Sjors Provoost

Solving Unproductivity

October 30, 2008 – 14:03

I will distribute free copies of Getting Things Done!

We all want to save the world, but we are remarkably ineffective at it. We leave the car at home once a week, replace a few light bulbs and complain to our friends that the government should do something about AIDS. Perhaps we even donate a bit to charities.

The problem is that it just doesn’t add up. It feels good, but it often turns out there are far more effective things you could do. But how do you decide what the best way is to spend your precious time and money?

By Sjors | Posted in Earth Hour, campaign | Comments (4)

X-Prize for carbon removal?

October 28, 2008 – 21:22

Last year, Richard Branson offered $25 million to the person who comes up with the best way of removing one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere.

I say, let’s be a bit more ambitious and offer $10 billion to the person who actually removes about 300 billion tons before 2013. In other words, whoever restores CO2 to preindustrial levels before Kyoto ends, wins.
Read More »

By Sjors | Posted in Earth Hour | Comments (5)

Lomborg vs. Lomborg-errors & Co. (Part 3/3)

October 27, 2008 – 15:51

What’s with the precautionary principle?

Lomborg discusses the Precautionary Principle in his book, but none of his critics seem to refer to this discussion. They seem to ignore it, because they do exactly what he warns about.

Lomborg essentially argues that the Precautionary Principle is being abused by scientist to attract unjustified large amounts of resources.

By Sjors | Posted in Earth Hour, Uncategorized | Comments (11)

Lomborg vs. Lomborg-errors & Co. (Part 2/3)

October 27, 2008 – 14:35

Debunking Cool It Critique

My short answer to the critique on Cool It is that it is mostly right about the details, but completely wrong about the big picture. The most comprehensive resource of critique on the book can be found on http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/. Kåre Fog and others have spent many years creating an inventory of every mistake – big and small – that Lomborg has made over the last decade.

The idea behind the site is the following:

For every piece of information in the books, you have to check if it is true and if the presentation is balanced. If the concrete information given by Lomborg is correct and balanced, then it follows that his main conclusions are also correct. But if the information is flawed, then the main conclusions are biased or wrong.

By Sjors | Posted in Earth Hour, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Lomborg vs. Lomborg-errors & Co. (Part 1/3)

October 27, 2008 – 13:46

After I discussed Lomborg’s latest book about climate change in my previous post, it came to my attention that there is a website dedicated to its flaws at http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/ . Initially I was very concerned because it indeed shows some very serious issues about the book and Lomborg’s methods in general.

Upon closer inspection however, it turns out that the critique completely misses the point. The same goes for Ackermans paper ‘Hot, It’s Not – Reflections on Cool It!, by Bjorn Lomborg‘ and the other critics that I’ve been able to find so far.

What they are not seeing, is that Lomborg is proposing a paradigm shift. Or at the very least, they don’t understand the paradigm shift. I demonstrate this later on, but let me first explain this new paradigm. Please pay attention, as paradigm shifts tend to be hard to get if you are not used to them.

TOC:

A new paradigm for looking at climate change? (part 1)
Introduction to the new paradigm
How to properly use this paradigm in your critique of Lomborg
Debunking Cool It Critique (part 2)
My personal take home messages from Cool It
How bad are Lomborg’s Errors?
1. Polar bears
2. Heat and Cold deaths
3. Melting glaciers
4. Sea level rise
5. Hurricanes and extremes
6. Malaria
7. Final score Lomborg versus Fog
What’s with the precautionary principle? (part 3)
What about Ackermans paper?
The organizational perspective
Conclusions

By Sjors | Posted in Earth Hour | Comments (3)

Earth Hour – On the bright side

October 23, 2008 – 15:49

Those following me on Twitter may have noticed that I am a little bit skeptic about Earth Hour – an initiative that asks everyone to turn off their lights for one hour to raise awareness about global warming.

It is a great thing when the whole world joins together for one hour to think about something important. I love that about Earth Hour. But why just climate change? There are so many other problems in the world.

