@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Today it occurred to me to coin a term that encapsulates how applying quantitative methods and approaches to code without also incorporating quality dimensions (which include emotions, tastes, perceptions, wit, values and beliefs) leads to deficient decision-making. I’m calling it “ALGORITHM AUTISM” (© Twain 刘秋艳, 16 May 2010).

Its definition is as follows:

Algorithm autism is a state of syntax and audiovisual deficiency in the input, process and output stages of code which don’t enable the machine to interpret or relate the socio-emotional elements of content, and thereby understand its context and make sense of it.

Given my previous definition of information as “a consciousness of quantity and quality that enables differentiation and contextualization over time”, the definition of INFORMATION AUTISM is as follows:

Information autism occurs when the constituents of information are purely quantitative, objective facts or data objects which don’t carry any associated subjective contextual qualifiers such as human emotions, tastes, perceptions, wit/humor, beliefs and values.

Examples of autistic information would be most of the equations in quantum theory and that underpin risk management models (===> implications for understanding why and how the global financial crisis happened). Examples of non-autistic information could be found in psychometric and EQSQ tests such as Myers-Brigg, Alpha Assessment for Leadership, Belbin, Saville-Holdsworth and Simon Baron-Cohen etc. Simon Baron-Cohen is the Cambridge professor cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen of ‘Bruno’ and ‘Borat’ movie fame.

Why did I choose this designation of autism?

Well, it’s well known in medical circles that autistic children are often highly intelligent (numerate savants and linguistic encyclopedia). However, they’re afflicted by an inability to read, interpret and understand the emotional states of others and nor do they have much concept of social relationships and their role in the dynamics. Their brains process mechanistic, metaphysical inputs (numbers, words) but don’t capture or process those socio-emotional codes that would make them understand the philosophical and psychological motivations underpinning another human being’s communications and interactions.

So………if we think about the neural networks of the World Wide Web and the codes which are streaming between its nodes…….It’s arguable that there’s algorithm autism. We have lots of functions that enable us to capture and interpret numbers and words (binary, probabilities, data objects). Yet none that enable us to capture and interpret socio-emotional context and thereby make sense of the whole of it. Therefore, the algorithm is itself autistic.

This has far-reaching consequences in global finance terms because it means the risk management models — which are built from increasingly complex and sophisticated mathematics (chaos, Black-Scholes etc.) — as well as economic models en masse are FAILING TO CAPTURE THE UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMAN QUALIFIERS which actually drive human engagement, intent and consumption of any piece of content, product, service, lifestyle etc. It’s been commented upon broadly in this MIT Technology Review article, even if no solutions have been proposed there.

Now, in the case of human autism there are methods to help those with the condition to deal with it. Plus there’s support for their loved ones to identify it, appreciate that it makes their autistic child special in different ways from other children and work with it. In the case of algorithm autism………..We need and are going to find methods in object-oriented programming (OOPs) in conjunction with whatever semantics technology has to offer (NLP, machine learning, AI, neural nets et al) to re-orient code pathways so that the machines do comprehend those socio-emotional elements of content that will enable it all to make sense and help us arrive at more informed decision-making.

And, no, the existing sentiment analysis algorithms do not tackle or resolve their own autism bias. They’re not able to interpret socio-emotional context with much degree of accuracy. For example, let’s take a look at Twitrratr and the search term “facebook” today and let me highlight some obvious examples of “algorithm autism”:

This last week has seen unprecedented criticism of Facebook’s privacy policy with Google trends showing that “how do I delete my facebook account” is increasing in popularity:

The Institute of Quantitative Studies at Harvard University has also pointed out how the number of words in Facebook’s privacy policy has grown over the last 5 years, from 1004 to 5830 (which makes it even longer than the Constitution).

So……..existing empirical and anecdotal evidence — Google trends and numerous examples of users threatening to leave Facebook en mass or griping about it all across the socmedia space — indicates to us that the sentiment towards Facebook is negative. Yet Twitrratr shows only 3.89% of comments as negative, 10.03% as positive and 86.08% as neutral. Superficially, this may look acceptable but when we manually sanity-check some of those comments, it becomes clear that Twitrratr’s sentiment extractions are……..AUTISTIC. They can’t read or interpret the socio-emotional context to any degree of reliable accuracy. Here are some specific examples from about 50 comments:

(1.) lied! i didn’t have lunch…i just worked. now i’m having lunch and playing a little on facebook. still listening to cool vibes — This has been bucketed into “positive” when in fact the word “cool” is in reference to the music this commenter is listening to and not specifically to facebook itself.

(2.) methinks i want to take some modeling pics. any burgeoning/talented photogs need willing subjects? xxxxxx@gmail.com, facebook or dm me — This has been bucketed into “positive” when in fact it belongs to “neutral” because it doesn’t make any sentiment about whether the commentator likes or dislikes Facebook itself.

(3.) glad to see most of the online retail partners I work with have a presence on Facebook — This has been bucketed into “neutral” when it’s clearly a positive statement.

(4.) found living kidney donor through Facebook – another perk of social media — This has been bucketed into “neutral” when it’s clearly a positive statement.

(5.) is posting 1 obama supporting link for every anti obama post he sees on his facebook gotta keep it fare — This has been bucketed into “positive” when in fact it belongs to “neutral” because it doesn’t make any sentiment about whether the commentator likes or dislikes Facebook itself. Actually, the brand in question is President Obama rather than Facebook!

(6.) having fun the toolbar from www.cooliris.com. wicked for my iphone, facebook, and surfing……and i’m not getting paid to pimp — This has been bucketed into “negative” because the sentiment engine interpreted the word “wicked” as a negative term when it’s clearly a positive statement — albeit not for Facebook specifically but for cooliris. So Twitrratr’s natural language processing is being doubly autistic.

(7.) eathing lunch and sending out birthday greetings on facebook while reading the comics in today’s paper. adhd or wickedmulti-tasking? — This has been bucketed into “negative” because the sentiment engine interpreted the word “wicked” as a negative term when it’s clearly a positive statement — albeit not for Facebook specifically but for the commentator’s own ability to multi-task. So Twitrratr is being doubly autistic in this instance too.

Some people might argue that 10-20 percent of inaccuracy in 50 comments is not a big deal. However, there is something called compounded inaccuracy which — like compound interest rates — can accumulate to quite a sizable influence. The main issue, though, is how this socio-emotional deficiency of context then propagates and permeates throughout the rest of social media which……CONTRIBUTES TO MORE NOISE RATHER THAN TOWARDS SENSE.

