Reading a book

By way of Stephanie, this lovely video:

While funny, for those of us who read Janice Radway's Reading the romance, the irony just keeps piling up.

Christmas present tips for your geeky friend

I know what I want, at least: A very special memory stick! And if it's a girl geek and you want to say "I love you" in a suitably romantic way...

Or, if she's an academic geek, and happen to be exactly like me, then she wants to try out new software, or needs a new version of the old. Trust me, nothing says "I love you" like knowing exactly what software your favourite geek girl needs. Or do you want to impress? Go for something expensive!

Pink bloggers

One of the most popular Norwegian girl bloggers at the moment is a young lady who calls herself Linnea, and writes the blog "All you know is wrong" (Alt du vet er feil). At first glance you expect to encounter a typical fashion blog, as the top picture is of a very good looking girl with nice earrings, a fashionable top and a cheeky smile. The "About me" section gives a warning though, as she writes:

Jeg er over gjennomsnittet bitter, og liker stort sett ingen andre enn meg selv. OBS: Man lærer ingenting her inne.

Translated: I am more than averagely bitter, and don't like anybody but myself. Note: You learn nothing here.

Then you start reading, and you realise that this is not your average fashion blogger. Linnea writes a wonderful stream-of-consciousness type posts, all about herself, her experiences, feelings and, yes, clothes. Where your average fashion blogger would show herself off in handsome clothes, Linnea posts a picture of herself, on the floor of a gym, the result of a fall because she was just slipped going down one step. Not only did she fall, most ungraciously, she did so while wearing a thermo-suit, which is standard winter workwear for anybody working outside. So, not your standard fashionable one-piece; it's utility clothing for the most unfashionable (but extremely important) jobs.

This particular post, titled "I don't know," discusses exactly her position as a blogger, and particularly a "pink" blogger. She is outraged at being characterised as a pink blogger, and I can very well understand that. Her writing is sometimes as delicate as if she had puked all over the screen, as her stream-of-consciousness often appears to not have been subject to any editing at all. There's nothing polite, sweet or candy-scented in her texts, and pink is definitely not a colour that comes to mind.

What this random, meandering and carefully not-edited post still manages to say is: "Look, I am not cute or graceful or strong or smart, and I am still the most popular and potentially influental blogger in Norway." And I have to say: I can see why. Linnea is the girl who doesn't have a grip, her closet is a mess, her life is filled with inner conflict and struggle, and she is intolerant and angry - your normal, average girl, who happens to be able to write and use a mobile camera. She speaks for the bitch in all girls who are sick of trying to blend and be gracious, and she reveals her total lack of taste quite ruthlessly.

If Linnea has a colour to her blog, I think it's orange. It's warm and angry and temperamental and contrary, and it picks you up and makes you feel cheery, even if it's obnoxious and hard to tolerate in too large doses.

It's hard to be evil

Sustainability - Ph D comics style

Brainwashed

There's a program on NRK these days called Hjernevask or "Brainwashing." It's creating quite a stir, as a Norwegian comedian is having it out with his old professors, particularly any who have been doing gender research and claimed that gender is cultural, not natural.

The program has caused a lot of good and interesting debate, and I don't really feel the need to expand on it here. But for those who have been following the debate, here's Evolutionary Psychology Bingo:


By way of TL - thanks!

Game of the future

The Norwegian University og Science and Technology NTNU celebrates its 100 year anniversary, and to celebrate they have designed the game Spillet om framtiden or "The game of the future". In this you can be the headmaster of the University, fighting some mysterious female evil bandit (I am not sure what she has done, but she is dressed in black and has short, white hair. Is she perhaps a representative of the humanist- or the social sciences, directions which are not prioritised in Trondheim?), solving several puzzles as (you) he zoomes around the Trondheim campus in his red coat.

Despite the language in the cut scenes (did I mention that this is a technical university, not one with a strong language department?), it's a very funny little game, and I am quite delighted with how it combines playfulness, science fiction, game clichés and information about what goes on at the campus.

Home taping is killing music

This one was just too good to pass by. Thanks Nick!

Sustainability

Yes, I am part of organising a conference with a major buzzword in the title. Hence, imagine my delight when I found a nice visualisation of this and some other recent buzzwords in Academia:

Dear Amazon

You know I have loved you since I found you online. You have sated my reading lust and supported my academic struggles for years. I have browsed your pages and lusted for your offers, my wish-list is long and much larger than my bank-account, and in my shopping cart lurks desires I want to consume side by side with guilt about procrastination and lazyness.

But, dear Amazon - you are making life very difficult for me now. I was unhappy with you for a while, in Sweden, when you made me run around all of Umeå to figure out where you had sent my treasures. It was not a funny game, although it did make me ride my bike, through snow and wind, to new, remote places. Back home in Norway though, safely in Volda, I forgave you, because you delivered reliably again. I found my books in my mailbox or at the mail office, a healthy little walk away from home.