Imagine having the worlds attention for one hour – something nobody has ever achieved – what would you say? What would you want 6.7 billion people to think about?

So here is my challenge for anyone who cares about the world, has a camera and some free time:

Send me a one hour video with your top 10 best ways to help the world!

Rules

There are just a few simple rules:

A top 10 of of best ways to help the world
60 minutes
Explain the problem
Explain how it can be solved on a global scale
Provide a simple first step for individuals to contribute or learn more
No lies: be prepared for some serious fact-checking by the community
No divine intervention: it’s just us this time

By Sjors | Posted in Earth Hour, campaign, livejournal | Comments (8)

Startup Camp and the Cultural Divide between those who Have Money and those who Want It

October 7, 2008 – 15:02

Startup camp

Last weekend I participated in the first edition of the Melbourne Startup Camp. What happens when you put twenty five people, who may or may not know each other, in a room, divide them into three teams and tell them to start a company within less than 48 hours? What if you also introduce a couple of ambitious deadlines throughout that weekend and convince everyone their companies might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars once they are funded by the Venture Capitalist…. this Sunday at 3 pm.

Well, obviously, you end up with a fantastic and completely exhausting weekend. You end up with many lessons learned, many new contacts made and maybe even a surviving startup or two.

During the weekend I was mostly focused on writing code – 26 hours straight – but that didn’t stop me from observing other things. I’ve learned a tremendous amount of things on technology and working in a multidisciplinary team of (mostly) strangers under high pressure, but that’s not what I want to write about here. This post is about culture.

Venture Capital

Please take a bit of time to read Duncans post about our project, the other projects, the weekend in general and the lessons he’s learned. The title – The Good, the Bad and the VC - should warm you up and it’s an interesting read.

Assuming you haven’t read it, one the things he discusses is the guest VC, Jordan.

A VC (Venture Capitalist) is, as far as I understand it, basically someone with way too much money looking for even more money. In order to do that he needs to find a bunch of high quality people with a good idea. There is a lot of people out there with ideas and a need for money, so they have to keep it short. The resulting phenomena is known as pitching. It’s simply a more sophisticated and useful alternative to soccer. For an 14 minute introduction to the subject and just to get an impression of their pace, watch this TED talk. It’s a must-see for anyone who needs to give a presentation about anything actually.

So Jordan gave some advice to the groups at Startup Camp about how they present their buisness plans to a VC such as himself. You should not start with how cool your project is. In stead you should first focus on how the VC is going to make a lot of money, only after that you should talk about the “details”.

Duncan didn’t really appreciate this and wrote:

The short version: bullshit and lie, and it’s only about the money.

But I disagree. The short version is: don’t bother a VC unless you have something he wants.

The reason he said you should exaggerate is not because he wants to invest in lies. That would simply not be in his interests. The reason he says that is because he wants you to at least think along these lines. Even if your initial idea won’t achieve that, at least you have the right goal in mind and you’ll find another way.

It is a well known fact that the end result of a starting company is nothing like their initial idea for a product. Coca-Cola doesn’t contain cocaine anymore, need I say more?

The same goes for buisness plans; they change.

The only thing that matters is the team. A great team with a mediocre idea and mediocre buisness plan, will fix both issues in due time. A mediocre team with a fantastic idea and brilliant buisness model is a recipe for disaster. Just lend your brand new car to a 16 year old cocaine prostitute to see my point.

A VC does not want to invest money in a team that doesn’t share his goal of making a lot of money. If they both agree on that and if the team is good, he’ll get his profit. If the team doesn’t agree, e.g. it aims at more conservative buisness models, then he will not get his profit.

It’s not about lying, it’s about thinking the same way. And yes, of course it is all about the money; that’s the difference between a VC and a charity.

Culture shock

Before I continue, I wish to quickly introduce a “new” phenomenon into the mix here: culture shock.