Ergo, autistic algorithms are making the Web less intelligent.

How I arrived at this term of “ALGORITHM AUTISM” was the result of twaining elements from these topics: dsycalculia, DNA, Objective-C language, IQ-EQ, dexterity and discern. One day (when my book gets published), I’ll explain exactly how this twaining happened.

:*).

The news item that’s capturing my attentions this weekend relate to Lord Adair Turner, the Chair of the FSA (UK equivalent of the SEC, btw), and his proposed Tobin tax on bankers’ deals. It’s being reported and commented upon in the UK media but less so internationally.

· http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/wp-content/cache/supercache/www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/08/how-to-tame-global-finance/index.html

· http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/980e9ec8-92f2-11de-b146-00144feabdc0.html

· http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/tracycorrigan/6101533/Lord-Turners-answer-to-the-financial-crisis-raises-more-questions.html

· http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/hamish-mcrae/hamish-mcrae-lord-turners-tax-is-a-trauma-too-far-for-our-biggest-foreign-earner-1778376.html

· http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/27/turner-tobin-tax-economic-policy

Whilst critics of the proposals have been quick to wave the usual autopilot flags about “protecting London’s status as a financial center” and how financial institutions and bankers would “leave London in droves” if such a tax is implemented, there are merits to the proposals — albeit, it could be strategically positioned better than Lord Adair’s approach and more targeted in its applicability.

Instead of reacting to the idea of it the way media pundits who have little or no direct experience of banking, I’m going to try to be practical about it and highlight what considerations the banking community are likely to be taking into account.

Here are a few challenges with taxing bankers’ deals:

(1.) Almost no banks are going to readily disclose the bonus structure by which they reward their deal-makers and revenue generators. It’s part of how competitive advantages are maintained by attracting and retaining top talent.

Therefore, getting any idea of the appropriate rate of Tobin tax is going to be difficult and would depend on self-administration/regulation by the individual banks to comply if the tax is introduced.

(2.) Transaction values can be difficult to pin down precisely and are dependent on the accounting rules and jurisdictions applied, particularly those involving privately-owned entities or those not listed on the major exchanges.

This would make like-for-like Tobin taxation to apply across all transactions tricky to administer and achieve.

(3.) Post-transaction valuations are also variable so it’s not always clear what contribution the bankers have made to any increases in valuation — if any — and which part is attributable to the company’s management and which to external market forces like customer loyalty and goodwill.

This is all before we need to pin down the exact people who did most of the work on the transaction — typically the Directors, Associates and corporate finance bag carriers who receive less of the transaction bonus than the lead rainmaker(s). Therefore, to tax each individual banker on a transaction at the same level would be inappropriate. The duration of a transaction would also affect the quantity of bonuses involved.

All these factors considered, the principles of Lord Adair’s proposals seem to be socially responsible ones: to make the global banking community more accountable and to increase their contribution towards socially useful activities rather than “socially useless” ones.

Coincidentally, I was discussing something related with my friend Marta whilst in Spain. About 5 years ago we had an idea for a socially responsible website to distribute goods handmade in developing economies like Peru, South East Asia and some African states. As part of the model I thought up there was also a program oriented at corporations to increase their global consciousness about social responsibilities. The other side of the equation was a ploughback into the indigenous population of 25 percent of net profits, investing in infrastructure like schools and clean water.

Marta and I revisited this model during my trip and she noted that the global financial crisis was surely making us all aware that business, as a whole, has to become more socially responsible. I pointed out that Harvard MBAs have proposed and been signing up to their own Ethics Code:

· http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528381

· http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/business/30oath.html

· http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-business-students-take-dumb-ethics-pledge-2009-5

However, what’s still missing — and is a commercial opportunity gap — is the creation of companies with the types of tools, products and services which can help this and the next generation of corporate leaders to PRAGMATICALLY commit to a new modus of ethical decision making, implementation and behavior.

It’s one thing to study about Hobbes, Locke, Smith’s “invisible hand of good” et al as part of an Ivy League / Oxbridge / Top 10 MBA course on business ethics and tick the boxes which say, “Yes, we know about codes of ethics as well as corporate tort, balance sheet restructuring and Porter’s competitive matrix” and another to have tools — and here I mean tech ones — with which to systematically abide by and implement according to codes of ethics signed up to…….

Tools, products and services which foster not only changes in mindset but, more importantly, CHANGES IN ACTION.

Otherwise we’ll find ourselves in (yet another) cycle of repeated economic and corporate irresponsibility. It’s not an easy or overnight fix but it does require collective imagination, will and optimism.

The Tobin tax — although a step in the right direction — is not that imaginative. Tax is a word that’s universally hated. In Chinese, the word’s homophone is the same as for the word “broken, shattered and splintered” and “rotten in character” (yes, seriously).

It’s preferable to think of the Tobin tax instead as a “COS” (contribution optimizing society). It would be a variable percentage amount — rather than a fixed annual rate — allocated by financial institutions, from their transactions, towards local communities and enterprise that’s distinct from the budget allocated for promotional and PR activities or their lending practices. Variable according to the reporting month in which the transaction is booked on the balance sheet in the financial accounts.

Only time will tell whether the global financial institutions care purely about making money for themselves and several handfuls of top bankers or whether they care about local communities and the rest of the world too.

Today the FT is carrying a forum discussion on Queen Elizabeth II’s question, “Why did no one see this crisis coming?” Some of the comments are spot on and some are grossly wide of the mark and delve into all sorts of irrelevant macroeconomic theories about the roles and forecasting perspicacity of economists.

* http://blogs.ft.com/arena/2009/07/28/economists-what-is-the-point/

* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21c911f6-7b66-11de-9772-00144feabdc0.html

Incidentally, the reply provided to the Queen was:

“A failure of the collective imagination of many bright people” who were all “doing their job properly on its own merit.”

LOL, a diplomatic and charming platitude albeit not one which helps us to collectively accept fault, learn from mistakes or progress towards implementable solutions.

