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Manifesto for the Reputation Society
by Hassan Masum and Yi-Cheng Zhang

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the
opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the
development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate
between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism:
Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of
collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of
quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far
greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our
limited and local human judgement power with collective networked
filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of
socially beneficial reputation systems - to restrain the baser side of
human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the
realization of ever higher goals...

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/

The Photon Sphere

Mathematically speaking, the photon sphere occurs at 3/2 the Schwarzschild Radius.

The photosphere is a place where light rays can have unstable orbits around the black hole. To have a stable orbit the light ray has to travel at a high velocity (c= 3*10 ^8 m/s) as it gets nearer and nearer to the center of the black hole. As it gets farther from the center it doesn?t need such a high velocity. The farther the ray is from the center of the hole, the less the velocity of the ray. A light ray would have a hard time to keep its constant orbit, as there are other rays colliding with it and changing its velocity and trajectory, thus shifting it either into outer space or straight into the black hole. The idea is that in the photosphere nothing is stable: everything either is drawn at incredible speeds in the interior of the black hole or plunged into space but delayed for a few thousands of years.

Another interesting phenomenon is the movement of space. If one had a source of light, let?s say a reflector, at the black hole, then the light rays would start orbiting the hole. If the ray comes back after one rotation it would hit the reflector. Now if one would have a camera and try to move the camera towards the image forming in front of it, then the image would retreat and shrink. This is because the view of the camera is just like the view someone would have if they were standing behind it. If the camera stands behind the person and he would start moving forward, their image recedes.

Movie: circling the black hole from the photon sphere

Explanation: The apparent position of the photon sphere is easy to spot - it is the apparent dividing line between black hole and sky. Stars approaching the other side of the black hole from your point are greatly magnified and move with high angular speeds. You can only see one star moving very fast and get very brighter, and then another one appears.

Demo Site is Finally Launched

20/07/04

After many false starts and lots of help from our friends from Kleber we have finally managed to get the long awaited FatCat Demo Archive online ? a brand new site featuring unheard music by new / unreleased artists.

Whilst we are still receiving a high quantity of demos, we have decided to use the freedom of our website to showcase the best of these. These will be curated online with freely downloadable MP3s and information & contact details for each artist. These tracks will also be available to listen to in the FatCat audio player.

As we launch this site, there are 24 artists included in this archive ? most of whose demos had been received some time ago. The site will be continuously updated, with new artists being added as & when good material is recieved. Throughout August we hope to be adding new artists on a daily basis.

We want to thanks those artists who have stuck with us and waited a long, long time to finally see this site go up. Many of the tracks are a few years old but this does not detract from how good we think their music remains.
If you download tracks and enjoy them, please do drop the artists a line, give them support and encouragement because after all they are sharing their music with you for no finacial gain.

We hope that we can build on these great initial tracks and hopefully see this site grow into something quite special.

You can check out the site here or by clicking the Logo in the top right hand corner of the page.

We got our electricity bill today; our provider announces on the envelope that it is now a member of Nectar.

Opening the envelope, we see that we have been sent a registration form, that gladly declares:

"We are already collecting points for you!"

To get you started we are already reserving Nectar points for you. Your reserved points are shown on the right hand side of this statement and wil be held until 14 January 2005...

Over 1 million customers have already registerd their Nectar cards with us.

The form has your customer account number on it, and your post code under the space where you sign and date.

Now, if a national ID card scheme is introduced, (this translates to "If Labour loose the next General Election" because the Tories have promised that they will scrap the idea...ha ha) Your NID will be connected to your Nectar card to your Electricity bill, to your postcode, to your telephone number etc etc, and all of this will be available to any one of the entities that you are getting a service from, and ALL of this will be available to Nectar, since they are clearly trying to forge relationships with anyone who sells anything to anyone on a large scale.

Nectar will have information on every shopper - fine grained information that would make any marketer faint with extacy at the prospect of the super detailed profiles that could be built with the data.

Imagine it; you already get personalized postcards from supermarkets, printed with your name made of flowers; imagine this data being used to tell you about things that you are 100% certain to be interested in. Its a very compelling and seductive idea - from both ends - because it would be useful as a shopper to be informed of things that you might want to eat or read, just like TIVO tells you what you might want to see on TV. Oh yes, they WILL be joining Nectar, them and SKY also.

You would never miss a bargain, a new product or special offer, and you get points for buying these things that you know you want. That is pure seduction. That is a cause to give up your privacy.

Of course, all of this could be done anonymously, but then the benefit would be purely to the customer, and the essential demographic analysis bussiness model of Nectar would be destroyed.

Privacy will be taken very seriously when Nectar is everywhere, and there is very little privacy; in other words, when it becomes scarce. When that happens, people will pay for privacy.

There will be legions of people and services providing privacy, in the same way that there are professional dog walkers in the major cities of the world. You will pay someone to do your shopping for you, in their name though the goods will be going to you. These Dorian Greys will take on all the sin of your shopping, and heap it onto themselvs, leaving your record clean and lean. Your ID will show that you never buy anything, except (if you are careless) the services of one or two people, who might not even be real people, who will seem to have the buying power of 100 human economic units.

Dont worry, this does not mean that you will loose your Nectar points. The Dorian Greys will keep perfect accounts of what was spent on your behalf, anynmoysly, and your points will be redemed for you on whatever you desire. You will get it all, the anonymity AND the privacy.

I personally know people who already do this. They use a network of friends to collect packages for them, who dont mind if their address is used on forms, and who know what to do when an unexpected package arrives for that "JANE EYRE" woman whose mail always ends up at the house unexpectedly. These people use cash only of course, and when they need to buy something from Amazon, they have a friend who does that for them, including recieving the books of course.

Obviously this being the age of the internet, there will be organized identity swapping sites so that you can break the trail that follows you around. "NctarSwap.com" register it right now. There is a problem with this however, if you have a Nectar card and swap it for one that was used to collect points when someone was buying someting fradulently, you could be swept up when you tried to use it. Also, these cards will have so much information on them that is personal to you, it would be ...unwise... to swap it with anyone at all, so scratch that last paragraph. Partially. You get the picture; identity swapping will be organized on a massive scale, by the same type of vigilante that creates sites like bugmenot. Demand will make these services appear.

Scarcity.
Demand.

"Never before have we been so contented"

The Photon Sphere

Firefox extensions I currently have installed

Demo Site is Finally Launched

20/07/04

We Support Team Member Excellence and Happiness

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