Abstract: While the striving for status has long been recognized in animals and in humans, the role of status in their utility calculations has not been clarified. Specifically, the debate has not been settled whether people pursue status as a means to achieve power and resources or as an (emotional) goal in itself. We present results [which] show that people regard status as a valued resource in itself, rather than a means to an end. Subjects valued status independently of any monetary consequence and were willing to trade-off some material gain in order to obtain it. This result was stable across cultures from Hong Kong, Turkey, the US, and Germany. Moreover, the amount of money that participants were willing to trade off against status corresponded to the power distance index of the respective culture. The power distance index of a culture has been shown to be correlated with the importance and acceptance of status symbols in that culture. Finally, the amount of status seeking observed was different among men and women, an intriguing observation that deserves further work.

Status As A Valued Resource, by B.A. Huberman [PDF]

The immune system is a complex biological system with a highly distributed, adaptive and self-organising nature. This paper presents an artificial immune system (AIS) that exploits some of these characteristics and is applied to the task of film recommendation by collaborative filtering (CF). An AIS built on two central aspects of the biological immune system will be an ideal candidate: Antigen - antibody interaction for matching and antibody - antibody interaction for diversity. Computational results are presented in support of this conjecture and compared to those found by other CF techniques.

A Recommender System based on the Immune Network [PDF]

.... a collection of writings on the emergence of "cultural biology." ... three sections ... revolving around two central themes: how technology transforms our perception of the world and how culture is taking a life of its own.

Two interesting book reviews from the latest issue of _First Monday_.

First Monday Book Reviews

Communications technologies continue to improve despite the telecom recession. As the gap widens between what is possible and what is deployed, the threat to established business models grows accordingly. The ILECs and their allies in the publishing/entertainment industry and other sectors must fight harder and harder to preserve the technological underpinnings of their old business. The Tauzin-Dingell DSL non-competition bill is an example of such a hold-back-the-future battle. Fortunately, it is likely to die in the U.S. Senate. Senator Hollings, chairman of the Senate's Commerce Committee, vividly described the bill's purpose in a Senate speech on February 25, 2002: "Hailed as a way to enhance competition, it eliminates it. Touted as a way to enhance broadband communications, it merely allows the Bell companies to extend their local monopoly into broadband." Despite the anticipated death of Tauzin-Dingell, the network of the future has few friends in government. Hollings is no gigabit guru; he is opposed to Tauzin- Dingell because he is a friend of AT&T (the *cable* non- competition company) and to the konstipated kontent krowd. Meanwhile, the ILEC teleban is regrouping in regulatory and legislative caves of several state governments. Having killed off the Competitive Local Exchange (CLEC) business, it is going after the next threat -- forward looking public entities, such as municipal utility districts and publicly owned power companies, that see how important an advanced communications infrastructure is to their local economies.

It seems that legal issues may prevent the US from repeating Canada's success with customer-owned networks. And if you are still under the impression that the telecom collapse has nothing to do with intellectual property, just ask David Isenberg.

Nine States Have Barriers to Publicly Owned Telecom | Isen.com

The purpose of the Long Bets Foundation is to improve long-term thinking. Long Bets is a public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake. The foundation furnishes the continuity to see even the longest bets through to public resolution. This website provides a forum for discussion about what may be learned from the bets and their eventual outcomes.

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The Long Bets Foundation was started in 02001 as a 501(c)(3) public education nonprofit foundation, based in California. It is a partial spin-off from The Long Now Foundation, which is building a 10,000-year Clock and tools for a 10,000-year Library. Long Bets is one of the Library tools.

Long Bets

Software companies run on Internet time. Speed is everything, and if the product that is shipped doesn't quite work, it can always be fixed in the next release. Then there's the wireless-carrier industry, which works on telephone time. The goal from the get-go is 99.999% reliability, so the rule for both hardware and software is test and test some more, to make sure that products work properly and don't interfere with the operation of the network. Telephone time is the toughest standard of all.

This "telephone time" idea is at the core of the industry's collapse. What's the point of having expensive "5 nines" gear in the core of the network, when handsets are forever warning users about dying batteries; when coverage is spotty at best in rural/suburban areas and often congested in urban areas; when random, abrupt, unexplainable hangups are commonplace; when many customers are locked into long-term contracts anyway; and more.

A retail model in which carriers are expected to subsidize the cost of phones and handhelds means the network operators are in control of what gets sold.

This is where Europe got it right with GSM: control access through simple, interoperable tokens, and let the customers buy their own equipment.

"[Carriers] run the risk of being reduced to dumb pipes," says Richard Siber, a partner in Accenture.

Ah, so it's back to the old debate between the stupid network and the intelligent network. Didn't we already finish that one?

The Techno-Culture Clash in Telecom

Technically Speaking provides a blueprint for bringing us all up to speed on the role of technology in our society, including understanding such distinctions as technology versus science and technological literacy versus technical competence. It clearly and decisively explains what it means to be a technologically-literate citizen. The book goes on to explore the context of technological literacy -- the social, historical, political, and educational environments.

This new publication from the National Academy of Engineering is freely available online. 170 pages.

Technically Speaking: Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology

... In the self-referential utopian community that is TED, even the juggler has a MacArthur fellowship and the neighbors, if not good-looking, are brilliant, fascinating and sometimes astonishingly rich. ...

The TED Conference: 3 Days in the Future

But something happened on the way to community-radio nirvana. Something like reality. ... Of the 3,400 amateurs nationwide who have applied for low-power FM licenses in the last two years, only five are on the air. ... Essentially, the new rules banned low-power stations in urban areas, where the radio dial is crowded, and pushed the applicants into rural regions. ... "I'm really not that capable of a person, but I did get a license," he said. "That says something." ...

From the front page of the 19 Feb 2002 edition of The Washington Post.

Little Guys Get Airtime as Low-Power FM Debuts in Region

If you want to be in the right place at the right time you need to figure out where things are going...

BT's future timeline