TWAIN’S ANSWER

Firstly, banking is not about imagination. It’s about facts, numbers, analysis and decision-making (including sometimes misinformed judgment by those with sign-off power). It’s about bottom lines, value propositions, growth potentials, hedging strategies, risk management and product innovation. Unfortunately, few bankers will have the imagination à la a Steve Jobs, a Steven Spielberg or a Tim Burton to envisage the potential horrors, carnage and devastation of portfolio and value decimation, and also how to create a much more beautiful scenario of wealth creation triumphing over the financial carnage.

[Besides which, bankers are trained to deploy words like "resizing" rather than carnage so already this shows lack of verbal imagination.]

Secondly, not all bankers are bright — although the ones who are are seriously brilliant, dynamic in their intelligence and phenomenal. Meanwhile, some may be academically highly qualified (every Ivy League / Oxbridge / Tsinghua / INSEAD / Bocconi MBA under the sun), yet unfortunately they may also lack common sense and a commitment to ethical corporate social responsibility even if they’ve studied it and passed the academic exams.

My great friend GC and I recently discussed how Harvard MBAs have created their own code of ethics:

* http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528381

* http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2009/bs20090611_522427.htm?chan=bschools_bschool+index+page_the+mba+life

Thirdly, not all bankers do their own jobs properly. For example, I’ve inherited investments which were poorly due diligenced, burning cash at unacceptable rates, had barely any business model and an underperforming management. As soon as the investment was under my responsibility that changed. I’ve also read internal and external management consultancy reports which were so nonsensical it made me put a freeze on buying them.

My colleague (Harvard, Cambridge) put into my evaluation review that I’m “prodigious, highly competent and have excellent collaboration skills” but this isn’t true of all bankers and even I have my odd moments where I don’t meet my own high standards — like the time a Director of Compliance almost derailed one of my negotiations through his own misinformation and ignorance, and I became a lot less charitable in my collaboration with him. Still, I managed to make a successful case for our Legal Counsel’s nomination to the newco’s executive board, so my annoyance didn’t last long. LOL.

Most importantly and relevant to how economists missed the signs of crisis is this: economists in banks get nowhere near the information which really matters — the balance sheets on whatever transactions and bond issuance are being included into the risk management systems to comply with various Basel II, international GAAP and regulatory body requirements.

That’s not the economists’ fault. It has to do with Chinese walls between business units and lines of responsibility. Chinese walls are oriented to protect confidentiality but they may also exclude information being passed to enable business units to risk manage and do their jobs. It’s the way the system is: needs improvement, work-in-progress.

Anyway, only a handful of people in CEO-Chairman’s Office may get clearance to that confidential analysis, so there’s actually little chance of any economist anywhere being able to accurately call the crisis — even if some may be being celebrated by the media as economic sages.

The media itself has some failings in its role as the Fifth Estate, to help us keep society in check and optimally functioning, wrt the global financial crisis. Some of the opinions from their business journalists have been laughable, although there have also been some excellent coverage too — such as by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Interestingly, in one of the FT links, Galbraith is quoted:

JK Galbraith remarked that one of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know. Regulators and supervisors did not know complex financial products and processes, or the impact of low economic volatility on risk management systems.

(source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21c911f6-7b66-11de-9772-00144feabdc0.html)

I’d place an addendum to Galbraith: “An economic wisdom is to understand that to achieve perfect information for properly functioning capitalism, as proposed by Adam Smith, it’s our responsibility to find the information we don’t know and to assimilate it into our systems.”

This takes us towards building context, clarity and consensus views in a truly democratic, open and capitalistic model.

Anyway, what’s the solution to prevent future global financial crisis of this ilk? Simple: build a consortia platform involving the banks, the governments and the regulatory bodies on an international basis to share and flag bubble build-ups.

Is it do-able? Yes.

Does the technology exist? Yes.

Will it synch with the vested competitive advantage interests of different groups? Yes.

How can I be confident about this? Well, you see all the institutional trading platforms out there from Equities to Fixed Income to IR-FX? Who wrote some of their investment proposals, negotiated terms of agreement, got weekly updates from their CEO/CFO/CTOs, was involved in writedowns/reinvestments and knows how their technology works and interconnects on a cross-organizational basis?

Yes, yours truly. My sole stipulation now would be that anyone who wants me to be part of project managing the build would have to remunerate me extremely well for my knowhow.

Plus that no one’s allowed to comment on my prettiness* and just lets me get on with the project.

FINANCING VIA SOCIAL NETWORKS

The FT also carries this article on how some tech entrepreneurs are crowdfunding by leveraging social networks:

* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c037ae5c-7b92-11de-9772-00144feabdc0.html

This is not a new concept, it’s how some independent film producers have been raising up to GBP1 million to make their features. What the article points to is how difficult it is in the current environment to raise new capital, especially in Series B and C rounds for development financing.

Ergo, tech start-ups would be well advised to abide by Sequoia Capital’s points about conserving cash and not burning it on poor marketing strategies.

My observation from crowdfunding via socnets which is different from the VC approach is that:

(1.) It triggers issues relating to compliance with FSA/SEC/Consob etc. rules regarding investment advice and protection of investors’ interests.

(2.) Social network investment is more likely to be a one-off transaction whilst the VC is more likely to repeat reinvest.

(3.) VCs and their network of investors tend to be able to bring expertise and contacts to the company which people on a social network merely taking a “punt” of GBP10 or less may not be able to offer.

(4.) The administration involved is different. With crowdfunding there are more investors to update and the paperwork may not be of a regulatory standard.

(5.) VCs have a more established path to institutional investors which is important if your strategy is likely to involve plans for floatation or acquisition by a media giant.

Anyway, it’s a personal choice: go with a handful of VCs and investors you meet face-to-face where you can develop deep and longer-term relationships of trust or go with many kind-hearted strangers on a socnet whom you may never meet face-to-face because of geographies and get to know each other better online.

Yesterday’s W-Tech event was designed to encourage women to pursue careers in technology and be successful in the sector. Workshop topics ranged from ‘Project Management’ to ‘Getting Your Research Project Funded’ to ‘How Smart Women Manage their Careers’. Speaking to some of the other attendees throughout the day, quite a few of them chose to attend the workshops on personal branding, political savvy and emotional intelligence. I selected ones where either the technology is at the bleeding edge or the speaker is someone I need to know to help my career — like Gary Bullard who presented the ‘Negotiate Your True Worth’ seminar. Previously he was President, BT Global Services and now he runs a company that supports talented female executives in advancing their careers and getting senior roles in big companies.

