Serendipitous altruism

Yesterday, @telecomix mentioned a statement by Trotsky about the publication of secret treaties. A few extracts :

“Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level”.

“The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents”.

“The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy”.

Sure, it is Leon Trotsky and you will discount his opinion because he carries the stigma of Communism – or Trotskyism to be more exact. So what about someone more moderate ?

What about a President of the United States ? If that could help convince you, here is Woodrow Wilson : @AymericPM dug out his Fourteen Points and guess what the first one is ?

“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view”.

Amen bro !

Secret diplomacy sucks – ACTA is a recent prime example of why it does. Popular reaction to the Cablegate publications shows that popular awareness of that issue is growing.

I’m sure that we can find other prominent  political thinkers who have something to say about it… We have two and I’m sure it is only the beginning of a consensus.

About the Cablegate, Defense Secretary and former director of central intelligence  Robert M. Gates declared : “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest”. Let’s contradict him : we want open diplomacy.

Post forth your quotes in support of open diplomacy !

Yesterday, sparked by a Frederick Douglass quote I stumbled upon at Reddit, I posted my spontaneous thoughts about the Wikileak Cablegate aftermath. Of course by now everyone an his dog is barking across town in delicious cacophony, so here are a few articles in that vein that I liked today.

“How to think about Wikileaks” is a compendium of analysis and reactions that has been widely pointed at. If you don’t know where to start, this is a very good place with choice quotes from interesting voices from all round. Among them, Cintra Wilson’s “The C Word: Julian Assange Isn’t Doing Anything Worse Than What Our Government Is Doing” rang particularly well within me.

Apart from that, I liked this piece from Broadstuff, found through the incredible Glyn Moody : Wikileaks only exists because the mainstream media failed. Here in France I’m pleasantly surprised to have seen Le Monde be one of the five media anchors in the world to collaborate on the Cablegate release – this surely has something to do with its new rebellious ownership. Not to be outdone, the left-leaning Liberation is now hosting a Wikileaks mirror – of course I’m not holding my breath for Le Figaro to do anything. But even Le Monde has only caught the Wikileaks wave, not created it. Journalists used to be the conduit for leaking information – where are they now ?

By the way, Aavaaz petition in support of Wikileaks is past 530k signatures – 300k in past 24 hours. Let’s get it past a million, just in case whoever cluelessly keeps attempting a clumsy crackdown has not got the message yet…

A disturbing number of people around me have expressed misgivings about Wikileak’s disorderly conduct, claiming that progress must be achieved in a more civilized way within the frame of the established government system. Alas, that is not always possible – sometimes a measure of peaceful excess is required to nudge the system out of a local optimum toward the great wide open of better possibilities. To illustrate that, here are a few choice quotes from someone who broke his chains and helped in freeing others from theirs:

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” – Frederick Douglass in an address on West India Emancipation (1857-08-04)

If you don’t ask for something, the odds of receiving it are tiny – especially when subjected to more powerful forces. The people have been clamoring for honesty from those who govern them, and not getting it. Now they begin to understand that a struggle is required – and they chose information as their weapon.

The people seeks truth as authority, not authority as truth. But Wikileaks is not about the abstract and impossible absolute transparency – the strawman argument derided by those who oppose it. It is about more transparency in response to a problem : we don’t trust our governments anymore.

Or course, Wikileaks is clearly excessive – but it is only the backlash for the equally excessive treachery that secretive governments have foisted upon their own people.

More balanced views will prevail, but only when trust will have been re-established. Until then, there will be struggle :

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe” – Frederick Douglass in speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)

It remains that whereas governments have been used to the privilege of surveillance over subjects – they are now waking up to a new world of sousveillance, where citizens forcefully take back rightful lordship over their government.

Wikileaks has contributed to the exposure of how broken the covenant between the people and the governments currently is. That covenant will be renewed : the truth that is pouring out of the shadows is the source of hope that will feed it.

“When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world” – Frederick Douglass in in speech to the International Council of Women (31 March 1888)

The discussion is now open – more information cures all !

Thanks to Frederick Douglass for the inspiration – the Wikileaks affair underlines the timelessness of his writings.

In France, at least two mobile networks operators out of three (I won’t tell you which ones) have relied on Cell ID alone to identify cells… A mistake because contrary to what the “Cell ID” moniker suggests, it can’t identify a cell on its own.

