How do we maintain the quality of information over time?!
Well, I think you’ve actually answered your own question by providing your own ’sanity check’. The quality will be maintained just the same way as it happened before, it won’t. But you, as an individual, can!

How exactly?
With the democratization of production factors of news, this process of determining the quality has shifted/is shifting from the editorial ivory towers of cenventional media corporation to the ‘consumer’ of this news. This consumer, in order to determine the authenticity, is now forced to act proactively when determining the quality of that news. (That is why you tend to go to who.org for medical advice). This makes us, (people who use digital media AND perform ’sanity checks’ themselves), something like ‘pro-sumers’ instead of consumers. We should set our own quality filter!

That is the big difference.

Why?
We all should get acustomed to doing this ’sanity check’ you refer to, as often as possible, only the difference is that in the past we haven’t been doing that with the conventional sources. We assumed that if an ‘authority’ comes with some news than it must be true. They had a monopoly on news. Now they don’t anymore because some student from Iran can Tweet what is going on, depicting he events probably better than some journalist that has been kept at the border and is trying to validate the rumors. In this case the quality is the factual news on factual events (real-time!), not some sophisticated linguistic elaboration upon it written in dactylic hexameter, or something like that. The same holds for something like Michael Jackson memorial. I mean how many reporters do we actually need at the Michael Jackson memorial? 160, 170, and all reporting the same event?! And probably all staying in hotels, vans, or whatever, with all the equipment, the transportation costs, distribution etc. When you buy say the Herald Sun, you’re actually paying for the costs made by their journalists being there (if any) and reporting on te same event like the 170 others doing the same thing… (if they weren’t then you’re paying for those who were but have sold their news to Herald Sun). Well, I’m not willing to pay for that For me, tweets from say 36 different attendants with some pics would suffice in this case. There is no quality issue here.

Filtering & Selection
As is the case with all the news reporting; it is always subject to interpretation and selections based on geo-social and semantic relevance, ‘juicyness’ and probably also political orientation of it’s reporters and audience. It’s just how information transmission and processing works amongst humans. For this matter people have completely trusted the conventional media in this, and perhaps rightly so to some extent, so that we don’t have to do it ourselves. But the fact of the matter is that most of these large media companies have their own opportunistic interests in providing this news. The ‘filter’ they apply is still ‘their’ filter for whatever purposes. And since we don’t have time to recheck everything, they’ll still have their jobs, they just need to adapt their business models.

So if we really want to maintain the quality over time, we’ll have to accept the following facts: that a.) there is more information, b.) everyone can make it ( = more ‘noise’), c.) the conventional media have their filters d.) we, as prosumers, have our own different interests, interpretations etc. and thus different filters.

The maintenance of quality of information eventually happens on an individual level, but is distilled through several filters in coming to us. In the past the only filters were the Murdocks of this world, now we’ll have to proactively engage in retrieving the truth ourselves. And since we don’t have time for this we’ll have to rely on some ‘quality’ sources. But what this quality is, is thus dependant on our own set of preferences within our socio-demographic environment.

So there is no quality issue here. There are experts (like doctors, or pilots) whose judgement you can trust, but not say on environmental issues. For the same reason, there are amateur bloggers whose judgement you can’t trust when it comes to medicine, but who can be just as trustworthy as journalists when they’re sending realtime pics from conflicts at hand. In the past we trusted these judgements on professional journalists and news corporations, now they’re just one source of information and we’ll have to set our own ’sanity checks’.

Surely, for in-depth discussion you’ll probably have to buy the Herald, but not for Michael Jackson memorial.

How do we maintain the quality of information over time?

Since then, Openworld (www.openworld.com) has worked on a range of similar initiatives in areas of poverty and high unemployment. Success-sharing free zones can apply a portion of the land value gains resulting from transparency-enhancing business climate reforms with social ventures, including microvouchers for eLearning and eHealthcare. Far from being colonialism era-enclaves, the zones can be privately developed under competitive global tenders, with developers obliged under “build-operate-transfer” style concession agreements to convey assets to workers, residents, and learning/health care institutions of the sponsoring countries.

As public sector bureaucracies reach their fiscal limits, the new generation of free economic zones can pioneer sustainable institutional innovations that can replicate and scale far beyond their initial boundaries. Contractual, transnational systems for ensuring world-class dispute resolution and other crucial services can bring rapid growth to now-troubled areas, and set the stage for an updated version of the Hanseatic League to compete with failed and failing state institutions.

The new cities that Paul Romer envisages can emerge as magnets for knowledge workers and other mobile creatives who will be increasingly shortchanged by sclerotic, bankrupt, and increasingly kleptocratic governments.

Best,

Mark Frazier
Openworld, Inc.
“Awakening assets for good”
@openworld (twitter)

I think that the choice, realistically, for the future global language lies between English and Esperanto rather than an untried project.

It’s unfortunate, however, that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.

After a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polgar, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.

Further arguments can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.

A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

http://dok.esperantic.org/ced/espstu.htm

Hoe komt het dat we niet weten dat we minder weten dan we denken te weten?

In onze diep gewortelde, psychologische tendens om onzekerheid te vermijden vervallen we gauw tot het kunstmatig creëren van zekerheden middels allerlei inductieve theorieën. Dit heeft dan ook z’n evolutionaire en psychologische verklaringen maar dat is weer een ander verhaal.

Er zijn 2 hoofdproblemen die zich hier voordoen:
Probleem 1:> Deze theorieën, na inductief verkregen te zijn en steeds retrospectief te zijn geverifieerd, worden alleen op juistheid getest en niet op al die keren dat ze niet werkten (confirmation bias).
Probleem 2: Daar komt nog eens bij dat er een ‘normale kansverdeling’ verondersteld wordt in situaties waar die niet toepasbaar is (‘Ludic fallacy’) zoals in de aandelen markt, de inflatie indicaties, en alle macro- en socio-economische variabelen).

Hierdoor wordt de impact van onvoorspelbare gebeurtenissen extern aan het model (the Black Swans) extreem onderschat. Deze impact wordt ook steeds heviger naarmate de complexiteit in de samenleving toeneemt, de indicaties hiervoor liggen in o.a. de technologische ontwikkeling, globalisatie, internet, digitalisering enzovoorts.

Ofwel, we schijnen modellen van onzekerheid te gebruiken om zekerheid te scheppen in een steeds onzekerder wordende wereld! Ook daar waar er geen zekerheid kan zijn, (zoals in socio-economische en andere gecompliceerde variabelen uit het dagelijks leven), laat men het na, inclusief de academia, om in te zien dat de methodes EN de theorieën die gebuikt worden om de toekomst te voorspellen niet werken en verkeerd toegepast worden.

Echter, dit probleem beperkt zich niet enkel tot de financiële markten, banken en overheden, het strekt zich uit over ELKE complexe sociale situatie in het dagelijks leven. En ook daar zijn er meer van als men denkt!

Als men dit eenmaal begrepen heeft, is het iets makkelijker om Taleb’s harde kritiek op de economische experts beter te begrijpen. Hieronder enkele citaten van hem m.b.t. de financiële crisis en de economen:

“(…)the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banksever earned taking risks” (…)
“It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand.”
(…)Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. If they look conservative, it’s only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions. But (…)bankers are not conservative at all. They are just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug.(…)
(…)The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely”(…)

Nu heb ik niet eens tijd om alles weer op te bouwen en zeker niet om met MySQL te gaan klooien.

een schone lei is ook niet verkeerd, I guess