Anyway, these were the workshops I chose to sit in on and listen to:

· Funding Your Hi-Tech Start Up

· Cloud Computing and the Law

· Google’s MapReduce

· Interacting with Technology — MS Surface

· Negotiating Your True Worth

· Confidence + Credibility

· Closing session: Achieving in the Technology Profession (panel comprised senior female technology MDs from Goldman Sachs, Accenture, IBM, London 2012, Deloitte and P+G).

It was a really enjoyable and educational day and I managed to swap business cards with people who are incredibly inspirational.

MS Surface + Communicator

Also at yesterday’s event I got up close and personal with the Microsoft Surface product. At the moment, the product is retailing for GBP8000 in the UK for the consumer version and GBP10,000 for the developers’ version. The MS demonstrator showed us several programs that are available on the system:

· Finguistics — a foreign languages learning package

· Vitruview — a medical visualization package which allows doctors to show patients their medical conditions with 3D images which can be rotated, enlarged etc. Vitru is in reference to da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

· Unified Office Communicator — a system that combines a motion-detection sensor with a 360 panoramic view web cam, voice-activated mobile services that allow users to access and update their emails, swap and collaborate on documents, and a P2P IM channel that can record conversations. The entire solution is designed to enable remote working and collaboration across different locations.

MS Communicator was what interested me the most. The demonstrator said the solution has been around for 3-4 years. This isn’t exactly right; it’s been at MS for about 3 years. However, its history stretches back to the late 1990s.

I know this because it was one of the incubations in my investment portfolio at the bank. It was developed in-house, rolled out as our internal communications tools, opened up as a consortia offering to the other Tier 1 banks to facilitate external communications and later successfully spun out. It preceded Skype and is technically more robust and secure because its original audience was the financial services sector where information security requirements are high. This was all before it became a consumer product at MS, via the acquisition of the company a few years ago. One of the original patent owners and I are still in touch.

GoogleMap Reduce

The audience was shown the results from a study by Matthew Gray and Dave Petrou. They’d written a software program that scanned through all of the books deposited in Google Books looking for any mentions of place names. The books included the Gutenberg collection and dated from 1600 to today. Using this data, they’d mapped the longitude and latitude of these places mentioned in books. The map results were displayed for 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000. The Google representative observed how it started with a concentration of locations in Europe, which then migrated over to the States and spread gradually to Africa and Australasia. She commented that India didn’t seem to be mentioned much in the literature that had been scanned.

Well, there was a much more obvious missing contribution: China.

So I raised my hand and observed that perhaps the name tags in the search algorithms used show a bias towards Europe and America because they’re in English and use the alphabet. If the name tags picked up Chinese characters instead of English, for example, then the incidence and frequency of Chinese locations on the books map would be higher. I also noted that the search result differences between me searching with Chinese characters in Google.com is different from when I search in Google.cn and different again when I use Google Translation Services.

She said that my point is an extremely good one and would make an interesting project.

Then I said that this type of mapping is also relevant to Semantic Web developments and our increasing attempts to differentiate text-based words. I noted that every time the word “Paris” appears in a book it may not be in reference to the capital city of France but to Homer’s character in the Iliad, for example.

Later, when she referred to how the central character in Frankenstein moved from ingolstadt University to Geneva, I asked whether it may be possible in the future for MapReduce to have some type of time flex so that we can trace not only where locations that appear in books are, but also when the characters or the author(s) arrived there.

Later still, when she discussed loads and cluster processing I asked whether theoretically instead of mapping locations mentioned in books, MapReduce might be applied to mapping and predicting the incidence of economic bubbles and potential bursts. She said that she’d use linear regression to do that. I noted that with linear regression outliers would need to be removed and also there’s no dynamic longitude-latitude pinpointing.

Anyway, the take-away from the seminar she said that the points I raised would make very interesting code projects and I said I’d send her some links and materials to reports on the recent global economic crisis, which have numbers etc. that can be plugged into MapReduce.

Applying technology in a good way to monitor and prevent future global financial crisis and value destruction of US$ trillions that affect millions of households globally is something I believe in. If this tiny suggestion of mine to test MapReduce in this way and see what results it produces works, then that’s another step forward in the right direction.

Oh and here’s some interesting quotes from her presentation:

· If you have one server, it may stay up 3 years (1000 days);

· If you have 10,000 servers expect to lose 10 a day.

· With MapReduce, they lost 1600 of 1800 machines once, but the processing finished fine.

Here’s a Google Roundtable on MapReduce from YouTube:

London 2012

During the event we also got to see the first screening of London 2012’s new promotional video. It shows the integration of sports with local communities and the way Olympic venues are shaping up. The music track on the video is sung by Leona Lewis with Jimmy Page on the guitars, which was first performed at the close of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

How women can succeed in technology

The last seminar of the day focused on experiences and tips from a handful of senior women in technology about career progression and being mentored. Some of them were of the opinion that there is no pay or promotion differential between the sexes whilst others commented on the male culture they’d had to learn to deal with.

All of them paid tribute to their families as role models and highlighted the following as having played a part in their careers (in no particular order):

· authenticity

· knowing their business well

· prioritization

· calculated risks

· training

· growing into the role

· economic independence

· LUCK and serendipity

Later, I caught up with the MD of Goldman Sachs and we swapped notes on our experiences with male bosses and whether some of her fellow panelists’ horror stories about lost opportunities and pay differentials because of men have any validity. We both noted that we’d been extremely lucky and hadn’t experienced the discriminatory issues other women have.

I think she’s spot-on when she says it’s about our own attitudes, approaches and outlooks on our careers and male-female dynamics too.

My male manager at the bank could not do more to support my career or advance it:

· He approved financing for the best training I could possibly get.

· He publicly and privately credited me for the work I produced.

· He went to a Special Committee to present the case for my fast-track promotion.

· He recommended me into CEO-Chairman’s Office to contribute to and support the CEO’s corporate agenda.

· He remains one of my mentors now and acts as a sounding board for my ideas on strategy, banking and business.

There are some PHENOMENAL bosses out there — male and female. We just have to hope that luck and serendipity brings them across our paths and we have the opportunity to be guided by them and to follow their example.

On a final note, the event also enabled me to experience my first-ever coaching session, ‘Confidence and Credibility’. The coach reminded the audience of the importance of posture and that it can send signals to others of whether they can entrust their projects, pets and even children to that person. Then she showed us how we should stand.