A cell is only fully identified by combining with the Location Area Identity (LAI). The LAI is an aggregation of Mobile Country Code (MCC), Mobile Network Code (MNC – which identifies the PLMN in that country) and the Location Area Code (LAC – which identifies Location Area within the PLMN). The whole aggregate is called Cell Global Identification (CGI) – a rarely encountered term, but this GNU Radio GSM architecture document mentions it with details.

Since operators run their networks in their own context, they can consider that MCC and MNC are superfluous. And since the GSM and 3G specifications defines the Cell ID as a 16 bit identifier, the operators have believed that they had plenty for all the cells they could imagine, even taking multiple sectors into account – but that was many years ago. Even nowadays there are not that many cells in a French GSM network, but the growth in the number of bearer channels was not foreseen and each of them requires a different CellID – which multiplies the number of cells by their number.

So all  those who in the beginnings of GSM and in the prehistory of 3GPP decided that 65536 identifiers ought to be enough for everyone are now fixing their information systems in a hurry as they run out of available identifiers – not something anyone likes to do on a large critical production infrastructure.

Manufacturers and operators are together responsible for that, but alas this is just one occurrence of common shortsightedness in information systems design. Choosing unique identifiers is a basic modeling task that happens early in the life of a design – but it is a critical one. Here is what Wikipedia says about unique identifiers :

“With reference to a given (possibly implicit) set of objects, a unique identifier (UID) is any identifier which is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose.”

The “specific purpose” clause could be interpreted as exonerating the culprits from responsibility : given their knowledge at the time, the use of Cell ID alone was reasonable for their specific purpose. But they sinned by not making the unique identifier as unique as it possibly could. And even worst, they sinned by not following the full extent of the specification.

But I won’t be the one casting the first stone – hindsight is 20/20 and I doubt that any of us would have done better.

But still… Remember kids : make unique identifiers as unique as possible and follow the specifications !

On Identi.ca I stumbled upon this dent by @fabsh quoting @nybill : “Linux was always by us, for us. Ubuntu is turning it into by THEM, for us“.

It definitely relates to my current feelings.

When I set up an Ubuntu host, I can’t help feeling like I’m installing some piece of proprietary software. Or course that is not the case : Ubuntu is (mostly) free software and as controversial as Canonical‘s ambitions, inclusion of non-free software or commercial services may be, no one can deny its significant contributions to the advancement of free software – making it palatable to the desktop mass market not being the least… I’m thankful for all the free software converts that saw the light thanks to Ubuntu. But nevertheless, in spite of all the Ubuntu community outreach propaganda and the involvement of many volunteers, I’m not feeling the love.

It may just be that I have not myself taken the steps to contribute to Ubuntu – my own fault in a way. But as I have not contributed anything to Debian either, aside from supporting my fellow users, religiously reporting bugs and spreading the gospel, I still feel like I’m part of it. When I install Debian, I have a sense of using a system that I really own and control. It is not a matter of tools – Ubuntu is still essentially Debian and it features most of the tools I’m familiar with… So what is it ? Is it an entirely subjective feeling with no basis in consensual reality ?

It may have something to do with the democratic culture that infuses Debian whereas in spite of Mark Shuttleworth‘s denials and actual collaborative moves, he sometimes echoes the Steve Jobs ukase style – the “this is not a democracy” comment certainly split the audience. But maybe it is an unavoidable feature of his organization: as Linus Torvalds unapologetically declares, being a mean bastard is an important part of the benevolent dictator job description.

Again, I’m pretty sure that Mark Shuttleworth means well and there is no denying his personal commitment, but the way the whole Canonical/Ubuntu apparatus communicates is arguably top-down enough to make some of us feel uneasy and prefer going elsewhere. This may be a side effect of trying hard to show the polished face of a heavily marketed product – and thus alienating a market segment from whose point of view the feel of a reassuringly corporate packaging is a turn-off rather than a selling point.

Surely there is is more about it than the few feelings I’m attempting to express… But anyway – when I use Debian I feel like I’m going home.

And before you mention I’m overly critical of Ubuntu, just wait until you hear my feelings about Android… Community – what community ?

Evil implies that corporations can be judged as humans, but they are not : corporations are just soulless. They knows neither right nor wrong. By definition, a corporation exists merely as a maximization function toward the goals of its shareholders. That is why, in spite of having legal personality, corporations cannot exist in the political sphere that holds control and oversight in the name of the public good – though the extent to which the financial resources of corporations are employed to influence political campaigns shows how poorly that separation of power is applied.

