What's the Source of Value for Students' Gigs?

I was chatting with Spencer Padway yesterday and he asked me a very relevant question. He wanted to know how I thought the students of the "web design" school would be able to compete with the labor and talent pools overseas, the infamous "outsourcers".

In essence, he wanted to know what the business model was for my students, how would they take the information they learned from participating in the educational activities into the real world to earn a living.

This is a very important and often overlooked aspect of learning "web development", and it's one I want to address directly and prepare my students for. Ideally I'd like to place all students in jobs or with work enough to live well.

I want the business model of the school and the business models of the students to have a similar relationship to a garden and the plants growing in it. The garden produces what the plants produce and the plants too.

But who wants our crops? Especially when they're on sale so much cheaper just a hemisphere away?

What's in a Business Model?
In simple terms, a business model is an algorithm that specifies how one expects to satisfy some expenses consistently over time.

One super-simple model that I really love is Kiyosaki's: You have income and you have expenses. You own assets, which are anything that puts money in your pocket, and liabilities, defined as anything that takes money out of your pocket.

The name of game, the generalized algorithm, is straightforward: Reduce your expenses and increase your income until the latter exceeds the former, then invest the difference by purchasing more assets.

Given the above super-simple definition of "business model" and the model of viability and wealth generation outlined, there are three aspects I want to address, and in doing so I hope to elucidate both the interlocking projects discussed on this blog and the path to long-term viability I see for my students. To wit:

• Reducing expenses
• Increasing income to adequate levels and maintaining it
• Information Age Assets

Expenses
In programming we often take the tack of solving the general problem that some particular problem represents, and then apply the general solution to the particular problem and solve it. This works surprisingly often and is almost always easier and feels as magical as it sounds.

Broadly speaking, I advocate a Permaculture garden with energy efficient home and attached energy harvesting gear to supply its own power. For transportation I'm developing powered kites, no really.

"You can solve all your problems in a garden" -Geoff Lawton. It's true. There's a ton more to say, but for now on the subject of expense reduction I'm going to bunt and say "Permaculture" and continue.

Maintaining Adequate Levels of Income
How do you find reasons for people to give you money, and then do it again?

That's the name of the game in modern business. That's what it boils down to at the end of the day, and in the internet age the reasons can become very esoteric indeed.

The TriGalactic game is a lot of things, and one of those is essentially a good reason for people to send in five bucks a month.

But why? And how do you find people to whom your answer to that question appeals?

Let's answer those questions in reverse order. I'm going to assume that TriGalactic has enough appeal, or that Student X has enough appeal, to attract customers, and address the question of how to find them.

Information Age Assets
There is an "asset" that's free, you don't have to pay for it, that requires little or no work (but can benefit from it), and that has the potential for open-ended returns, that is the returns are non-linear and can continue into the future, and it cannot lose money, i.e. it can never become a liability.

Furthermore, it is purely informational, so you can transfer it online and it has no direct environmental impact whatsoever.

As if this weren't enough, it has additional properties that answer the question above of how to find customers that want your particular value. It can connect you within a short time to a huge number of potential clients or customers thus providing the amount of work you need to meet your expenses.

I'm talking about the Dendrite Network, originally part of TriGalactic that I had planned to slowly "phase" into the real world. When I needed a social app to use as a teaching project for the school I figured it would be the perfect OpenSocial application.

The Dendrite Network, when used with a GameSeed that has a multi-tier affiliate program associated with it, becomes a sort of generic "amplifier" network both for the originator of the GameSeed and the transmitters who participate in the seed's propagation.

The Dendrite Network
In this day and age, I see a primary purpose of the Internet and computers in general as supplying you with whatever you require quickly and efficiently. Put another way, the web's job (one of them) is to connect you with the people who can supply your needs at a price you can afford.

This is the flip-side of the coin of finding enough customers.

The DN is designed to propagate "things", and multi-tier affiliate programs for those things give transmitters an additional motivation for participating in the propagation of quality "products". Any "product" attached to a multi-tier affiliate program that comes through the Dendrite Network becomes an asset with the properties described above.

To summarize, the Dendrite Network:

• Connects producers and customers of products.
• Allows rewarding of the intermediate transmitters. With properly designed affiliate programs these rewards can become significant. Participation in the network provides free quasi-passive "assets".
• Serves as a teaching project for our school.

Due to the generalized nature of the Dendrite Network it can handle both finding computer work for our students as well as finding healthy food (See "Promoting Permaculture Food Parks" in the previous blog post Everyone Eats, this ties back in to reducing expenses.)

