Incendia Sparks

We can certainly point to many Pareto or power law distributed phenomenon in the "natural" world as well as those created by man. The business world is certainly no exception. In addition, many industries or markets see disruptive events that don't necessarily mediate a redistribution of wealth but trigger a redistribution. Inevitably, the distribution seems to often reflect a pareto style distribution. Is the banking industry any different? Was the recession the disruptive event that set the events in motion for a redistribution of wealth among the banking industry?

My recent knol examines relevant heuristics and cognitive biases in open systems on the Internet
How accurate or objective are product reviews and ratings? How well do public (online) conversations reflect the actual views of the participants? Do cognitive biases, selection biases and heuristics influence public interactions, reviews, ratings, conversations, etc. in open systems? To what degree? What can be done to reduce bias? This working paper represents a thought project style (i.e. non-experimental) exploration of these issues.

To read more, view the knol here: http://knol.google.com/k/dan-pothier/cognitive-bias-in-online-open-syste...

I recently came across Doc Searles' article over at Linux Journal entitled "EOF - The Google Exposure" in which he discusses; "Advertising is a bubble. If that’s a true statement, Google is a bubble too. And if that’s true, many of the goods we take for granted on the Web are at risk. Let’s run down some evidence."

If you're interested in reading the article (I suggest you do) you can find it here:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/eof-google-exposure?page=0,0

This is a little off my normal topics, but I'd like to talk a bit about real estate prices today.

I've hypothesized before that the Internet generally creates a destructive paradigm for the business models it seeks to replace (e.g. instead of adding value it just cannibalizes existing models through price point competition). In the newspaper industry for example, you can replace a relatively large economic supply chain of loggers, transport trucks, pulp mills, paper mills, printing presses, delivery trucks, professional journalists, paper boys to deliver newspapers to hundreds of thousands of homes, etc with a couple of servers that can accomplish the same thing.

Social Media Marketers all over the Internet are drooling over themselves at Dell's claims that they made $3 million dollars in sales via Twitter all for $0 cost. They're using these stories as testimonials to convince big brands that social media marketing is right for them. Statements like "Twitter Earns Brands Millions - For Free" are typical of their claims.

Dan Ariely wrote in his book "Predictably Irrational" that people don't have an internal value meter and that we rarely choose things in absolute terms. His specific quote (regarding the subscription options available at the time for the Economist) was:

Ok, so not everything around here has to be serious, so when Rob posted on Facebook a definition of the "Canadian Refrigerator" we were motivated to perform some good (or quite possibly bad) science to confirm or deny this hypothesis.

For your reference, the definition states:

Canadian Refrigerator:
A bank or pile of snow during the colder months of winter, where food or beverage products (namely soda and beer) can be stored. Great for parties.

"Are we out of Molson Canadian?"
"There's plenty in the Canadian refrigerator."

Entropy tells us that highly ordered systems are improbable and that increasing order has decreasing probability. Emergent systems are patterns of organization that emerge from complexity or multiplicity. Complexity is somewhat relative and subjective since it depends entirely on your frame of reference. If society could be described as emergent, it might also be defined as being more complex than the sum of it's parts. Additionally, society could be defined as having increasing order.

Today I'm seeking knowledge or debate on a question I have regarding emergence. And my reasoning might be built around flawed assumptions, so feel free to correct my flawed assumptions (if you'd be so kind).

The first assumption I've gathered is that in emergence theory, you can define man as having emergent properties from the environment, that is to say that man is shaped by his environment.