Co vás zaujalo mimo Webtrh?

This is how it usually goes with my wife:

Wife: (looking at me suspiciously)

Me: "Are you confused?"

Wife: (nods yes)

Me: "Do you know who I am?"

Wife: (shakes head no)

Me: "I am your husband"

Wife: (looks at me, wide-eyed, more suspicious)

Me: "Do you have a headache?"

Wife: "Yes..."

Me: "It's going to be okay. This happens when you get bad headaches. I can give you some medicine. Once your headache gets better you will remember everything"

Už jen samotná informace o tom, že firma SpaceX založilasvůj profil na populárním serveru Flickr, který je určený pro ukládání fotografií, by byla potěšující. Stačí jen letmý pohled a hned je jasné, že setu ukrývají velmi povedené snímky všeho, co souvisí s provozem SpaceX. Ale ještě zajímavější je, že všechny snímky na tomto profilu jsou od 18. března pod licencí Creative Commons s atributem 2.0 Generic. Tohle odborné konstatování asi málokomu něco řekne, ale znamená to, že tyto fotky jsou k dispozici všem lidem pro jakékoliv využití včetně komerčního! Jediné, co je potřeba je uvést zdroj. SpaceX se tak přidává na stranu, kde je třeba NASA. Za tento krok patří americké firmě velký palec nahoru a nyní malá ochutnávka tří fotek ze zmíněného profilu.

More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. It astonished the whole international community of experts on the ancient world. Was it an astrolabe? Was it an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else?

For decades, scientific investigation failed to yield much light and relied more on imagination than the facts. However research over the last half century has begun to reveal its secrets. The machine dates from around the end of the 2nd century B.C. and is the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world. Nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. The Antikythera Mechanism is now understood to be dedicated to astronomical phenomena and operates as a complex mechanical "computer" which tracks the cycles of the Solar System.

The Chinese government is currently implementing a nationwide electronic system, called the Social Credit System, attributing to each of its 1,3 billion citizens a score for his or her behavior. The system will be based on various criteria, ranging from financial credibility and criminal record to social media behavior. From 2020 onwards each adult citizen should, besides his identity card, have such a credit code.

...

Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibility and scores therefore well.

...

'This is the most staggering, publicly announced, scaled use of big data I've ever seen', says Michael Fertik, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Reputation Economy. 'It certainly feels about as Orwellian as your nightmares would have it be."

Parents across China decided they needed to get rid of their female/disabled babies. A loophole was soon found in the law. It was illegal to kill your child directly (as in to stab or shoot them) but it was not illegal to kill them through neglect. 'Orphanages' were opened to cater to the new demand. Parents would take their children there, where the staff would leave the children in rooms to die of thirst or starvation. The film was produced over the course of two years. Kate Blewett, Brian Woods and Peter Woolrich all pretended to work in the orphanages that would be the focus of the film. They found evidence that very young children were deliberately neglected and allowed to die in agonizing ways.

Majority rule based on one-person-one-vote notoriously results in tyranny of the majority–a large number of people who care only a little about an outcome prevail over a minority that cares passionately, resulting in a reduction of aggregate welfare.

Quadratic voting is a procedure that a group of people can use to jointly choose a collective good for themselves. Each person can buy votes for or against a proposal by paying into a fund the square of the number of votes that he or she buys. The money is then returned to voters on a per capita basis. Weyl and Lalley prove that the collective decision rapidly approximates efficiency as the number of voters increases.

Democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes, but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of other people — a problem that leads to the familiar phenomenon of tyranny of the majority. Various institutions that have been tried or proposed over the years to correct this problem — including supermajority rule, weighted voting, cumulative voting, "mixed constitutions," executive discretion, and judicially protected rights — all badly misfire in various ways, for example, by creating gridlock or corruption. This paper proposes a new form of political decision-making based on the theory of quadratic voting. It explains how quadratic voting solves the preference aggregation problem, giving proper weight to preferences of varying intensity, and how it could be implemented as well as addressing concerns about its consequences for equity.