If somebody moves to another country, he finds himself in an unfamiliar environment where all his subconcious daily tricks don’t work anymore. A person usually goes through a number of phases.

the honeymoon phase: everything is great, new and exiting
the (what I’ll call) denial phase: “characterized by a hostile and aggressive attitude towards the host country”. Stereotypes are formed, e.g. “Americans always…”
final adjustment: “visitor accepts the customs of the country as just another way of living. He can operate within the new milieu without a feeling of anxiety although there are moments of strain”

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, Duncan concludes his analysis of our encounter with a Venture Capitalist, by saying that VC’s are:

anything other than nice people, and any rumors they’d heard about VC’s were true

Now I truly enjoyed working with Duncan, but this is, sorry to put it bluntly, a classical case of culture shock, denial phase. That is not something about Duncan in particular, because I read this type of statement a lot. The usual reasoning is that VC’s in Australia should behave more like VC’s in Sillicon Valley, but that is completely missing the point.

There is simply a massive cultural gap between people who have money and people who want money. At least as far as the underground web entrepreneur crowd in Melbourne versus Australian Venture Capitalists is concerned.

There are two ways to deal with culture shock: one is to “leave”, which is basically what Duncan seems to be doing when he says:

And you know what, if I never pitch to a guy like Green again as long as a live, I’ll die out my days as a extremely happy man.

The other way is to stick around and keep interacting until you figure out a way to use the situation in your advantage. At that point you’ve extended your comfort zone and you will earn buckets of money at the same time. I’m opting for the second solution in this case.

Your choice should depend on the question whether you think you need VC money or not; personally, I would like to at least keep that option open (I’m talking in general here, nothing to do with any pluck).

My impression was that Jordan (the VC) was actually really curious about us (all groups, the whole startup camp idea), but you could easily see he was not in familiar territory. He made a few remarks about presentation style, but quickly stopped doing that after he sensed the response. Trust me, if I was given carte blanche to criticize the three presentations, everyone would have left the building in tears. He was mild, if not soft. Not that the presentations were not great, or that I would have done any better, but they didn’t stand a chance to win capital.

Next camp: more ugly!

What I’m trying to say here is that we should involve VC’s (and other sources of capital such as the B-word: banks) much more closely in the next Startup Camp. They should be right on top of us during the ideation phase, forcing us to think more in their terms.

That exposure will in turn make them understand “us” a bit better as well.

But make no mistake: there is plenty of places to invest money, not plenty of places for us to get money, so we are the ones that need to adapt, like it or not.

By Sjors | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (9)

My winter in Melbourne

September 22, 2008 – 23:25

My new room and view

Some of you may wonder what I’ve been up to outside my Summer of Code project, so let me just write an update about the last couple of months.

As I wrote before, I arrived in Melbourne on May 12th, spent about a week here and then traveled onwards to Canberra and Brisbane. In early June I got myself an apartment in Preston and about a month later the Internet worked and my life could really start. I spent several 40+ hour work weeks in the public library before that, feeling really sorry for people who did not have a laptop: I called them The 15 Minute People.

Sydney Skyline

Less than a week after I moved into my new apartment, I traveled to Sydney. My official excuse was to visit the Google Developer Day, but I also did some sightseeing, got myself a free T-shirt at the opening of the new Apple Store and had a great chat with the folks from Lisasoft who work on all sorts of geo web and open source stuff. I stayed at the Chilly Blue Backpackers, where I met some really laid back people. It was a short trip and provided the right backpacking, sightseeing and techy mix for me.

Back in Melbourne I’ve been going to all sorts of interesting events, both for the sake of the events themselves and in order to meet the interesting folks that also visit them. Upcoming.org is very useful for this, as well as techevents.com.au. Of course, even in 2008 urban life is less organized than one would like, so I’ve also mastered the art of paying attention to people who mention other potentially interesting events and I’ve joined several mailinglists.

It seems that I now divide my “social time” over two more or less unrelated “subcultures”. These two subcultures were a lot more intertwined in San Francisco and Seattle by the way. I have a theory why this is the case, but I’ll leave that for the first person who buys me a drink and asks.

