Chenla: weblog

Ohfunato, Iwate Prefecture Japan Rebuilding Monument

2011-06-15T00:00:00+07:00

Our very own Chenla co-founder and artist, Ruben Seja together with Dusan Pomothy, artist and Stanley Rodriguez, a Kumeyaay Elder, have been invited to construct a Rebuilding Monument to those lost in the earthquake/tsunami earlier this year in Ohfunato, Iwate Prefecture in Japan. The project will be completed between 20 June and the 21 July, 2011 with the help of 20-30 volunteers from Japanese Universities in the prefecture.

The concept is to create a monument for the Lost souls using debris from the earthquake/tsunami area when permitted. The momument will be made of concrete with acid stain and a flexible opitcal silicon video display sandwiched between glass windshields from vehicles destroyed by the tsunami.

Survivors of the disaster will be invited to contribute memorial photos of those lost, to be projected on the displays.

The lights, computers and displays will be powered by wind turbines and solar panels.

Bread Cast Upon The Waters

2010-09-26T00:00:00+07:00

I have been thinking a great deal about how to build organizations and institutions which can survive very long periods of time. But how do you justify such investments, especially to a generation the measures time in nano-seconds and measures success by the ROI in the next financial quarter?

In a fairly recent SALT (Seminars About Longterm Thinking) by the Long Now Foundation entitled Long Finance, Stewart Brand read out an extended quote from Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars.

In the book, the Long Range Foundation take on very long term goals which require such vast amounts of both time and money that from a near-term perspective they are pointless wastes of money.

We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: "Bread Cast Upon the Waters," and its charter is headed: "Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants." The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers' fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn't enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn't show results for ten generations, if ever…something like how to control the weather (they're working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.

The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money – "embarrassing" to a non-profit corporation that is. Take space travel: it seemed tailor-made, back a couple of hundred years ago, for LRF, since it was fantastically expensive and offered no probable results comparable with the investment: There was a time when governments did some work on it for military reasons, but the Concord of Bayreuth in 1980 put a stop even to that.

So the Long Range Foundation stepped in and happily began wasting money. It came at a time when the corporation unfortunately had made a few billions on the Thompson mass-converter when they had expected to spend at least a century on pure research; since they could not declare a dividend (no stockholders), they had to get rid of the money somehow and space travel looked like a rat hole to pour it down.

Even the kids know what happened to that: Ortega's torch made space travel inside the solar system cheap, fast, and easy, and the one-way energy screen made colonization practical and profitable; the LRF could not unload fast enough to keep from making lots more money.

The Long Range Foundation projects echos a number of themes found in the Report From Iron Mountain (full text of the book); a hoax or satire (take your pick) published in 1966 by the Dial Press which claimed to be a leaked government report from a government think tank exploring the consequences of long term peace.

I was given a copy of the book around 1978 during a lazy summer in a century old Pennsylvania farmhouse by the wife of a retired vice-president of Harvard University turned gentleman farmer. The ideas explored in the book stuck in my head, unresolved, ever since.

Philip Coppens wrote a excellent article on The Report From Iron Mountain:

Lewin proposed that until substitutes for war were developed, “war” needed to be maintained, if not improved in effectiveness. Part of the “genius” of Lewin is in the type of proposed potential substitutes he proposed – some of which may have given various governments some inspiration… or is it just coincidence that “reality” mimics fiction? The Report’s recommendations were:

a giant space-research programme whose goal was largely

impossible to achieve (a black hole, budget-wise and hence able to feed the economy);

create a new, non-human enemy, e.g. the potential

threat of an extra-terrestrial civilisation

create a new threat to Mankind, e.g. pollution

new ways of limiting births, e.g. via adding drugs to

food or water supply

create fictitious alternate enemies

create an omnipresent, virtually omnipotent

international police force.