Charles Stross’ Accelerando is heavily loaded with buzzwords – though it is a fun read and a great reflection on post-humanity. Among the interesting concepts that pepper the story, I found the “Turing-complete company constitution” – if you have legal personality, then why not Turing completeness ? And then why not go all the way to human-equivalent sentience and cognitive abilities or better ? You may, but it won’t matter because whatever their sophistication, corporations have a mandate inscribed in their lowest level code that merely makes them paperclip maximizers.

Whether you consider them anthropomorphic artificial intelligences or just really powerful optimization processes, corporations don’t care about you anyway. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky : they don’t hate you, nor do they love you – you just happen to be resources that they can use for something else.

Dear offshore development team, we appreciate the effort you put into communicating with us, but alas your apparent use of machine translation between English and French can sometimes be more hilarious than efficient. We did laugh but, after more than a year of collaboration, finding that you don’t understand the meaning of a generic French acronym that represents one of the major project milestones did cause some sadness at the same time.

Unsupervised machine translation by generic public services is not yet very good at tuning itself to context, especially when attempting to expand corporate jargon back and forth across languages. Thanks for trying but for comprehension’s sake we will gladly keep using English until further advances in machine translation.

Names and examples withheld to protect the innocent. And anyway, the humor would have been lost in translation…

I stumbled upon Peter Hutterer’s “thoughts on Linux multitouch” which gives a good overview of the challenges facing X.org & al. in developing multitouch over Linux. Among other things he explains why, in spite of end-user expectations to the contrary shaped by competitive offerings, Linux multitouch is not yet available:

“Why is it taking us so long when there’s plenty of multitouch offerings out there already ? The simple answer is: we are not working on the same problem.

If we look at commercial products that provide multitouch, Apple’s iPhones and iPads are often the first ones that come to mind. These provide multitouch but in a very restrictive setting: one multi-touch aware application running in full-screen. Doing this is suprisingly easy from a technical point of view, all you need is a new API that you write all new applications against. It is of course still hard to make it a good API and design good user interfaces for the new applications, but that is not a purely technical problem anymore. Apple’s products also provide multitouch in a new setting, an evironment that’s closer to an appliance than a traditional desktop. They have a defined set of features, different form factors, and many of the user expectations we have on the traditional desktop do not exist. For example, hardly anyone expects Word or OpenOffice to run as-is on an iPhone.

The main problems we face with integrating multitouch support into the X server is the need for the traditional desktop. Multitouch must work across multiple windowed application windows, with some pointer emulation to be able to use legacy applications on a screen. I have yet to see a commercial solution that provides this, even the Microsoft Surface applications I’ve played with so far only emulate this within very restrictive settings”.

In summary, the reason why Linux multitouch lags behind some of its competitors is that it is a significantly more ambitious project with bigger challenges to overcome.

Among the links from that document, I particularly appreciated ‘s Bill Buxton’s “Multi-touch systems that I have known and loved” that provides a great deal of material to frame the debate over multitouch functionality – I feel less clueless about multitouch now…

Stumbling upon a months old article by my friend George’s blog expressing his idea of local social networking, I started thinking about Bluetooth again – I’m glad that he made that resurface.

Social networking has been in the air for about as long as Bluetooth exists. The fact that it can be used for reaching out to local people has not escaped obnoxious marketers nor have the frustrated Saudi youth taken long to innovate their way to sex in the midst of the hypocritical Mutaween.

Barely slower than the horny Saudi, SmallPlanet CrowdSurfer attempted to use Bluetooth to discover the proximity of friends, but it apparently did not survive: nowadays none of the likes of Brightkite, Gowalla, Foursquare or Loopt takes advantage of this technology – they all rely on the user checking-in manually. I automated the process for Brightkite – but still it is less efficient than local discovery and Bluetooth is not hampered by an indoor location.

People like George and me think about that from time to time, and researchers put some thought into it too – so it is all the more surprising that there are no mass-scale deployments taking advantage of it. I found OlderSibling but I doubt that it has a large user base and its assumed spying-oriented use-cases are quite off-putting. Georges mentioned Bliptrack, a system for the passive measurement of traffic, but it is not a social networking application. I registered with Aki-Aki but then found that it is only available on Apple Iphone – which I don’t use. I attempted registration with MobyLuck but I’m still waiting for their confirmation SMS… Both MobyLuck and Aki-Aki do not seem very insistent on increasing their user population.