All of a sudden she called out, “Up there I see a woman I’d gladly hand over my kids to right this second!”

Over two hundred pairs of eyes turned and looked right at me!

It’s just as well I don’t have too many complexes or I’d have turned bright red. The fact is I’ve always been self-assured, have a certain amount of kudos and am ready to take on responsibilities. Plus I went to dance lessons and played lots of sport as a kid, so standing up properly and being ready to compete and be a team player is something I’m trained in.

If the coach wants to entrust her kids to me, fine. I’d prefer to take care of my own, though — LOL.

Last night I watched HARDtalk on BBC News 24, presented by Stephen Sackur, in which he interviewed Hector Sants, CEO of the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA). Here’s the link to BBC iPlayer if you’d like to watch the full interview:

· http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00kq2hy/HARDtalk_Hector_Sants_Chief_Executive_Financial_Services_Authority/

There were a number of questions posed by Sackur that reminded me of the dissonance gap between how the media perceives the global economic crisis and the blame attribution to bankers on a wholesale basis, and what collective measures can be pragmatically implemented to reduce the likelihood of a repeat of the global economic implosion we’ve all witnessed over the last 18 months.

Now, since I worked on corporate strategy projects within CEO-Chairman’s Office of a Tier 1 bank during the period when key decisions were taken about building businesses in mortgage CDOs, hedge funds, proprietary trading, prime brokerage and opportunities in US real estate markets due to government policy changes, and more recently tracking the bailout-regulation situation with interest and discussing it with finance sector friends, my insights may be more informed than those who don’t have direct experience of investment banking or how banks operate, create financial products and manage risk.

Yes, I am 100% au fait with the knowledge I did not contribute to the global economic crisis or to the bank’s subsequent US$ billions writedowns, losses and government bailouts because (without any *”I told you so”* on my part) I did present the strategic case that the bank should consider these options:

* develop the asset and wealth management business in BRICs countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China);

* build advisory expertise in Intellectual Property Securitization (to capitalize on developments in the renewable energy and digital content publishing sectors); and

* sanity-check the banking model by incorporating more independent metrics on potential revenue streams and risk diversification

rather than any overly ambitious and risky moves into the US mortgage market.

Unfortunately, the powers-who-were decided to go with some other parties’ business case(s) and their drive towards the issuance and proprietary trading of mortgage CDOs. It wasn’t so much that the information about the potential risks of mortgage CDOs wasn’t publicly available and, therefore, the scale and depth of global economicl crisis avoidable or at least reducible, it was a case of the information being inappropriately interpreted by key decision-makers or, sometimes, vital pieces of analysis being put at the bottom of the pile because they were working towards their own political objectives (internal promotions, fiefdoms and controls of budgets). Mostly, it was a case of the volume and complexity of analysis and information available defeating the decision-makers. Moreover, the rapacious turn of events superseded their ability to properly manage and utilize available resources to prevent the wholesale collapse of their banks and the global meltdown.

When too much noise enters a system — be it a business model or too many chiefs in a senior management team — sense gets drowned out and decisions become confused rather than clear and coherent. That’s the nature and source of fallibility in human existence, alas.

In the HARDtalk interview, the head of the FSA provided an important lead and clear observation about the need to “assess risk concentration” properly rather than to adopt any kneejerk reactions about separating commercial retail lending from the investment banking business. He reminded us that the reason the wholesale or universal banking model developed (in laymen’s terms creating a banking behemoth such as the Citigroups / HSBCs / Deutsche Banks: Main Street banking plus asset management, corporate lending, brokerage services, investment banking — corporate finance advisory, equities, fixed income, irfx, secondaries, etc. — hedge funds and institutional sovereigns all operating under the bank’s brand umbrella) was in the interests of risk diversification and economies of scale.

In other words, don’t put all our eggs into the same basket and, at the same time, the economic principle that producing one egg at a time isn’t going to be as profitable as producing in batches and en masse.

It may also be helpful to think of a bank like a patient who needs surgery. Hacking off the patient’s limbs (aka separating each of the bank’s businesses) may not be helpful or life-saving if, actually, it’s his heart that’s clogged up and he needs a double bypass. It’s the heart where his health risks are accumulating and concentrating rather than his limbs, of and within themselves, which become immobilized or paralyzed by what his heart’s doing.

Again, this is why we need prognostic, diagnostic and remedial tools that are keenly calibrated and sense-making rather than blunt and off-radar/fuzzy logic.

As it stands, the FSA’s proposals to assess risk concentrations and to implement measures to alleviate them within the financial system and, specifically, on issues of risks covered by the Basel II accords seem sensible, progressive and practical. For anyone interested, here are some links to Basel II resources:

· http://www.bis.org/publ/bcbs128.pdf

· http://www.risk.net/public/showPage.html?page=665558

· http://www.ebrd.com/country/sector/fi/conference/willem.pdf

Few media interviews have examined Basel II and capital adequacy requirements to offset operational risk in any depth and most interviews have focused on economists’ forecasts and pronouncements (Nourbini, Krugman et al), but actually more representatives from these firms need to have their insights probed and shared by the media:

* strategy consultancies like McKinsey, Oliver Wyman and Greenwich Associates — how do they envisage the restructuring of the banks and ensuring otherwise silo information is suitably shared between the businesses (equities, fixed income, etc.);

* remuneration and headhunting agencies — what characteristics should and will future CEOs, senior management and board members have, to ensure the risk-reward dimensions are managed properly;

* ratings agencies — what are the measures to insure independence of ratings analysis from relationships with banks; and

* risk management technology providers — how can secure and commonly shared tech solutions be implemented which will allow banks to maintain the competitive advantage of their platforms (trading and intellectual capital) whilst also acting as a one-stop detector and manager of global banking system risk.

If we ask the right people the right questions, sooner or later we arrive at some sensible solutions.

Now the other part of the Sackur interview which made me LOL was when he suggested that there’s a conflict of interest for Hector Sants, Lord Adair Turner and David Walker who’ve all been appointed to senior roles at the FSA since they all either worked in banks or are closely associated with banks as board members (presently and previously). In the US, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s previous tenure as CEO of Goldman Sachs was also pointed to as a potential source of conflict of interest. In other words, that former bankers now working for government bodies would negotiate structures and terms of bailout and regulation which are more favorable to their former employers (the banks) than to their current employers (the public).