Many of these proposals should feel uncomfortably familiar. When the cold war ended, new phantom enemies were erected including the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. These were not real Wars. They had no concrete objectives and no means of ever being concluded. But so long as they could be used to create fear, they justified the existence of the Nation State and the vast sums of money being thrown away to fight them.

The Nation State, as we've known since Peace of Westphalia, is on it's way out. Finance, Transportation, Energy and Communications are now global distributed networks which transcend the ability of any one Nation State to control. Pretty much all services that Nation States provide can be delivered by either local government or the private sector. Over the next decades all that the Nation State will have left to offer their citizens is the threat of physical force and the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address in January 1961:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual –is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The purpose of the Long Range Foundation seems, on the surface, to be much the same as Lewin's proposals to dump huge amounts of money into projects which will have no practical return on investment. But in fact, as Heinlein points out, the ROI from such projects is potentially enormous. Where war truly is a means of throwing away money, big projects seeking to solve big ideas will often lead to very substantial payoffs. Just not for the generation which initiates them.

This is a message that needs to be relearned. We need to make the distinction between investment whose only purpose is to prop up power structures that are reaching the end of their shelf life and big investments in the future that have a real payoff. This could form the foundation for a Nation State which is not based on fear and phantom enemies.

Some things take time. Sometimes a very long time. But the potential payoff that your grandchildren or perhaps great great great grandchildren will see is very real. And it is our responsibility to lay the groundwork for those who come after we as individuals have passed out of living memory. Bread cast upon the waters indeed.

We're Back

2010-09-25T00:00:00+07:00

It's been a rough few months since the concert in May, but we're back. We may not have been posting, but we've been working hard on a number of ideas and projects which were hinted at in the presentation we gave in March.

Brad will be moving back to Bangkok in October. We hope to be giving a presenation at BarCamp Bangkok in late October. And work will begin in earnest on the Saltmine server prototype in November.

Chenla Concert

2010-05-17T00:00:00+07:00

For all of you who couldn't make it to the concert, it was your loss, you missed a great show. Thanks go out for the world class performances from Domingosiete, La Santa Cecilia & the PLopez Project. Thanks to Stone Brewing Company, Carl Strauss Brewing Company and Ballast Point Brewing Company for providing such classy beer. Thanks to George and Maria from Red Oak Catering for providing food which was worthy of both the music and the beer. Special thanks to Alex, Mucci, Memo, Lorraine, Roberto, Lamine, Stephanie, Ed and Danny – we couldn't have done this without your hard work. And finally, thanks to all who came to the show, your support is greatly appreciated.

Chenla at the WorldBeat

2010-05-12T00:00:00+07:00

See Event Page for more information.

Organization as a Human Activity

2010-04-07T00:00:00+07:00

The following is a draft of a section of a chapter introducing our Universal Authority Control project which is at the core of all Chenla Content projects. Any feedback would be most welcome.

Organization as a Human Activity

In recent years it has become common to hear the claim that search engines will replace the need to catalog altogether. But what many people don't understand is that search and retrieval is only a small part of why we catalog. But search engines do not replace cataloging or authority records and it's doubtful they ever could.

Search Engines

Search engines are nothing short of a technological wonder; a human achievement that should be mentioned in the same breath as landing a man on the moon, or any of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Personally, I am a heavy user of search engines. As I write this, I personally have made 13,202 searches since September 2004 when I first got my Gmail account, and this only includes searches made while I was logged into Google!

Search engines are very good at finding new and popular content, at the head on the left side of the Long Tail. But as you move down the tail, keyword search becomes less and less useful as the content becomes older and less popular.

Cataloging as an Organizational Technique

Cataloging, on the other hand is nothing more or less than a technique for the organization of objects and information. It is true that one of the primary reasons we organize, is so that we can find things, but just as importantly, we organize to understand things as well.

Organization is not simply a matter of sorting and collating, it also requires that we categorize, which means identifying the similarity between different things, as well as to evaluate the worth of items so that they may be either preserved, consolidated or discarded.