Nevertheless I quite like the idea of MobyLuck and Aki-Aki and I wonder why they have not managed to produce any significant buzz – don’t people want local social networking ?

With indoor navigation looking like the next big thing already rising well above the horizon, I’m pretty sure that there will be a renewed interest in using Blueetooth for social networking – but why did it take so long ?

If you can read French and if you are interested in networking technologies, then you must read Stephane Bortzmeyer’s blog – interesting stuff in every single article. Needless to say I’m a fan.

Stéphane commented an article by Nokia people : « An Experimental Study of Home Gateway Characteristics » – it exposes the results of networking performance tests on 34 residential Internet access CPE. For a condensed and more clearly illustrated version, you’ll appreciate the slides of « An Experimental Study of Home Gateway Characteristics » presented at the IETF 78’th meeting.

The study shows bad performance and murky non-compliance issues on every device tested. The whole thing was not really surprising, but it still sounded rather depressing to me.

But my knowledge of those devices is mostly from the point of few of an user and from the point of view of an information systems project manager within various ISP. I don’t have the depth of knowledge required for a critical look at this Nokia study. So I turned to a friendly industry expert who shall remain anonymous – here is his opinion :

[The study] isn’t really scientific enough testing IMHO. Surely most routers aren’t high performance due to cost reasons and most DSL users (Telco environments don’t have more than 8 Mbit/s (24 Mbit/s is max).

[Nokia] should check with real highend/flagships routers such as Linksys E3000. Other issues are common NAT issues or related settings or use of the box DNS Proxy’s. Also no real testing method explained here so useless IMHO. Our test plan has more than 500 pages with full description and failure judgment… :)

So take « An Experimental Study of Home Gateway Characteristics » with a big grain of salt. Nevertheless, in spite of its faults I’m glad that such studies are conducted – anything that can prod the consumer market into raising its game is a good thing !

This just cost me twenty minutes of hair pulling and from the number of unanswered forum and mailing lists mentions of this “Lost connection to MySQL server during query” error in the context of remote access through an SSH tunnel, posting the solution seems useful.

Letting mysqld listen to the outside is a security risk – and an unnecessary one for the common LAMP setup on which the applications are executed on the same server as the database server. As a result, many Mysql servers are configured with the “skip-networking” option which prevents it from listening for TCP/IP connections at all. Local communication is still possible through the mysql.sock socket.

Nowadays, communicating through local sockets is rather rare – connecting locally is usually done through the TCP/IP stack which is less efficient but more flexible. So the naive user who expects TCP/IP everywhere sets up a tunnel to the Mysql server he usually accesses locally, he provides the right connection parameters to his Mysql client – and on his connection attempt he gets the “Lost connection to MySQL server during query” error.

So – when connecting through ssh tunnel to a mysql daemon, you need to make sure that the “skip-networking” option has been removed from /etc/my.cnf

When the “skip-networking” option is active, network parameters are redundant. But once you remove it, for security’s sake you must make sure that mysqld does not listen to the outside – so check /etc/my.cnf so that the “bind-adress” parameter is set as “bind-address = 127.0.0.1”.

Misguided aid efforts are a favorite gripe of African entrepreneurs, and the ever virulent Magatte Wade never misses an opportunity to hit on self important aid advocates. She declares that “Africans are tired of the charity brand” and she leads by example.

Today, she noticed a recent Wall Street Journal reporting that Edun, the company started by Bono and his wife, is now producing most of its products in China. Edun’s mission is to “encourage trade with Africa” and “celebrate the possibilities and the people of the continent”. I’ll let you appreciate her take on this monumental feat of hypocrisy.

The contrast with a recent New York Times article about IBM betting on growth in 16 sub-Saharan Africa by entering a ten years agreement to supply hardware, software and services to Bharti Airtel. For IBM, Africa is a growth market, not an aid destination.