First of all there is Couchsurfing, a world wide hospitality network. Even though I have only “surfed” for one week in Melbourne, I just keep on meeting great people and having lots of fun through that network. There is a Melbourne Couchsurfing group and its members regularly organise drinks, excursions and other excuses to get together.

Jumping Crocodile

My three personal highlights: I spent the weekend with a group at someone’s house in the Mornington Peninsula. We went snowboarding at Mount Buller (all my muscles hurt for weeks, but it was worth it). And during the midwinter night we burned a couch.

It is really remarkable how much technology changes the rules of the “urban social game”. In an era where everyone seems to be afraid of everyone else and nobody talks to strangers in public, there are these incredible exceptions. With couch surfing, you can take a plane to another continent and stay in the house of a total stranger and you both simply know it is completely safe. Same goes for inviting a bunch of strangers to your house warming party.

How can this be? One reason is probably because most people really aren’t as evil as we all seem to believe. But another reason is that people can leave each other references. So before you decide to stay with somebody, you can read what other people have said about them. And so a situation is created where everyone knows everyone else and everyone keeps an eye on everyone else. Just like in a village. Hence the term “global village” I guess.

The second subculture is a group of tech savvy people with social skills. There is this cultural phenomenon going on here in Melbourne – and in other places all around the world – where one person organizes a meeting around a theme and basically invites the whole world. In practice, only five to twenty like minded people, who may never have met each other before, show up. The result is a great evening and the event is repeated. After a while, a new group comes into being that is not formed through any one company, government or existing circle of friends (although these still play a role): it is self assembled out of the millions of people that live in this city, grouped around a common interest. Pretty cool huh?

Me as a mighty pirate; my sword is just outside the image in case you were wondering. Photo by Lauren.

My current favorites are Tequp – a biweekly meeting in a store about anything techy – and Jelly – a day of co-working in a restaurant or office for “freelancers”. I’ve met a lot of nice and interesting people there. Often, these concepts are copied to other cities, by people who may or may not have been to these events before. Maybe I’ll get a Tequp and Jelly up and running in Utrecht by when I get back.

Some other successful examples of that phenomenom are Barcamp (a spontanuous self organized free conference) and the Talk Like a Pirate Day parties all over the world.

In other news, I just got myself a bicycle two weeks ago. Australia is not really what you would call a cycle country, but the government seems quite eager to get people to use these wonderful devices. That’s probably because Australia recently passed the USA as the country with the highest obesity rate. Anyway, the result is that there are some wonderful bike lanes. My favorite one is even named after me: the St. George Road bike path is a long straight path, far from the road and lined with palm trees! I love palm trees.

Cycling also turns out to be much faster (and cheaper) than taking the tram – even without any real effort – so I am surprised there are so few people here that use them. But I can come up with a couple of reasons.

First of all, there is this law that people have to wear these ridiculous helmets. Even though people claim that they are used to it and it looks normal to them, I think deep inside people realize that wearing a helmet on a bike is like wearing shorts at a stock exchange. I also seriously doubt it really adds any significant amount of safety and even if it did, there are other measures that would make a much bigger difference, see below.

Kakadu National Park.

The second problem is the lack of dedicated bike lanes. At some point in the past, the government had the brilliant idea to “draw” bike lanes on the road. However, either they were completely incompetent fror the beginning or they had to give in to car owner lobbyists: cars are allowed to park on these bike lines. The result is that you have to swing on and off the bike lane, which is inredibly dangerous as it means you are moving in and out of fast traffic all the time. Also, because cars are parked on the “bike paths” you are in constant danger of being slammed of your bike by an idiot that opens his or her car door at the wrong moment.