Who wants our crops?
I am of the firmly held belief that viability in business is directly related to the value you provide your customers. If you're not providing a true value, then you won't last long in business, and conversely if you really are providing something of value then you'll seldom have a problem finding enough work.

The reason the DN can act as "mini-assets" is just that it provides the transmitters the opportunity to contribute something of value, namely their help "routing" the knowledge of the existance of something worthwhile to someone.

Really, if you can't provide something of more value than your brother programmers in the East then I'm certainly not willing to help you rip people off. There are a lot of ways to provide your customers value beyond simply writing code and html markup, and we'll explore those as we go, but I've already given you what I consider to be one of the most sure-fire: Aligning Levels, model on the blog, and directions for applying it on the FunkyGalaxy Mailing list.

If you are truly aligned on each of those levels then my experience indicates that you will never have to worry or struggle for clients or customers or what-have-you. If you're living your mission, you'll be taken care of in a way that seems magical. If you're not, then that's step one.

Introduction to Permaculture (excerpt)

A long quote from the pamphlet "Introduction to Permaculture" from Yankee Permaculture. I've clipped out what I think, in my warped biased mind, are some of the best bits. Mostly the parts where Mollison talks like Bucky really. This is agriculture the way Bucky's work was architecture, the synthesis of science and mystery. Enjoy:

We deal with the Earth, which has a fairly constant energy input from other parts of the universe. We are dealing with energy which has a renewable source, the sun. Between the source and the sink is where we intervene. The more useful storages to which we can direct energy between the source and the sink, the better we are as designers. So what we are up to is making an efficient set of storages that are useful to man. Some of these storages may be useful in the creation of other storages. The amount of complexity we can build into that flow, the amount that we can direct to useable storages in order to hold back energy until we start to use it, that's where the skill of the designer lies. Furthermore, a lot of energies unusable in a mechanical sense are usable in the biological sense. So we need biological as well as mechanical storages.

Energy can be transferred from one form to another, but it cannot disappear or be destroyed or created. So we have a choice in the type of flow that we allow through the system. We can determine whether it is stored or whether we let it leave.

That is the choice we have with water, with rainfall. We can store it or we can let it leave; and if we let it leave, it becomes unavailable to us.

If we would recover it, there is a lot of work to making it available again. Engineers go down to the valley, because everybody can see there is water down in the valley. So they put a block in the valley and the water backs up behind it and you have water, a big lake down in the valley where it is least useful. Where

it came from was up on the hills. Had the engineers stored the water where it came from, then they could have run it through all sorts of systems before they let it escape into the valley. The closer to the source that we can intervene, the greater use is the network that we can set up. So we edge up close to the source to start to intervene in the flow. It's not the amount of rainfall that counts, it is the number of duties we induce that water to perform that counts.

Resources are something you can feed into a system and increase its productivity, or its yield, or the number of useful storages. But if you continue beyond that point of productivity, then the system itself collapses. And that comes down to the statement that any integrated system can only accept that amount of energy that it can productively use. So you can over-manure anything, over-heat anything; you can over-plow anything. Whether we are talking about money or manure, you can put too much of it in. What then happens is first you start to get less and less increase in yield and then more and more increase in a lethal factor. You can't continue to pour in more of the same thing and get a continued increase in yield.

Then there are categories of resources that are of a totally different sort. There are resources which are unaffected by use. You can look at a beautiful view all day and it really doesn't affect the view. Information is such a resource. [But information is preserved by use. -DH]

There is another category of things that is interesting in that they increase if you use them. The more you use them, the more that they increase. Some forms of browse fall into that category. Some categories of animals and plants increase each other by interaction, and some other categories of resource also do that. And some resources, particularly quick turnover resources, simply decrease if you don't use them. Annual grass is a good example. If not used, the amount of annual grass in the system decreases. To some extent, so does firewood in a fire-prone situation. It accumulates as a fuel for wildfire when all of it is consumed at once.

But most resources lie in the category of resources that need to be managed to maintain them. They are those which decrease if used. We will call them finite resources.

There is still another category made up of resources that, if you use them, decrease everything else. We have a good example of that in uranium or plutonium. Plutonium in use tends to lay waste to other resources and some of those uses are horrific. Things like dioxins, if used as a resource, start to decrease the general resource.

So resources have a sort of hierarchy of management and a hierarchy of being beneficial or not beneficial. Most of the things that make us happy either are very manageable or there are plenty of them. There a few things which we think we need, but which make us miserable.

...it is not the number of elements in a system that is important, but the degree of functional organization of those elements - beneficial functions.