Now it remains to be seen whether IBM invests in Africa or merely enjoys the open market to sell goods and services produced elsewhere. My experience of European telecommunications consultancies in Africa is that this sort of deal does not involve actual local development beyond token liaison personnel. But countries such as Morocco now feature maturing markets that nurture local suppliers – so it could happen in sub-Saharan Africa too. There is a long way from call center sweat shops to a fully developed information technology industry, but anchor investors such as IBM may trigger the start down that path. We shall see…

This morning a French banker provided me with an explanation for the efforts of the banks at selling MVNO contracts to their customers. This explanation does not dismiss the influence of the contemporary urge to use any customer-facing operation as an excuse for selling services entirely unrelated to the core product – but it makes a little more sense.

Banks see the mobile payment wave rising high on their horizon, and they want to be part of the surfing – in a bank-centric model of course. As near field communications are coming soon to a handset near you, getting ready is a rather good idea.

To carve their rôle into the mobile payments ecosystem, banks believe that building a customer base is a good way to make sure that they will have a critical mass of users to deploy their products to when the time comes for that. In the context of a maturing market with decreasing churn rates, this makes sense – especially as the banking and insurance industry enjoys much lower churn rates than mobiles operators, and the banker’s image could have a halo effect on the mobile products they distribute.

But on the other hand, considering the leonine conditions that French mobile license holders grant to the MVNO, this is a fragile position on which to take leverage.

By the way, if you feel like working for a hot mobile payments company, take a look at the openings at Zong and say hello to Stéphane from me !

I stumbled upon an article published last June by Knowledge@Wharton mentioning “The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion” by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison. Somehow I had missed this book that offers intriguing alternatives to organizations mired in their own structures. To learn about it you can read this critique by The Economist,  that happen to be titled “In Search of Serendipity” – on a side note, I’m happy that this word that I discovered in 1997 has been enjoying increasing popularity since the beginning of this millennium.

I can’t stand playing a MMORPG for even fifteen minutes (I prefer tactical, operational or strategical games – preferably with a pseudo-realistic environment), but I watched my people play and I agree about Hagel & al’s the mob collaborative dynamics that happen there :

Guild leaders in World of Warcraft “require a high degree of influence,” noted Hagel [..]. “You have to be able to influence and persuade people — not order them to do things. Ordering people in most of these guilds doesn’t get you far.”

In addition to the leadership qualities involved with becoming the head of a guild and assembling a problem-solving team from previously independent players, World of Warcraft enthusiasts, as noted by Hagel, conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader. In addition, he said that game players typically customize their own dashboards to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy.

This parallel between gaming and management is interesting – but Hagel & al. are not the first to notice it. In 2008, in “Collective solitude and social networks in World of Warcraft” my fellow ESSCA alumni and friend Nicolas Ducheneaut remarked :

We show that these social networks are often sparse and that most players spend time in the game experiencing a form of “collective solitude”: they play surrounded by, but not necessarily with, other players. We also show that the most successful player groups are analogous to the organic, team-based forms of organization that are prevalent in today’s workplace. Based on these findings, we discuss the relationship between online social networks and “real world” behavior in organizations in more depth.

“Prevalent in today’s workplace” ? From my big company point of view, I find that statement more than slightly optimistic – though not surprising considering how Nicolas enthusiastically embraces the future. But that is definitely the direction that we are going in. Expect even more of it as Generation Y enters the workforce. Until then, there is still a lot of evangelism to do…

Twenty two days ago, my periodically running script ceased to produce any check-ins on Brightkite. A quick look at the output showed that the format of the returned place object had changed. Had I used proper XML parsing, that would not have been a problem – but I’m using homely grep, sed and awk… Not robust code in any way, especially when dealing with XML. At least you get a nice illustration of why defensive programming with proper tools is good for you.

So here is a new update of latitude2brightkite.sh – a script that checks-in your Google Latitude position to Brightkite using the Brightkite API and the Google Public Location Badge. Description of the whole contraption may be found in the initial announcement.

The changes are :

% diff latitude2brightkite_old.sh latitude2brightkite.sh
69,70c69,70
< id=`wget -qO- "http://brightkite.com/places/search.xml?q=$latitude%2C$longitude" | grep "<id>" | sed s/\ \ \<id\>// | sed s/\<\\\/id\>//`
< place=`wget -qO- "http://brightkite.com/places/search.xml?q=$latitude%2C$longitude" | grep "<name>" | sed s/\ \ \<name\>// | sed s/\<\\\/name\>//`
---
> id=`wget -qO- "http://brightkite.com/places/search.xml?q=$latitude%2C$longitude" | grep "<id>" | sed s/\ \ \<id\>// | sed s/\<\\\/id\>// | tail -n 1`
> place=`wget -qO- "http://brightkite.com/places/search.xml?q=$latitude%2C$longitude" | grep "<name>" | sed s/\ \ \<name\>// | sed s/\<\\\/name\>// | md5sum | awk '{print $1}'`

I know I should use a revision control system… Posting this diff that does not even fit this blog is yet another reminder that a revision control system is not just for “significant” projects – anything should use one and considering how lightweight Git is in comparison to Subversion, there really is no excuse anymore.

