Tom Grace

stoweboyd:

The Game Never-Ending, the start of Flickr

I can only speak from experience. I get invites to Quora. But I use Stack Overflow, sometimes without even realizing it.  

This Stack Overflow question illustrates how, for now at least, Stack Overflow appears to be a direct descendant of MetaFilter. By contrast, Quora presently seems like the love child of The Well and Uncle Plaxo. 

stoweboyd:

After using Quora for several months and seeing the myriad ways to game the system to get more upvotes, I’ve also seen a dozen ways to reduce the amount of gaming that is going on. Given the intelligence of the quora staff, I assume they probably have two dozen more on the table, but they are not being implemented. I doubt they’re even being tested.

Why?

Because more upvotes means more opportunities to stroke the ego of people answering questions. The more ego stroking, the more answers posted. The more answers posted, the more SEO, tweets, and shares. The more SEO, tweets, etc., the more users.

Here’s just a small sample of easy to implement things that could (maybe, maybe not) reduce the popularity contest:

• Make upvotes decay so that popular older votes have a better chance to be overcome by new, better answers (the Hacker News method)
• Make all answers anonymous until voted upon so that the identity of the answerer doesn’t influence the voter
• Don’t allow upvotes in the stream without taking people to the page so they can see some of the other answers
• Look for suspicious voting behavior like someone voting down every answer on a page (so theirs floats to the top)
• Only allow a user to vote up one answer on a page
• Require better identification by disallowing registration by solely twitter accounts (or simply weigh votes)
• etc. etc.

I wonder if any of these recommendations get picked up? I like the decay idea, and limiting upvotes (like GetSatisfaction) makes real sense.

ecohustler:

Finally a good use for Four Loko after the FDA issued warning letters to four companies on Nov. 17 saying the beverages’ combination of caffeine and alcohol can lead to a “wide-awake drunk.” The agency called the caffeine an “unsafe food additive.” Warning letters were sent to Phusion…

Four Loko, literally, gasoline.

Two bits I am looking forward to reading this weekend are the alpha nerd takes on Wikileaks that landed this week: Jarod Lanier’s “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy” at The Atlantic and Bruce Sterling’s “The Blast Shack” at Webstock.

Serious stuff no doubt. But when I first read this Sterling excerpt over at Stowe Boyd’s tumblr, I burst out laughing.  Begun, Wikileaks has.

Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange.

Fries, a vanilla shake, and a dose of animal-grade oxacillin please…

FlixonStix. The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. The Good: Indie film makers selling one-time views or short-term rentals. The Bad: Millions more semi-useful usb drives heading for landfills The Ugly: Another proprietary set top box play. Really? Boxee should just copy this. Maybe it would be a way to get Redbox customers to grok Boxee.

Watched this Graeme Taylor clip while standing at a crosswalk in Herald Square.

Note to self: there may be a larger point here that you are missing. 

courtesy of Swiss Miss and Capn Design

zadi:

designcircus:

11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food — far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.

Best quote from this kid: “Some people say organic or local food is more expensive. But is it really? … It seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or we can pay the hospital.”

Very true.

rebeccalando:

thedailywhat:

Food Pyramid of the Day: Now that’s more like it.

[biotv.]

This is pretty much exactly what I’ve been doing with the awesome homemade sriracha Stryker gave to me. 

Example of food pyramid in real life

Strolling through the Farm City Fair in Brooklyn this weekend, I took in the sod sculpture, snacked on tasty Brooklyn onigiri and had to concede that Jesse Jackson may have been onto something when he dismissed urban agriculture as “cute but foolish.”  

The Reverend Jackson parachuted into Detroit early last week and snagged headlines ahead of Mayor Dave Bing’s Wednesday night address on the future of that city (find reactions to Jackson’s remarks here, here and here). 

The second half of Jackson’s soundbite was-wait for it- Big Industry Come Home. Sadly, this is more of a bad memory than a vision for the future. This playbook ignores the last half century in Detroit and other cities (this NYT story rehashes our manufacturing decline).

Still, Jackson’s skepticism was a nice break from the Extra Long Play group hug that urban farming received from the media this summer.  It seems fair to ask how we get from today’s experiments to the good, green jobs and tax revenues communities are seeking. 

In mid-May, the LRB published a terrific article by Jeremy Harding. Surveying those who see the end of the era of modern plenty defined by  ”long distances and short order times”, Harding sums up “seven big problems” facing our food supply:

Population Growth

Urbanisation on this scale poses big questions about land use (housing v. farming) and the production of food by a minority for a majority as the gap between the two gets wider.

Worldwide Diet Change

Global production of food – all food – will have to increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years to cater for two billion extra people and cope with the rising demand for meat.

Energy

It takes 160 litres of oil to produce a tonne of maize in the US; natural gas accounts for at least three-quarters of the cost of making nitrogen fertiliser; freight, too, depends on fuel.

Peak Land

…as the FAO suggests in its diplomatic way, ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most productive land begins to diminish (soil exhaustion, climate change) and marginal land comes up for reassessment.

Water shortage

Worldwide, one in three people face water shortages and by 2030 the ratio will have narrowed.

Climate Change

…extreme weather events will also jeopardise agriculture and the movement of food from one place to another.

Workforce loss

The head count of these land armies – 600 million at a guess – sounds impressive but it doesn’t change the fact that the overall number of people working in agriculture is falling.

In the back half of the article, Harding handicaps the response to date in the U.K.: 

Scientists, policy analysts, nutritionists, campaigners – call them the food observatory – don’t have seven big solutions to the seven fundamentals. Instead, they put together a mix of different approaches, shuttling strategically between agricultural and cultural, global and parochial, chemical and organic, the death of the planet and the fun of the kitchen, ‘sustainable production’ and ‘sustainable diet’. 

You only have to spend a moment on the literature to grasp that these are not confused people, unable to make up their minds; it’s simply that they want a range of interventions on several, overlapping fronts, and soon.

The “food observatory”— that’s a keeper. Overall, Harding’s piece is a deft sketch of the current food frontier and much in line with Michael Pollan’s recent observation in the Seattle Times: 

We are pre-Earth Day, where the environmental movement was before April 1970. I don’t know what our Earth Day will be like, but I think we’re really at the beginning of something still.

The discussion of Thanet Earth, a greenhouse megaplex on the Isle of Kent, is a fascinating piece on its own. People wondering what Detroit’s Hantz Farms will look like in 2015 should read this.