Yield is the sum of useful energy stores. It is the sum of energy conserved and generated in systems. It is never just product yield, not the number of pounds of tomatoes, or pounds of fish, or of acorns - which is the normal way people have of measuring yield - but it is the sum of the energy in useful storages. Yield is a function of design, and it is theoretically unlimited. That is, I haven't seen a system where we can't, by better design, increase the yield.

As the design itself is a function of our understanding of the system, so does the yield also depend upon the degree to which we understand things. It is the intellect that decides all these things, rather than any extrinsic factors. I am not quite sure what the intellect is. I have put it as our ability to understand, which may not be intellectual but empathetical.

Between the source and the sink, diversity increases: energy stores may increase and organizational complexity may increase. Our job is to convert those pauses in the flux of some of those categories into beneficial resources. It is the number of niches in a system that will allow a number of species and varieties to co-survive. It is the woodpecker's hole within the forest.

Now, again, the number of niches in a system depends on the design of the system. So now we have come to the active case. In situations which should be saturated with species, and with yield, we can make a vast difference by seeing where we can create more space, often by very small movements. [After first seeing where the unfilled niches, the empty spaces, exist, and filling them. Temperate ecosystems, in particular, often are incomplete.-DH] The numbers of pairs of pigeons breeding on a cliff depends on the number of ledges. It is easy to increase the ledges. Often, what is holding down a yield isn't the basic factor of food. In fact, food ceilings are very rare things to bump. It is some other factor totally unrelated to food. There are tons of food [acorns] around this environment [Wilton, New Hampshire], with nothing eating it.

What we must do is to see how things work, how different things work. Tribal lore prescribes that one should only carry out necessitous acts, that non-necessitous behavior tends to be very destructive. The rest follows. Therefore, one apologizes for whatever one has to do and does it. But you don't see people doing unnecessary acts.

Now there are different sorts of acts. There are necessitous acts and harmful acts. But there are also beneficial acts. And that gives us another hypothesis - that you probably will get more good back than you design. And this seems also to be true. What has probably been happening from the beginning of a consciously designed system is that when we put three elements in conjunction so that they are pretty harmonious, other beneficial results come out that we didn't design. Now that has happened almost without exception.

This is something that isn't being taught: that once we have done one thing correctly it goes on and it proceeds to do a lot of other things by itself. This seems to be happening. So it looks like there is something going on there, and it is very hard to analyze. Sometimes you make a single move, simple and right, which you intend to be beneficial, and you discover, if you stand back and observe it and leave it alone, that it goes on and gives you maybe another 10 benefits which you didn't count on. Then, if you look into it closely, although you put it together for a single reason - you had reasoned it out - you see that once you did that, there were 12 or 15 other reasons why you should have done it. I think we all know examples of this.

When somebody clamped the greenhouse onto the front of the house instead of standing it out there in the sun, he may have done it for a single reason, to heat the house, perhaps, or simply to make it easier to tend it. But then lots of other good things came out of that.

We are not quite sure what they are doing, but the aboriginal groups go around polishing up their country with little ceremonies. They are fairly secretive about what they do, but certainly they are doing a little countryside adjustment. They have to do a little ceremony to keep the springs flowing along certain a mountainside. We laugh at them. We know those springs will flow whether they have a ceremony there or not. But if we take their religions away, the springs will stop flowing. You don't talk to idiots about advanced concepts. Anyway, they won't tell us much about what they know. I suppose they would worry about what we would do with the information.

There is something we ought to be sitting on the floor and talking about a lot. There is this harmonic that, if we could get hold of it, would give us a lot of understanding, a lot of control over events. Our job is to put things in the right place and then let them rip. But to get one in the right place, we have to have a lot of information about it. Anything we are trying to place, whether it is a building or a tree or an animal or a road or a structure or a person, we have to know these things about it. We have to know its intrinsic functions, what is natural for it to do,the things it can't help doing by virtue of just being itself, being alive. Some animals and plants must spawn and they do that in different ways. Then there are things that we can categorize as yield, which we might be interested in. These may be of two or three levels or natures. There are what we might call direct yields. Chickens lay eggs. Then perhaps there are yields which are derived, secondary, or processed yields. Chicken manure will yield methane. And we have to know what the different yields are.

It also pays to know how elements function. They have behaviors, things that they do. They walk around or they sway about. They have properties. They will or will not reflect light. They have properties by reason of what they are. They have a color. They behave. They have a whole set of interactions and stimulus-response behaviors. Behaviors are short -term and long-term, too. Too often we comment on the short-term behavior of things, which isn't how they behave in the long term. Our science, and particularly psychology, suffers a great deal by not looking at the long-term behavior.

