Incendia Sparks

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.

Has the Starbucks "hype" passed? Has the great coffee empire entered a slow but inevitable decline? Are corporations like Starbucks built like empires or like the goldrush? Perhaps we can see some evidence of the beginning of the decline. Is it possible for a corporation to continue to deliver quality on a massive scale? I say no and I predict they're at the edge of a precipice leading to a (possibly short depending on their behavior) decline, the evidence for which is the declining quality of goods, a reduced customer focus and economies of scale that don't work.

It's a well known fact that currently Drupal 6's admin interface (while a big step up from Drupal 5) is weak. It's not very aesthetically pleasing, it's not very easy to use, and it's not very powerful. Things are looking up for a few reasons though, namely that for Drupal 7, they are making the user interface one of the main focus points (see http://www.d7ux.org/ for more info).  While Drupal 7 is still a little ways off, there are several modules out there that can help a lot for making the administrator and content provider's jobs a lot easier.

Up until Friday Nov. 27 at 2:25 a.m. I'd say that the Tiger Woods brand was on top of the world. He is built a massive worldwide brand icon around his birth name, and a very marketable name it is.

While working on a business directory today, I came to a stark conclusion - The state of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in Drupal 6 is in a sorry, sorry state - despite being very important to a lot of people. I had implemented similar projects in Drupal 5 before without difficulties using the Location module, so I was expecting this to be a piece of cake. Unfortunately this was far from the case, because every GIS related module out there (as of today) is either lacking necessary (in my opinion) features, or is broken in some major way.

I had proposed previously that something like an ad futures marketplace could be an interesting model for a type of advertising "trading platform". Where, upon anticipating strong demand for advertising spots in certain niches, you could lock up future supply by buying "ad spot futures contracts" that guaranteed a fixed price for certain ad spots in the future. For example, if you were an investor wanting to capitalize on the next Twilight movie, you could go to all of the niche twilight sites and buy up all of their future ad spaces for a discounted price (since many, many publishers are cash starved and would take a much lower price today) then, when the event hit, you could turn around and sell the ad spots to a niche specific advertiser for a much higher price, making a profit.

I have a concept called Social Capital I'll be introducing over the next little while. The very early introduction can be found here: http://atrium.pyropath.com/social-capital/node/291

I'm planning on running this project as transparently as possible and with as much adherence to the scientific method as possible. I want to develop a quantifiable science of social capital. Whether that is reasonable to achieve or not remains to be seen.

I'd welcome any constructive input.

The myth of the Rational Person is an issue that plagues game theory and economics. It is also clearly an issue across many analytical and decision making models in social theory. What is interesting about the issue is when people try to rationalize decisions using flawed inputs.

For example, the media is notorious for reporting inaccurate or irrational information on subjects such as H1N1 influenza immunization. And the coffee shop talk often revolves around this contemporary issue.