general, adiabatic quantum computing, and D-Wave’s efforts to show that they’ve actually built a quantum computer. Linked to that is Scott Aaronson’s article, “Desultory D-Wave,” in which Lloyd’s nail-biting is made […]

 

Edward Lorenz, 1917-2008

Edward Lorenz, most famous for research concerning the sensitivity of high-level outcomes to seemingly insubstantial variations in initial conditions (the so-called “butterfly effect“), died April 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Much more information concerning Lorenz’s life and work is available via Wikipedia.

 

Generativity, Emergent Chaos and Adam Thierer

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Oxford, has a new book, “The Future of The Internet.” He’s adapted some of the ideas into a long and worthwhile essay, “Protecting the Internet Without Wrecking It.” In that essay, he uses the term “generativity” to refer to a system which has what I would call ’emergent chaos.’ A […]

 

Obama vs. McDonalds

As he was winning contests in Iowa and South Carolina, Senator Barack Obama raised $32 million in January for his presidential bid, tapping 170,000 new contributors to rake in nearly double the highest previous one-month total for any candidate in this election cycle. The New York TImes, “Enlisting New Donors, Obama Reaped $32 Million in […]

 

The Emergent Chaos of the US Presidential Campaign

This New York Times really is interesting. It’s all about how candidates are losing control of their campaigns, and they’re in a new relationship with emergent phenomenon on the internet. Now, as we come to the end of a tumultuous political year, it seems clear that the candidates and their advisers absorbed the wrong lessons […]

 

How New Ideas Emerge From Chaos

There’s an interesting contrast between “The Problem With Brainstorming” at Wired, and “Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas” at the New York Times. The Problem with Brainstorming starts out with some history of brainstorming, and then moves to its soft underbelly: The tendency of groupthink to emerge from groups: Thinking in teams, and pitching […]