Now if we knew enough, if we had enough information, then a lot of these things could be listed for each element in the system, each entity. And then we could make a tremendous amount of design use of it. But they are not the things that are being listed as knowledge about the entities. You can obtain knowledge of almost anything about a tree except these things. Bad luck! Very little is known about the properties of a tree. As to the yield, it may be almost unknowable. I once tried to find out how people have used walnut trees. I found out that there is a people who base their whole culture on the walnut; other people may base their culture on bamboo. Or you can just take the walnuts by themselves. It is up to you.

If you have a fair idea of what is known about something, then you are able to place it so that it can function, so that its intrinsic function is possible to it. Then it will give its yields and its secondary yields can be taken advantage of, and it will behave in a friendly way because we put it near to things that are beneficial to it.

There is an enormous difference between the way we make a design in permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it. Really, what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way.

Pretty breathtaking, hey?

Permaculture is why I look at the Great Garbage Patch as free candy.

First draft Tensegrity Kite Cell

First draft Tensegrity Kite Cell
Originally uploaded by trigalactic

This is a different design to Alexander G. Bell's. I wanted to make a true Tensegrity design to take advantage of the structural efficiencies.

The hallmark of a Tensegrity design is that none of the compression members (the coffee stirrers in this kite model) touch each other. They never experience anything but a direct inline compression.

This cell is easy to build. You take three struts and put them in a jig that holds them in the proper geometric relationship. You clip on two sails, one to the top and one to the bottom, then clip on the three tension cables. Release your new cell from the jig and repeat as desired.

I want to add sensors, wireless mesh comms, micro-aero-turbines for power generation, and small microprocessors to make each cell a sort of flocking robot. The corners of each strut-and-sail triangle can clip onto the edges of other cells to create a variety of tessellations in a plane. I'm still thinking about ways to stack planes to make volume-filling kites. That's one of the reasons I made this model, to have something concrete to handle and help figure that out.

Crane to Heaven: Tensegrity Catapults

Ken Snelson invented Tensegrity, Bucky stole it or liberated it, promoted it to the World as a engineering technology, a way to do so much "more with less" that everyone on Earth could be provided for in comfort, without "disadvantaging" anyone.

It has still yet to be fully appreciated as a tool for building machines and structures.

For example, Bucky pointed out that the towers built out of compression-only struts and tension-only tendons could serve as compression struts in bigger towers. You can repeat this fractal-wise to make truly colossal structures. They would weigh next to nothing, yet be stable and able to support tonnes.

People have been exploring what is called "actuated" Tensegrity, which basically means controlling the structures you build by changing either the struts, the tendons, or both under computer control. By deforming the tension "quasi-membrane" you can change the geometry of the structure without giving up its strength and resilience.

Take a look at Ken Snelson's "Arch" structure above.

Unlike a normal arch, this one doesn't require support at both ends. You can disconnect one end and the structure would remain standing. You can start from a base and, by selectively lengthening and shortening certain tendons, create a tower that conforms to a wide range of trajectories.

Let's say you build one of these towers. You use elastic tendons, and you allow for a way to "draw" or tighten the tendons to bend the arch, storing the energy in the elastic.

Imagine attaching some weight or load to the end and using the bounciness of the arch to carry it through the air and drop it back down again somewhere else.

Because the arch is basically a spring, you'd be storing energy in it when you lifted rather than expending it . When you put your load back down, you'd get back most of the energy you put into lifting it (neglecting thermodynamic losses.)

So there's a terrific new form of crane, especially when you consider that you can make them as big as Godzilla and they only become more efficient. But wait, there's more.

A reusable non-polluting path to space?

I love space and everything about it. One day I intend to visit it and take a pee-pee. (It both freezes and boils at the same time. In the sunlight? That's gotta be nice!) But rockets, as fun and sexy as they are, tend to be terribly messy, and hard on the air.

(Not all of them. You can use hydrogen peroxide as fuel and react it with a platinum catalyst and it makes a pretty decent, totally non-polluting rocket. The exhaust is steam.)

Well, you know how a bullwhip makes a noise because the tip is going super-sonic at the end of the curl?

Well, I haven't run the numbers, but what if you were to make a giant, say, kilometer long tensegrity "whip"?

You need to reach about 8kps to make it to LEO. Even if you can't get that fast with the catapult, you could still get a huge kinetic head start. Throw your rocketship into the air and then light 'er up!