Employment contracts governing conduct in the interests of current employers may supersede and be more legally binding than any residual loyalties towards former employers — particularly since that contract of employment is terminated and no longer active and they’re not paying the mortgage / children’s schooling fees / employer pension contributions, perhaps.

In any case, after Sackur asked the question, I kept thinking: “Well, instead of former bankers who actually have direct experience of how banks operate and where the risks of financial cardiac arrests appear on-and-off balance sheets, would people prefer it if the heads of the SEC, FSA, Consob etc. were from the worlds of entertainment / leisure travel / cosmetics?

Instead of Hector Sants with his (supposed) conflicts of interest would the public and the media prefer it if the FSA appointed someone like Paris Hilton who’d have almost negligible conflict of interest since she’s never worked in a bank?!”

We can also think of the global economic system being like a car whose engine has stalled. Now, if your car breaks down do you call a car mechanic you know who’s got a few decades of judgment-experience working directly with cars and has several pieces of paper which say he’s passed the requisite exams, to try and help fix your car or do you call one of these people:

(i.) a used car salesman;

(ii.) a petrol station attendant;

(iii.) a cook working in the restaurant attached to the highway stop-off;

(iv.) a satnav retailer;

(v.) the model who sits next to the man driving the car in the ad;

(vi.) a motoring commentator such Jeremy Clarkson;

(vii.) Jenson Button / Mika Hakkinen / Lewis Hamilton;

(viii.) a best boy electric (aka lighting engineer who works in a TV / theater / film production unit);

(ix.) a cosmonaut who helped fix the Hubble space station; or

(x.) the CEO of General Motors / Chrysler.

Hmmmn………Personally, I’d get the qualified car mechanic in. I certainly wouldn’t jump to the “conflict of interest” connection just because he’d previously serviced my neighbor’s car, charged for his mechanical skills and made their car run more fuel efficiently per mile or more green than mine!

LOL.

On a serious note, it’s vitally important to check that conflicts of interests are at a minimal. We do want to ensure the bailouts and regulatory regimes are as objective, efficient and effective as possible and that all parties are working towards end goals that are beneficial to ordinary households. Nevertheless, the media can act as a check and balance about possible conflicts of interest in a more informed way.

A more interesting question to ask would have been, “Some people will be skeptical the FSA will be able to regulate and enforce policies in the City of London following the recent global meltdown and what look to be cowboy speculators running amok whilst the sheriffs were in the saloon, asleep. They may also feel uncomfortable about potential conflicts of interests since you previously worked at CSFB and ask themselves whether they have trust and confidence in a former banker now policing the banks — in a sense, poacher turned gamekeeper. So……..what would you say are the policy and risk management techniques you developed during your time in banking which can help repair the damage which has been done to the reputation of London and the global financial markets as a whole, and restore market confidence in the FSA?”

That’s a much more interesting question because it recognizes that mistakes were obviously made (with typical wry journalistic vernacular about cowboy speculators and sheriffs), the markets and its participants are wary, the interviewee has an opportunity to bring former experiences to bear in restructuring the system appropriately, and the way forward to solutions.

Solutions are what we need.

I TOLD YOU SO

Yes, sometimes some people don’t understand or appreciate my attempts to help them steer clear of icebergs and plot a path that’s more win-win for company-customer-collaborators alike; objective proposals which will result in their strategic health. Instead, they have some form of obsessive compulsive disorder, narrow myopia or ego insanity to play chicken with the iceberg.

Well, they can play chicken with the iceberg if they want.

I’ll be on the ship heading for open waters, new horizons and reachable destinations.

This picture on the ‘Huffington Post’ site is so charming and spontaneous I couldn’t resist smiling. I then SMS’ed my friend, GC, and told him that the Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi, had managed to ensconce himself with the trio of the world’s most important economies: the US, Russia and China.

GC called me back and we had a great conversation about Berlusconi, whom it transpires he’s known for many years.

In any case it’s good that despite all the supposed political frictions and grandstanding going into the summit, some core principles were agreed upon regarding tighter and more coordinated international regulation of the financial system, and that the IMF’s lending facilities were boosted three-fold to US$750 million from its present US$250 million. This will enable it to support developing economies more as they too try to survive the global recession so it’s a welcome move. Clearly, due consideration will have to be taken in TARGETED and measured lending to prevent some governments from attempting to call on IMF funds and then misspending those funds. However, in principle, boosting IMF monetary funds is a good decision from the G20 summit.

Now, some people may wonder why I as a former banker and someone who believes in capitalism would welcome stricter regulation. This is because I believe in capitalism of a particular kind: SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE and INFORMED capitalism. The current system is not as informed as it could be which partially explains why bubbles were allowed to build (from complex instruments like the mortgage CDOs, offshore SPVs, hedge funds etc.), undetected, until the burst became inevitable and resulted in a domino / ripple effect through the global economy.

There had been a lot of, “We didn’t know this was going on. There was no information available to us,” which doesn’t abrogate responsibilities from anyone but it does reflect that information is not being effectively channeled to important decision-makers; these are defined as people who affect the global economy — whether they be politicians, economists, bankers or consumers.

If they don’t have this information readily available or calculable:

· risk exposures of off-balance sheet SPVs

· hedge fund accounting

· reward structures without floors or ceilings for people who are speculating with others’ pension funds, assets, mortgages etc.

Then some of the decisions they make are bound to be from a blind spot; this means they’ll hit the iceberg sooner or later, and it’s something we all want to prevent because it takes innocents down with them. This has been seen with ordinary taxpayers being tied into various government bailouts (financial institutions as well as automobile and other sectors). Instead of directing funds which could otherwise have gone into building schools, hospitals, telcoms and other infrastructure, governments are being forced to prop up the banking system to prevent total collapse and economic anarchy.

So when I say “socially responsible capitalism” I mean the type that will support the ability for interested parties to allocate their funds towards building schools etc. whilst also enabling individuals to be entrepreneurial and generate profit and rewards.

Let me be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of profit, value, growth and rewards in a capitalist democracy. However, there is also everything right with being INFORMED on a real-time basis about all the worst-case scenario consequences of how that pursuit is conducted and impacts upon the wider community.