Back to the point… To get the place identifier, I now only take the last line of the field – which is all we need. I mdsum the place name – I only need to compare it to the place name at the time of the former invocation, so a mdsum does the job and keeps me from having to deal with accented characters and newlines… Did I mention how hackish this is ?

Anyway… It works for me™ – get the code !

Guillaume Esquelisse tipped me about an interesting discussion arising from Andy Grove’s article on the need for US job creation and industrial policy, which highlights the relationship between innovation,manufacturing and trade. Rajiv Sethi summarized its central point : “An economy that innovates prolifically but consistently exports its jobs to lower cost overseas locations will eventually lose not only its capacity for mass production, but eventually also its capacity for innovation“.

Unlike some of the commentators of Tim Duy’s article, I’m not one of those heretics who openly toy with protectionist ideas as a protection against the shameless exploiters of the international trade system. But as Tim Duy warns : “if you scream ‘protectionist fool’ in response, then you need to have a viable policy alternative that goes beyond the empty rhetoric“. So here is a proposal.

I believe that the fix does not lie in the selfish tweaking of trade barriers – that is merely treating a symptom. We need to act much deeper by addressing a foolishly held belief about the fundamental nature of the knowledge economy : underlying the fabless follies of glamorous captains of industry no longer worthy of the title is the fallacious narrative that applies capitalist analogies to the knowledge economy.

Knowledge cannot be hoarded. Like electricity production, knowledge creation is an online process : there are marginal hacks for storing some of it, but to benefit you must be plugged in the grid. As John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison put it : “abandon stocks, embrace flows”. Read their article and let it sink in : knowledge flows trumps knowledge stocks.

This is the same point that Mike Masnick found in Terence Kealey’s “Science is a Private Good–Or: Why Government Science is Wasteful” :

“How many people in this room can read the Journal of Molecular Biology. How many people in this room can read contemporary journals in physics? Or math? Physiology? Very, very few. Now the interesting thing — and we can show this very clearly — is that the only people who can read the papers, the only people who can talk to the scientists who generate the data, are fellow specialists in the same field. And what are they doing? They are publishing their own papers.

And if they try not to publish their own papers… If they say, ‘we’re not going to get engaged in the exchange of information; we’re going to keep out of it and just try to read other people’s papers, but not do any research of our own, not make any advances of our own, not have any conversations with anyone,’ within two or three years they are obsolescent and redundant, and they can no longer read the papers, because they’re not doing the science themselves, which gives them the tacit knowledge — all the subtle stuff that’s never actually published — that enables them actually to access the information of their competitors.”

This is a huge point that fits with similar points that we’ve made in the past when it comes to intellectual property and the idea that others can just come along and “copy” the idea. So many people believe it’s easy for anyone to just copy, but it’s that tacit knowledge that is so hard to get. It’s why so many attempts at just copying what other successful operations do turn into cargo cult copies, where you may get the outward aspects copied, but you miss all that important implicit and tacit information if you’re not out there in the market yourself.

Collecting ideas is easy, but acquiring tacit knowledge takes actual involvement. Tacit knowledge requires doing. This is quite far from being news to the practitioners of knowledge management or to anyone who has ever reflected on what internalizing knowledge actually means… But is is no longer just a self-improvement recipe nor an organizational issue : it has now acquired visibility at the national policy level.

The Chinese are not just mindlessly pillaging out intellectual property : they have also understood the systemic effects of a fluid knowledge economy – take open standards for example. We must now get on with the program and admit that the whole idea of capitalizing intelectual property is a lost cause. Political leaders will soon understand it… Patent trolls are already dead – but they just don’t know it yet.

But we have already advanced far into a de-industrialization process whose only redeeming strategic value is that the Chinese must be laughing hard enough for their gross national product to be slightly negatively affected. Is it too late ?