I just finished Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, the definitive book on crowdsourcing, and although it was written nearly 4 years ago, I was really bowled over by key insights throughout the book. Crowdsourcing is more than just the design work or iStockphoto, there’s also an offshoot into the world of Crowd-predicting. Utilizing the wisdom of the crowds to predict anything from sports results, Hollywood sales or even Presidential elections, and it appears these prediction markets actually do a pretty good job of predicting the correct outcome. They’re not right 100% of the time (then again neither are the experts), but overall the Crowds can –and do–predict with great accuracy.

The premise of crowd-predicting is simple. Get a whole bunch of people together and then ask them to predict the outcome of a particular event, once each individual prediction comes through you then aggregate that information to get the final result. Proponents of crowd-predicting say this result often beats the ’experts’, and they have some data to back it up.

I used to be a strong believer of organics, until I saw the prices of organic foods at my local Jusco. Needless to say, I stopped believing in organics pretty quickly. Of course, I understand the premise, which is that organic food is 100% natural, without added chemicals or fertilizers, no herbicides or pesticides leaving your food 100% wholesome. There is strong justification for this, although limited scientific proof.

The way to think about organic is that, mankind evolved to consume certain types of food and nutrition, but with the advent of ‘industrialized agriculture’  things changed. We now consume tomatoes all year round, although it’s a seasonal fruit, the concept is simple–pluck the tomatoes when they’re ripe and then spray them with chemicals just before they hit supermarket shelves, that way nobody needs to worry about seasons. This is true for nearly all your seasonal fruits that appear ‘all year round’. All this makes the fruit un-natural or at least–less nutritious than it’s purely organic counterpart.

According to a report from Channel News Asia, a total of nearly 200 DBS and POSB customers in Singapore have been hit by unauthorized withdrawals averaging S$1000 each. The withdrawals were done in Malaysia “while the ATM cards were with them safely in Singapore”. Which begs the question what does ‘safely in Singapore’ mean?

Channel News Asia goes on to report that withdrawals were made in Kuala Lumpur (not neighboring Johor Bahru) and done approximately the same time as ‘valid’ withdrawals. ZDNet has reported DBS is working together with its IT vendor, NCR to understand the issue and investigate further. It’s also suspended all suspected cards and are contacting customers to give them what it says would be a full refund. NCR also happen to make almost 90% of all ATMs in Malaysia, and according to Yahoo! news, this was “a security breach to its anti-skimming devices installed on ATM machines”, so I’m just wondering why this wasn’t done to Malaysian accounts of local banks? 

There’s been a recent surge of Anti-SOPA and Anti-PIPA sentiment over in the Unites States, Wikipedia blacked out it’s entire webpage and Google, Twitter and Facebook all joined in the fray. I’ve even received multiple emails from the Mozilla foundation on how to combat SOPA and recent a congratulatory cum Thank you note from Mozilla for joining the fight. Make no mistake, SOPA isn’t dead, it’s just been shelved for the time being, get ready people round2 starts soon.

In Malaysia though there has been little reporting on the issue, while some local blogs did mention SOPA, and a few newspapers briefly covered it, not much has been discussed on either of the laws. It’s typical of the Malaysian media to report less on matters that actually matter, and more on frivolous material like this article from the New Straits Times that read “Unity is Priceless: PM”. Really? Cause the rest of us thought Unity was worth around about Rm2.75 . I mean apart from pointing out the obvious, the article has absolutely no content, apart from the big picture with the “We Love the PM” nonsense.

That being said, there were a few articles on SOPA and PIPA, however those articles for censored to a certain degree, and here’s how.

Back in 2007, I had a n

ew year resolution to run 5km in 25 minutes, or more specifically to get my body in good enough shape to run 5km in 25 minutes. That was my aim, it was partly driven by some research I read that it’s better to have just 1 resolution and making that resolution specific rather than generic. So rather than, ‘I’ll exercise’, I needed a goal or a target to reach–and I chose the target of being able to run 5km in 25 minutes, because about 14 years ago, I ran 8km in 40 minutes at my high-schools cross country, and I thought 5km in 25 minutes was a pretty reasonable number to me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t accomplish my resolution in 2007, nor in 2008 or 2009, not even in 2010 and finally didn’t even jog in 2011.

So for the last 5 years, I’ve made just one new-year resolution and failed to accomplish it. That is a big FAILURE!!

or is it…..

Late last year the Government announced the Kampung Wi-Fi (or Village Wi-Fi initiative). The initiative was mooted by The Information, Communications and Culture Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Rais Yatim. Currently there are already 1,400 villages with Wi-Fi access and the Government hopes to increase that to 4,000 by year end.