Psychological Levels

This is not my idea, it's an NLP model. I can't recall who or where I got it from, and I couldn't find it on a quick google search, so here it is. If you know where I can link to this online somewhere please let me know.

This is sort of a set of levels, each "meta" to the one below it, that you can find in human psychology. It's a model, not a theory, so apply it or not as useful. I follow the originators of NLP in refusing to assign a "truthiness" to the concept(s).

The human being can be modeled as having the following levels. Read from the bottom, most concrete, to the upper, most essential, levels to find the path to God, read down to know Dharma.

• Mission - What are you here on Earth to do? When accessed even atheists speak in trans-personal "more important than myself" language.
  
• Identity - Often considered the "top" level, this is your face, and the internal feelings and chronic tensions of it. It's also your immune system and other homeostatic processes. Mentally it's whatever you say "I am ..." to.
  
• Values - These are your, uh, values. They're usually thought of in timeless terms, existing in a non-temporal realm even though in your life they are subject to change.
  
• Beliefs - Mental/emotional structures in the tissues of the whole body that process and organize sensory input and history to synthesize one's ongoing "story".
  
• Capabilities - Basically time-sequences of behavior organized by your beliefs. You can use NLP techniques to "extract" capabilities and "install" them in others. You can also "extract" behavior-sequences from anyone you can represent internally, whether from memory or creative imagination.
  What this indicates is that anything you've ever seen (or heard or felt!) done by anyone real or imaginary, forms a sort of "library" repertoire of stuff you can do too.
  
• Behaviors - The stuff that can be described by physics, what your body is doing right now. Mostly done entirely unconsciously.
  

Each level guides the level "below" it, regulating it cybernetically to keep it within the "settings" the level specifies. Your values condition and bias your beliefs. Your capabilities are by definition the set of behaviors you you can perform, etc...

Some notes on Beliefs:

• Can be "switched" at will using techniques developed in the 70's and 80's. Put baldly: you can change your own beliefs at will using off the shelf technology. It's not even hard.
• Are always false, no matter how much you belive them. They are neurological energy and information structures in your tissues, not truth.
• You can exist with far fewer than you probably have. Doing so conserves energy. You can even exist in the absence of all belief, but it's kinda dangerous because you tend to just sit there and starve to death. However, the point is that you are not destroyed by the destruction or reprogramming of any belief or constellation of beliefs.
• Beliefs will be congruent with "higher" levels, and they constrain your capabilities. You can't do what you believe you can't, and the converse is also true.
  

Google Code Hosting is now a Gadgets Container

You can now host web gadgets on your Google Code Hosting Wiki pages, and your ghost project can be put on your iGoogle page as a gadget.

I noticed the "What's New" link on the Dendrite Network ghost project was "lit up" red, so I clicked on it and was taken here, to "announcements of the latest project hosting features"

Blow me down! Now you can have the Dendrite Network Gadget on the main page of it's own project! So neat. Here's a link to the original blog post describing it: Gadgets and Google Code

Algorithm for Pacific Home

Here is a brief rundown of the general plan that's forming:

1. Build a giant kite.
2. Load it with supplies and tools and fly it to the G.P.G.P.
3. Rebuild the kite into a research station and marine Permaculture farm.
4. Separate Ocean water into water and salt. Water goes to the greenhouse.
5. Melt the salt (probably with Solar energy.)
6. Add plastic and some oxygen. Recover synthesis gas.
7. Combine syngas with water to create carbon dioxide and hydrogen. CO2 goes to the greenhouse.
8. Use syngas and energy from hydrogen to create more Octet-truss kite. Use hydrogen for buoyancy. Create both more flying vehicles and floating stations.
9. Bring home farm produce and other products for sale. The whole process is self-funding and "exothermic".

There are a ton of details, obviously, but I wanted to sketch out the general gist.

The research station would be researching both the GPGP itself and the recycling of it's contents, as well as marine living in a Bucky-esque futopia. It would include Living Machine trials to process and purify the semi-plastic muck, and Permaculture systems to grow food and other products out of the extracted resources.

Additionally, I see the construction of a large floating station as crucial to "igniting" this effort. It gives both a conceptual locus to hang attention on and also a physical destination in the Patch to change it from some waste-"land" into a real place that you can go to and "attack".

One of the reasons I want to take such a very large kite with me is that I can then partially disassemble it and reassemble it as a home base. By carefully designing it and constructing it before ever leaving land, I can make it so that within a day of "landing" at the patch I'll have one much smaller kite and a huge floating house!