Dear government, the solution is dead simple: do not allow cars to park on the main traffic arteries. It is a waste of road space and extremely dangerous for cycles. It is just about as stupid as allowing people to have barbecues in the middle of the road. Anyone who complains that they can not walk an extra fifty meters around the corner should be marooned on a far away island. Oh wait…

But there are some good things too: you can take your bike on the trains (outside rush hours) and you can even get a free bike locker at some of the train stations. This makes allows me to bike down hill to the city and let the train take me back. And there are some truly beautiful bike trails in this green city!

Oh and of course I also took a little train trip from Melbourne to Adelaide and on to Alice Springs and Darwin; about 4000 km. From Darwin I joined a wild excursion to Kakadu National Parks with a company called Kakadu Dreams; they provide some really active tours! It was good to be offline and in the outback (the outback in my definition is anywhere where there is no cheap and abundant Internet access) to relax for a couple of weeks.

By Sjors | Posted in Australië, livejournal | Comments (9)

If there was one thing you wish you had known before…

September 1, 2008 – 12:54

One of the questions in the student evaluation of the Google Summer of Code reads:

If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be?

It is a very typical evaluation question and we all sortof know what it means and how to answer it. However, if you insist on thinking about it – and this is very acceptable behavior in some circles – it is actually a very difficult question.

I tend to read this question as follows: if you could meet yourself in the past, what would you tell your past self?

Well, I would probably give myself the final git repository, plus an external hard disk with as much of the interesting new information on the present day Internet as possible.

What would my past self do with that information? He would probably decide to use the outcome of a couple of footy matches to make a decent living. But apart from that, he would pick another project. Not because my project is uninteresting, but I really enjoyed that part of the project that I worked on. Continuing to work on this particular code base is really interesting, but not as interesting as it was to build it in the first place.

So my conclusion is: the more advice that I give to my past self, the less intersting his project would become. This is not a real problem however, because the information would provide him with many new opportunities.

I have the same view on Sudoko puzzles. A friend of mine wrote a computer program, while he was drinking beer in the pub, that could solve a lot of these puzzles. Many fanatical puzzlers would never consider using such a program; it would take away the fun.

I completely disagree with them. Now that my friend has releaved the world of The Sudoko Problem, mankind can move on to solving new problems.

I do not understand why people take such pleasure in creating artificial problems and then solving them over and over again, when there is an astonishing abundance of problems already out there waiting to be solved.

Just to make an even bolder statement: anyone who spends even a minute a day solving problems that have already been solved, should feel really guilty about climate change, poverty, diseases, slow public transport and millions and millions of other problems. Well at least, I tend to look at my own behavior from that perspective. All that without losing the ability to enjoy live; that is the real tricky part.

By Sjors | Posted in Uncategorized, gsoc, livejournal | Comments (6)

The end of the Summer – let there be Summer!

August 15, 2008 – 22:52

Although there are still a couple of days left until the official Pencils Down date of the Summer of Code, I am now officially putting my pencil down because I need to catch a train to Adelaide tomorrow morning.

I guess this really marks the end of my student period; even though I graduated in June, this project allowed me to feel like a student just a little longer. Sniff, now I really have to enter the big scary adult world.

But first I will go on a trip for two weeks to see Adelaide, the Ghan train, Darwin and Kakadu National park. It will be a very culturally diverse trip; from what I have heard, Adelaide and Darwin are pretty much as different as it gets here in Australia.

Route profile demo by Lambertus

I am very happy to see that my application has found its way to an actual route planner website (see figure above)!

So what is next? Well, I will obviously have much less time to work on this project, so my highest priority will be to explain other people how to use and improve the application and how to install it on their own server. So don’t hesitate to mail me about that!

I have to keep this post short because I still have to pack some stuff and it is already late. But I do want to thank some people of course. Thanks Google for sponsoring me (and for creating all sorts of cool and useful tools for my project). Thanks OpenStreetMap community for selecting my project, your confidence in me and your support. And of course, thanks Artem for mentoring me during the project and for being a great and interesting person to talk to in general!

These are just thankyou’s, not goodbyes. So see you soon!

By Sjors | Posted in Australië, gsoc, livejournal | Comments (5)