That’s good news to a lot of villagers, broadband penetration is considered a right in certain countries, and bring internet access to rural Malaysia is a moved to be applauded. However, there doesn’t seem to be much on the technical aspect of the project available to the public.

According to this report from the Borneo Post, the Kampung Wi-Fi is a public-private sector initiative that involved expertise from Pernec Paypoint Sdn Bhd, so that’s an unknown company to me. The cost of the Kampung Wi-Fi initiative is anywhere from Rm25,000 to Rm32,000 per village, which for the additional 2,600 villages we plan to deploy to brings total cost of the project to RM65 million (onwards).

Sounds surprising and

quite convenient, that a company that reports a loss of Rm17 million, goes on to report that they have a lifeline, in the form of  a Rm6 million dollar contract from the police to “maintain the Royal Malaysian Police’s (PDRM) mobile systems for two years starting January 1”.

Quoting this Malaysian Insider Report :

“In a filing to Bursa Malaysia today, the company said TricubesNCR JV Sdn Bhd bagged the deal to maintain the Enhanced Mobile Management System (EMMS) and Mobile Card Acceptance Device (MCAD) on December 30, 2011.

TricubesNCR JV Sdn Bhd is 70 per cent owned by Tricubes.”

A couple of hundred years ago, if you wanted to find out what was inside a horses mouth, you’d go to a quite corner and sit for a while and contemplate what was in a horses mouth. This sounds anathema to anyone reading a blog in the 21st century, but it was quite common in the days of Aristotle. Our brains are hard-wired for imagination, in fact happiness expert Daniel Gilbert actually goes further and says we’re the only species that can imagine our future selves. It’s the reason he says, why Ben and Jerrys doesn’t have Liver and Onion flavored ice-cream. It isn’t because someone actually made Liver and Onion flavored ice-cream it’s because we can predict that Liver and Onion flavored ice cream is probably not a good idea.

About 2 years ago

if you typed “miserable failure” on Google the first listed webpage would be the wikipedia entry for President George W. Bush, apparently a few guys found out how Google ranks their pages and decided (with a little help from friends) to push up the GWBs Wikipedia page for the search entry “miserable failure”. Google has since changed it’s algorithm to prevent a few kiddie hackers from being able to control the page ranks of sites which have dire consequences of a pages visibility online.

I wonder if we could get miserable failure to point to the Tricubes website instead.

Tricubes is in the news again, this time for a ’typo’. Apparently the public listed company that was awarded the 1Malaysia email program and was also appointed the traffic fines collection agent by the police last month, can’t get their annual report in order. You would think that if there is just one document a public listed company would get absolutely correct it would be it’s financial report, Tricubes however is bucking the trend and inserting typos in their Annual Reportin what could be the shrewdest move ever to gain public attention. It’s probably a good thing, considering the ‘surprisingly low’ take up rate for the 1Malaysia email project. Tricubes aimed to get 5.4million email accounts, but according to the Malaysian Insider “ has so far only managed to register several thousand, most of whom were ported over from trial accounts”. This typo could be a cunning but ingenious ploy to get Malaysian more aware of the project, or it could be a error by a company that isn’t well run. Either way, there’s no such thing as bad publicity right? (sarcasm level at an all-year high).

Trey Ratcliff is a professional photographer who photographs ooze with talent, he also blogs at stuckincustoms.com. It’s an amazing blog, but what’s even more amazing is that Trey chooses to release his works of art under the creative commons non-commercial license, which has it’s restrictions but allows free usage of the photos as long as its used for non-commercial purposes. Now that’s like a programmer offering free programs, or a writer offering free-content. It’s not unheard off, but it’s rare. However, in todays economy more and more professionals are taking this step towards similar licensing of their works.

Treys photos aren’t customized for a specific purpose, he post them on his blog and if you like them you can use them. It’s not customized in the sense that he didn’t take the photograph of you or for you. Similarly a lot of programmers are offering free programs they wrote as a challenge or a dare and shared not just the program, but the source code that any other programmer can build further upon. They didn’t build it for a specific purpose, just something general that they thought would be best shared rather than sold. So in that sense, Trey can use photos of a holiday or a scenery and offer that for free.

I mention Trey not because I love his work (although it IS amazing), and not because Trey is a top level photographer that he shares his work online. I mention Trey because he has synthesized in short post on Google+ what he thinks of Online Piracy, and it really has struck a chord with people, especially since Trey is on a different end of the piracy war and he’s saying that pirates aren’t bad people. WHAT?