What has struck me from my operational experiences within banking as well as now with the Internet commentary on the global financial crisis has been the absence of technology voices to say how THEY can and would contribute to solutions — both of information coordination as well as providing tools to make sense of that information to provide better decision-making tools at the disposal of political leaders, civil servants, central bankers, senior investment bankers and pertinent others that will prevent a re-occurrence of the current situation.

There are security concerns with respect to sharing and coordinating information electronically on this scale. Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile to have these conversations from the outset. Let’s have the social media sphere make genuine innovations and work out how to harness crowd-sourcing and collaboration tools (to contribute to solving serious issues) — instead of throwing electric sheep at their followers or amplifying their ADHD by limiting the full capacity of their intelligence to a 140 character tweet.

Now is the time and Tim O’Reilly himself has also asked for more seriousness from this next generation of tech entrepreneurs:

* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/10/tim-oreilly-get.html

As for me, tomorrow I have a catch-up lunch with GC. We always have very interesting and productive conversations so I’m looking forward to it.

Next week I’ll meet some Silicon Valley people and I intend to ask them for their insights on how technology can play a more central role in getting the global economy back on its feet as well as preventing future re-occurrences of this last year: an annus horribulus economica.

Ceo All Hands 10-7-08 Final

This blog tells how a person quest led me to thinking about President-elect Obama’s prospective international agenda and how it can fit into Debategraph, a wiki debate visualization tool provided under Creative Commons.

(1.)         GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, 16 September 2008:

(2.) INTERNATIONAL ISSUES, Iraq War opposition (2002 to election campaign):

(3.) CLIMATE CHANGE, 18 November 2008:

The domestic issues I’ll omit here but they are readily available at the Barack Obama site.

A JOURNEY BEGINS

Earlier this month I went in online search of a dear man called Giorgio Bertini, with whom I’d been swapping notes about the current financial crisis as well as much mirth. Giorgio, for the uninitiated, is the Chile-based Administrador for  “Conversaciones Locales” – Comunidad Agentes Locales de Desarrollo, and has previously worked for the UN. He’s very interested in fostering net communities to educate and to collaborate as well as to solve serious major world issues, and has a terrific joie de vivre (in addition to personal kindness).

Finding Giorgio led me to the Global Sense-Making (GSM) Ning and opened my online life up even more.

From this week until President-elect Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009, David Price, the creator of the GSM Ning and the co-founder of debategraph, is collaborating with the Independent newspaper online to produce some visual tools to stimulate participation in and interaction with.

The project’s objective is to model what should be on Obama’s agenda and can provisionally be viewed here:

* Obama’s potential agenda, the Independent online

My notes to David to contribute my US$0.02 to the process can be read via the link as well as in full below:

* Twain’s notes on David Price’s debategraph on Obama’s potential agenda

1^ST ITERATION OF THE DEBATEGRAPH

David,

This is a fantastic way to present visual data for the Independent readers online!

To my mind there are 5 main agenda items which President-elect Obama needs to focus on and I wonder whether the map can designate prioritization (e.g., each subsidiary electron is numbered)? The items are:

(1.) Cabinet Appointments:

 — Secretary of State (Bill Richardson cf. Hillary Clinton — which represents real change? International diplomatic experience vs international recognition. Dove versus hawk. Who has endorsed each potential candidate and what are the implications? Henry Kissinger has publicly come out in favor of Clinton)

— Treasury Secretary (potential candidates being speculated upon range from Larry Summers, formerly Principal of Harvard and Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, to Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve)

— Secretary of Defense (speculation is between present incumbent Bob Gates or Gen. Wesley Clarke)

(2.) Global financial crisis

— US$700 billion bailout (structure + implementation timetable)

— US specific regulatory reforms

— executive compensation oversight

— plans to acquire (or otherwise) toxic assets

— support for non-financial sector businesses affected

— support for homeowners

— international frameworks for financial stability

(3.) International policy, principally focused on:

— Iraq + Afghanistan issues

— Middle East Peace Roadmap

— Russian hegemony

— China + trade relations

— EU ties compared with “special relationship” with the UK

(4.) Domestic policy:

— Healthcare

— Education

— Green economy that can be exported as a business model in replacement of Wall St model

(5.) US reputation abroad:

— Guantanamo Bay

— Flights of rendition

— ‘Walk the Talk” and lead the way in a GREEN future

In addition to referring to direct source material from Obama’s campaign and the Independent’s digital assets, it may be worthwhile to cross-refer to these sites:

* Huffington Post — Politics

* RGE Monitor — Roubini

Professor Roubini of Stern University is widely credited in the US for predicting the current financial travails.

* Democrats Abroad

* Democratic Strategist

* The Brookings Institute

I hope this helps. Good luck!

RESPONDING TO GIORGIO BERTINI + MARK SZPAKOWSKI’s COMMENTS

Following on from what Giorgio and Mark wrote, I’d like to pick up on three points:

(1.) Green employment policy

(2.) Complexity of interconnectedness

(3.) Future modeling and tech tools

On the first point, previously I shared with Mark a report from the PERI Institute which covers in some detail how, potentially, 2 million new jobs in the green sector could be created within 2 years with a change in economic and labor policy:

* PERI — creating 2 million green jobs

My contention has always been that the green movement needs to move upstream from campaigning about recycling marketing materials and packaging to these areas:

* significant job creation in the sector, particularly in the MANUFACTURE of green technologies;

* consumer influence at the product design stage as a form of green quality control; and

* more appropriate inventory systems to meet GENUINE demand with supply and thereby reduce the surplus (that wastes electricity to produce, resources to refrigerate and / or house, etc.)

On the second point, I agree with Giorgio and Mark that the global system is much more complexly connected than current technology tools will actually allow us to model. The closest I’ve seen of any technology which offers us more insight into what can potentially be done is Quantum4D:

* Gallery of RDF and 4D nodal perspectives

* Banking sector stability

* The MetaBase

Nonetheless, even with Quantum4D there are limitations and I’ll cover this in my final point.

As an associated sub-strand to (2.), Mark’s insight on the STYLE of leadership (responsive, listening, and empathetic) is an important and — to my mind — a critical one. No one of a rational and democratic intelligence likes or wants a dictator, bully, megalomaniac or tyrant as a Head of State. We reject these types in our daily lives and they command almost negligible trust or respect as leaders of men.