I think you know where this is going, though. Amazon, how could you? Suddenly, you are demanding that I take whole days off in order to receive that which I ask of you. You expect me to stay home, like a frustrated housewife, anxiously awaiting the pleasure of those who carry my books to me. Or, I have to ask that they are delivered to work, to be commented, studied and discussed by my peers. This is no longer what I thought it was to be! So, please remember this, my old love: Those are my books you are delaying. I have paid already as you send them, but you are slowing their trip to me through your poor choices of partners. I can change my mind, you know. I can take my wishlist elsewhere, directly to the publishers, or to competitors who deliver instantly.

I also haven't forgotten previous treachery. My patience is wearing thin, my passion is fading, but I still remember the love we shared in the past. You can still repent and return to better ways. Send my books by mail again, please? It is the best distribution system for private packages in Norway. The other systems are good for business transport, but I can't leave a lecture in order to sign for a box of science fiction books. I can't stay home a whole day just to indulge my taste for graphic novels. Please realise this, and give me the option to, perhaps, pay a little more for the transport I desire. It will be cheap compared to the inconvenience and the cost in work hours.

Cory Doctorow does...

from XKCD

Drilling isn't boring...

Check out this video from one of the most serious companies in Norwegian business! It's just absolutely fantastically hilarious! I am unreasonably happy that Statoil made it.



Yeah, still laughing.

OK, a quick check to see if this video was being written about. It turns out it was made for a team building seminar a couple of years ago. While it may be embarassing for the participants, who work in Statoil, I really hope they also understand that the kind of enthusiasm, self-irony and humour they express is admirable.

Another video surfaced in the process of checking though, this one from Aker, a company that among other things builds boats. This one is called "The Nutcracker", and the refrain is "have cracked worse nuts before." It received a price as the best Norwegian advertising video in 2005, some claim the best ever.



And if you think Statoil normally sends out this kind of silliness, have a look at "Tomorrow's Heroes", one truly touching movie, right up there with "Thanks for the trip" by Freia. I don't know if the sentiment carries past cultural barriers, but if you're not Norwegian just trust me, these two ads pull all the important strings in our national pride.

Career-change?

I am seriously considering a change of career. Particularly the dress-code is interesting, not to mention the fact that curses, nasty laughs, wickedness and mysterious behaviour is part of it. Also, I would get to have lots of cats at work, and run and hide if somebody got particularly unpleasant. Candles will probably be a work expense, and it ought to come with its own cauldron.

Introverts

And thanks to Alex Halavais for linking to this article, which finally made me feel understood.

Navel Gazing

From the world of amazing research: Belly-button fluff. The research of the Austrian researcher Steinhauser has revealed what belly button fluff is made of, and how come it migrates to the belly button. It turns out that it is avoidable, you just have to shave your belly, alternatively get a belly-button piercing. Knowing that the main carrier of belly button fluff is an overweight, middle-aged male, the image of shaved bellies and pierced belly buttons is perhaps slightly disturbing.

Georg Steinhauser does not only stare at bellies though. From the Technical University of Wienna, 2008, a report of his research on the chemical fingerprint of volcanic eruptions through studies of pumice.

Are you serious?

A fun email dumped into my box today, drawing my attention to a business plan that at first made me giggle happily. Then I checked the date. Nope, not April first. That's when my evil mind started looking for exploits.

The people in Seriosity, Inc. think the inbox should be a game - or at least, sorted through a virtual economy. And so, as the market economy ideal burns and crashes, Edward Castronova is an advisor to the company as it attempts to build a virtual economy by which to organise your mailbox. Prioritize depending on how much currency people are willing to pay for your attention, get Serios today!

Serios is the virtual currency you need to pay for the attention of others. It's expected that people will be careful with their serios, and not spend a lot of them, mostly splurging, according to the demo, on things like mails to the manager (50 serios).

From their white paper on email economy:

Attent users are given certain number of Serios every week. Serios are allocated equally to each user. Serios can be spent, saved or traded like a physical currency, and like an actual currency Serios are a scarce good that is valued among Attent users. Serios are traded using a secure, reliable financial system that keeps track of trades. And there are sophisticated monetary policies that insure the financial system stays healthy and the currency remains stable.

So, let's say I want to write one of my colleagues, and I want to let them know there's cake for the lunch break (no, there isn't, this is just an example!). That is the kind of information they really want to get (it's just an example! There's no cake in the lunch break today!!!), so I don't need to attach any serios to it. It's also not vital (one should think), so if they ignore it nothing really happens.

