Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Wiser Than You Think

The Crowd and The Life of Brian

Here at Network Address we've been interested in wisdom of the crowds for some time now. But as evidence like this starts to come out more, I wonder how much of this "wisdom of the crowds" thing has actually already been optimized by a kind of democratic voting system that we already have in place in a lot of developed countries? Like, have we known about Galton's ex-weighing trick for centuries and that's the reason why we vote the way we do? And we're just re-learning it again now because of an advance in technology?

And on the other hand, can we just translate all this to AI, because you know, they might do it better than us. (They?)

Crowds within crowd found to outperform 'wisdom of the crowd'
Jan 2018, phys.org


Post Script

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki, 2004

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds
Yahoo Finance, April 2016

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Off the Grid


Brooklyn's social housing microgrid rewrites relationships with utility companies
Aug 2017, The Guardian

"Microgrids offer something that rooftop solar alone cannot: the ability to leave the grid entirely."

Until the shit goes down.

I am totally into the sentiment here, and I hope this triggers copycats all across the city, and every city. But there is no such thing as an island in the middle of a city; unless of course you're an actual island. After the power went out during Superstorm Sandy, there was not a single hot (powered) outlet in the city that didn't have something plugged into it. There is no way that a community like this, with its off-the-grid resilience, would be spared during an emergency of like proportions. They would be inundated by others trying to charge their phones, and their phone chargers, and their phone charger chargers.

If you want to be able to maintain power in such an emergency where everyone around you does not have it, you're gonna need a lil military to go with that power grid. A security defense system that keeps people out, and maybe even a way to protect the people who live there as they go out into the rest of the city, because people will be pretty pissed that you get power and they don't. This is all part of the glaring hole in prepper mentality - you may be able to prepare for you and your family, but you can't prepare for others. When the shit really goes down, the most dangerous thing you will face is not food shortages but other people.