In corporate life, this is also true. The narcissists and the egomaniacs (aka the hubris oriented) have proven to be the cause of long-term value destruction rather than value nurturing. By comparison, leaders who can combine strong technical skills (i.e., work their ways around a balance sheet and understand the appropriate drivers and levers to exercise in order to foster sustainable growth and profit generation) with nuanced EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE are often successful in both innovating and implementing 360-2020 win-win sustainable solutions.

I make the distinction between value nurturing as opposed to value creation because it would be relatively easy for President-elect Obama to seemingly create value but if it’s not nurtured, it won’t develop or become self-sustaining and strategic — merely tactical point-scoring.

On the final point, what technology should we be looking to build? Well, personally, I believe Alan Kay has absolutely led the way in this with the Squeak and Tweak languages (current iterations of smalltalk-80). In his writings, Alan often refers to how this OOP is an attempt to more closely proxy in computer language how the biochemical world works.

Why and how is it relevant to politics and policy-making?

Well, both are complex organic systems which are not bound by linear cause and effect impetus alone. In an ideal scenario, the technology tools would allow us to map a policy in the same way that we can map the pharmacology of a drug at a particular point and its subsequent effects throughout the body.

In the same way, we would then be able to track all the moving parts of a policy and how it permeates domestically and internationally — as well as how it interacts with other countries’ policies and changes form and shape as a result.

When we can model policy like biochemical reactions is when we’ll be able to capture the full complexity of international connectedness.

2^ND ITERATION OF THE DEBATEGRAPH

The Climate Change and Response to Financial Crisis spheres are shaping up really well.

If I may, a few minor edits and adds?

* Typo — there are two L’s in HiLLary Clinton. 

* The 4th person in the cornerstone being considered for Sec. of State is Chuck Hagel.

* Another person being considered for Treasury Secretary is Robert Rubin.

* Under Response tFC:

(i.) Identify and ring-fence off problem financial institutions.

(ii.) Compile and communicate information on companies not affected by the toxic assets — this is a more immediate measure that can help restore confidence. At the moment, people are selling “blind” otherwise solid stock due to lack of information from authorities.

(iii.) Implement timely bans on short-selling.

(iv.) It’s capital injection in exchange for stock rather than stock injection plan. Stock injection has a result of diluting earnings per share (EPS) which would cause further loss of confidence in the company.

(v.) Wrt Resolution Trust Corp, I think “apply the more effective measures learnt from the RTC” is better than wholesale re-creation of it. As far as I can recall from articles it wasn’t profitable and if US govt. is going to use US$700 billion of taxpayers’ money it needs to have a respectable ROI.

(vi.) Increase transparency of hedge funds and bring them under closer SEC/FSA etc regulation

(vii.) Re-work Basel II and international GAAP (accounting frameworks)

* Under Policy Measures on Climate Change:

(i.) Severe fines and other punishments for companies which violate green principles — ordinarily, I wouldn’t advocate the stick, but in the case of Climate Change and the urgency of the challenge it may be necessary.

(ii.) Develop an independent kitemark standard to award green companies — just like the Blue flag in the UK indicates which beach is clean, so there should be a universal Green Kite.

TECHNOLOGY + the INTERNET

This should also be added as a key sphere of President-elect Obama’s agenda. He is the first President to be elected by the deployment of Internet campaigning (his eponymous website, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace).

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, has been discussing the role the Internet played in this election:

* Eric Schmidt on the Internet + Presidential Election 2008

There’s also material in the blogosphere and business technology sites on what an Obama presidency may mean for the sector.

I’m looking forward to the next iteration of the graph!

ADDING MORE DIMENSIONS TO THE DEBATE

hi David,

This debategraph’s becoming quite brilliant! Thanks for incorporating my suggestions.

A few more quick ones.

(1.) Triggers to the global financial crisis include:

* American banks sought better revenue streams with high-yielding, risky and complex securities (since yields on long-term US bonds had been depressed by heavy international demand).

* relaxed US monetary policies until 2004 (Fed rate, July 2003 — July 2004: 1%). As a comparison between Jan — July 2007 it was at 5.25%.

* crisis of confidence dislocated the money markets where ordinary investors are involved; they withdrew their savings (as in the case of Northern Rock and in the States forced the US govt to intervene with financial support to mutual funds).

Prior to this triggered contagion the confidence issue was purely institutional, so banks were reluctant to lend to each other. When it affected the money markets was when the crisis became acute.

(2.) In the Political Implications of the global financial crisis, one of the key debates is about the demise of exported American capitalism of the Wall Street variety:

* Death toll for American capitalism — Newsweek

(3.) In International Economy as well as facilitating the devaluation of the Yen, the Americans need to consider their policies re. the Chinese renminbi. There was a great article in capital.fr (in French about this; I’ll try to re-find it).

Meanwhile this YouTube video is informative:

* Chinese renmibi revaluation 

(4.) Under technology there are are two strands related to green issues:

(i.) tech co’s advancing energy efficiency through shared data centers — please see Green Grid roster of companies here:

* The Green Grid roster 

(ii.) Google itself has a made substantial investments and strategic moves into renewable technologies:

* Google’s Green Commitment 

* Google crunches the green numbers 

* Google and GE go green together 

(5.) Under International Policy, with the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State there’s some more material on what some of the topics may be:

* How will Hillary Clinton work with President-elect Obama as Secretary of State? 

WHY I’M INCLUDING MY NOTES ON “ALWAYS THE TWAIN”

I plan to use my blog as some type of time capsule for my shared thinking online……….

HOW THE DEBATEGRAPH’S PROGRESSING

It’s now available as an embed:

<iframe src=’http://debategraph.org/flash/fv.aspx?r=7714&d=2&i=1′ frameborder=’0′ width=’490′ height=’650′ scrolling=’no’></iframe>

ABOUT DEBATEGRAPH

Debategraph is a wiki visualization debate tool provided under Creative Commons. It was co-founded by David Price,  a Cambridge University graduate has worked in diverse roles with a wide range of organisations including: the BBC, the European Commission, the UK Prime Minister’

s Office, H. M. Treasury, and Virgin TV; and Peter Baldwin, a former Australian cabinet minister who has leveraged his programming experiences to develop the debategraph software.

Some of the debate topics covered so far include:

·      Can computers think?

·      Whose identity is it anyway?

·      Flash versus Ajax

·      Sport and Genetic Enhancement

·      To be or not to be? (a light-hearted take on Shakespeare)

What they’re attempting to do is interesting and I wish them success with it.