Now, let's say I want my colleagues to show up at a meeting to discuss next semester, and I want that meeting at the most peaceful time at the college: 08.00 sharp. If I want them to get that message, I would have to attach a huge load of serios, something like a million. Because it's January, next semester is almost a year away, and nobody have meetings at 08.00, as that's when the most eager of us stumble, still half-asleep, into the offices and start the procedure of waking up. I don't think they would get that message if I used a billion serios, no matter how serious the matter I needed to discuss was. Changing the time to 10 am, and adding cake, now that would get the message through at a much lower price.

Anyway. Now, as the middle manager sending off 5 emails with a million serios attached, I am broke. All out of serios. I got as many as the rest, but the others HATE the things I have to say to them (most of the time it means more work and less freedom to do their own stuff.) So the next email I need to send, which is a request for assistance in details for a letter to the students about their upcoming exams, gets no serios. I'll just have to trust that the recipients realise that this is more important than the cake during lunch (no, there is still no cake for lunch today). As a manager, trying to get the attention of colleagues who have a very different priority from mine, I'd quickly run out of serios. The system is then broken, as I don't have anything else to trade for serios - I am just a go-between and have no real power, just a big load of responsibility.

Now, I have to grind serios, by writing nice and serious emails my colleagues really want to read. I don't have time for that though, as I am working on all that stuff my colleagues don't want to know about. However, I have this contact in China, a nice young academic who is delighted to do such things as read books on public information and media theory, write short abstracts and reviews, make suggestions about how this can be used for teaching, and mail it to me - against a very modest fee. So I start my own little serios-farm, and pump out emails to my colleagues by flooding them with cheaply generated content. Soon the young academic in China is a well-established budget post, and I have all the serios I like and can spam my colleagues all the time with higly priced mails.

The problem is that my colleagues prefer the mails from the guy in China. You see - he delivers information they can use immediately, while I just make demands. So they start looking for mails with perhaps 2 or 3 serios attached, and ignore the ones with 50. The ones with big sums attached to them are now clearly mails I think they need to act on immediately, while the ones with small sums attached are fun and useful. And so even my little exploit is broken.

One of the exciting uses of the Attent system is that users have a new and extremely efficient way to give feedback to their correspondents. For example, if an e-mail recipient thinks that a new product idea sent with 50 Serios is valuable, they can reply with 60 Serios – a net reward of 10 Serios. On the other hand, if the e-mail recipient believes that a product idea sent with 50 Serios is not valuable, they can rely something less than 50, including zero Serios.

While this is a lovely thought, it assumes a lot about the rationality of human beings. It's the assembly-line taken to organisations all over again, assuming a system where all think alike, prioritize alike, and respond alike. If there's one thing organisation theory has taught us since the 50ies, it's that individually perceived importance and personal interest does not equal the best interest of the organisation.

The real problem with the broken exclamation mark on emails isn't that there is an exclamation mark instead of 500 serios connected to it. The real problem is that there is no common unit for measuring individual interest. What the serios may be good for are however to measure how co-workers feel about messages. As Seriosity goes on to say in their white paper:

In this group, outspoken members frequently clash with each other, while the ideas of other members get lost in the mix. As a result, the group is often unable to reach a consensus due to squabbling among members. When an idea is picked by the group, it is often due to the strength of an individual’s voice, rather than the appeal of the idea itself. In this environment, the talent of the group is wasted because all ideas are not heard equally. This creates hostility among team members, and slows innovation. In the competitive high-tech industry, this lack of innovation leads to product stagnation, ultimately resulting in falling sales.

Has currency ever given the world a solution to this problem? When money gets into this mix, it flows to those strongest voices, the person with more connections than talent, and it most certainly causes hostility. It creates a new, inventive way to silence the unwanted, disruptive voice: Don't respond with any serios! Soon the one with the really new and different idea will be as broke as the frustrated middle manager, and have no budget to draw on for Chinese serios-farmers.

Yes, Serios looks like a fun game I'd love to play with my friends and colleagues. I'd be more than happy to attach it to emails among folks I know will not abuse or exploit the system. The problem is: inside a flat, happy and friendly structure, you don't need that kind of a managing system, as people will respect each other's time and only write IMPORTANT in the headline when it is important. In a system with cut-throat competition, it will be broken 30 seconds after implementation.

So, I actually prefer to assume that whoever made this website and got Edward Castronova to play along, was not serious. As a joke, this is hilarious!

----
Castronova has responded to people's reactions to the proposition of serios, in two posts on Terra Nova. There is also a link to a post which describes the same email that set me giggling. Apparently it wasn't a joke.

Outside?

A new MMORPG reported. Careful though, it's expensive and very addicting, and has the potential of seriously disrupting your relationships and upsetting your entire friends list.

Text based FPS

And, on the topic of geekiness: Text based first person shooter!

Stuff white people like

One thing white people like is to read about what white people are like. So if you are white and want to learn more about your ethnicity, or if you are curious about what white people like, check out Stuff White People Like, and remember, when you see a white person riding to work on a bike, congratulate them on saving the earth.