Open Source Software and Social Ecological Systems

Two great talks in Palo Alto on Thursday, April 8:

1) Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL at PARC, on Open Source business models. OS is not altruistic; it is the self-serving component of OS that makes its possibilities limitless—everyone is incentivized to serve themselves. OS cannot exist without a user community. OS does not reduce R&D costs, but leads to higher software quality sooner. It both reduces marketing costs and speeds market penetration.

Any software that is core to a company that is not core to a competitor will get open sourced by the competitor sooner or later (e.g., Google open sourcing Android, a market core to Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft). Red Hat, the largest OS company, is the exception in its lack of IP; most OS companies retain significant IP. MySQL made money by licensing a subscription bundle including monitoring tools, legal indemnification, support, etc. 3 next big things after OS: cloud computing, mobile Internet, open data.

2) Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Economics Nobel Prize laureate at Stanford, on Understanding Social Ecological Systems (SESs). Contrary to conventional economic thinking, cooperation arises in many free-rider/shared resource (commons) environments (such as forests, oceans, and the atmosphere) without government intervention. Trust among users is key: trusting others to reciprocate reduces the fear of being a sucker. Communication is essential in inducing cooperation; communication with sanctioning is most effective. Reputations of participants (their historical behavior), longer time horizons, are also key. High social capital = low transaction costs.

In response to my question, she knew of and liked SFI’s Steve Lansing’s work in Bali to restore local rice farmers’ social norms and rituals that preserved precious water but which had been disrupted by well-intentioned government intervention. Described herself as a “radical poly-centrist” supporting not one central authority but multiple networked authorities.

Cal Day: Berkeley's Open House

"Cal" Day, the annual Open House at Berkeley on Saturday, was superb, and is now scheduled as a recurring annual event on my calendar. The day-long series of faculty lectures on all topics are free and open to the public. We learned, for example:

• How Polimerase Chain Reactions (PCRs) that speedily make billions of copies of genes and thus enable all kinds of research, genetic testing, and production processes was invented by Cetus Corporation's Kary Mullis in 1983 and led to his winning the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1993. PCR makes use of the enzyme Taq polymerase, discovered in 1965 by Thomas Brock in Yellowstone hot springs, that can perform even at the high temperatures required to successively separate and copy genes. For more on this in a lighter vein, see the PCR and GTCA songs:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD3faDLEvmY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID6KY1QBR5s.

• Yes, the brain is pliable: The part of breeding canaries' brains dealing with learning songs doubles in size during the spring mating season, then contracts to its original size. This same neurogenesis is now believed to apply to human brains as well. The hippocampi (part of the brains) of London taxi drivers, who have to learn all the streets in London and the best way to get between any two city locations, are larger than normal. Use it or lose it :-)

• Black holes are the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Every galaxy has a black hole at its center, and our Milky Way galaxy also has millions of smaller black holes throughout, the remains of collapsed stars. The black holes at the center of every galaxy emit so much radiation and eject so much matter that they profoundly affect the formation of the galaxy.

• The latest advances in evolutionary theory show that the Cambrian "explosion" of life forms between 490-542 million years ago, as evidenced by fossils in the famous Burgess Shale, was not so weird as Steven Jay Gould believed in Incredible Life. Rather, the explosion follows from several factors: growing levels of Oxygen in earth's atmosphere (the result of life) that enabled increasing complexity of genes; the principle of "frustration" selection (what is optimal for an organism overall is sub-optimal for any specific function); and interactions among species, i.e., ecology.

• Saturn's moon Enceladus, only 500 km across, has geysers spewing ice crystals and creating one of Saturn's rings. Amazing that such a small moon could be so volcanically active. Pluto is now known to have at least three moons: moonlets Nix and Hydra in addition to Charon.

Brain Science and Digital Signal Processing

Fascinating lunch yesterday with neurobiologist Bradley Voytek at Berkeley. Digital signal processing (DSP) techniques are being used to understand how signals are transmitted among parts of the brain. Higher frequencies are generally used for shorter distances; lower frequencies, for longer distances within the brain. A neurobiologist crowd-compiled data base is needed to characterize which parts of the brain link to other parts, and which nodes serve as intermediaries. Signals are more apt to be received, and people are more able to focus, during lulls of signals at other frequencies. People with attention deficit disorder (ADD) may lack the ability to create these lulls. Network diagrams describe many aspects of the brain better than spatial models do. Attention network theorists and DSP engineers: neurobiology needs your skills. Brain science may be the next big career opportunity for mathematicians and electrical engineers.