As we categorize and organize we can then begin to see larger patterns and trends emerge and we can use the categories used to catalog as mental signposts to remember not only where things are stored, but as a means of associating new information and content as we come across it in our daily lives.

Chunking

In cognitive psychology and linguistic analysis this process is called chunking. The term is used to indicate long-term memory structures that can be used as units of perception and meaning as a way the human brain organizes memories, and concepts. In a sense, cataloging is a means externalization and collectively sharing with others either locally or remotely, in real time and in the future, the same process we use to remember and understand the world around us that is going on in our brains.

In other words, cataloging is a a very human activity which is a fundamental part of our daily lives both as members of a culture and society and as individuals.

Controlled Vocabularies & Folksonomies

In addition to controlled vocabularies and thesauri I would be remiss not to mention folksonomies which are more popularly known as tags or tagging that used by many popular web services like Flickr or Del.icio.us.

This isn't the place to get into the religious wars between the taggers and those who prefer controlled vocabularies beyond that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Folksonomies are quick and easy and require no formal training. Adding a tag costs very little in time or effort and for that reason they are ideal means of a quick and dirty first pass cataloging for new content.

Controlled vocabularies are expensive and difficult to implement, but provide a mechanism for disambiguation between similar or alternate terms for the same person, place or concept, and provide a means for establishing a relationship between each term and other broader, narrower, related or equivalent terms. So a controlled vocabulary is ideal for older content that has already been identified as having some sort of long term value and therefore justifies the cost of cataloging using a controlled vocabulary.

Beyond a Search & Retrieval Based Web

The Web and more recently, the Social Web has transformed the way we communicate and interact with each other. But we are still managing the way we collect and organize information in two ways, 1) using file names and directories (folders) in a file system; and 2) using closed data structures which are hard coded into applications on the desktop and web applications.

There is no way of knowing what a post-search Web would look like. It is clear though that it will likely include a new paradigm for how people and groups collect, organize and manage their own information and mesh their own data structures with the data structures or other people and groups.

Launch Party Photos

2010-03-22T00:00:00+07:00

I've uploaded the photos from last friday's Launch Party on Adams Ave to our Flickr account. Thanks again to Nick Applebee for taking the photos.

Chenla Launch Party

2010-03-20T00:00:00+07:00

The Launch Party was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who came. I'd like to especially thank Memo for the wonderful food Alex, our resident roustabout, Edwin for the music and Nick Applebee for photographing the entire event. We couldn't have done it without you.

Sadly, we had a last minute video glitch and weren't able to record the presentation, but we will have the photos uploaded in the next couple of days.

The presentation is already up on line (slideshare | pdf | keynote).

Chenla Launch

View more presentations from Brad Collins.

Update On Site Redesign

2010-03-02T00:00:00+07:00

Just a quick note to let you know that we've been making slow but steady progress on the Site redesign. Pretty much all of the main pages have been created, though there are still a number of pages linked below which still have lorem ipsum placeholder text which we are slowly filling in.

Mekong Runs Dry

2010-03-02T00:00:00+07:00

Since the Mekong River is such a pervasive image and theme running through many of Chenla's projects, I thought it might be good, from time to time, to post news relating to the river itself.

According to Winai Chintongprasert, head of the Chiang Saen customhouse, the river, which forms the border of Thailand with Laos and Cambodia, and Laos with China, has run completely dry, with a very long line of sand dune islands in the middle of the river, forcing freighters from Thailand’s Chiang Saen Port to China’s Guanlei Port in Yunnan province and vice versa to have halted their runs for over 10 days.

Water levels are historically low partially because of an extended drought which has effected the region for the last few years. But another important factor are the many Dam projects along the Mekong in China.

Seventeen dams have been built on the Mekong River, most of which are in China. These dams are threatening fisheries, destroying a vast ecosystem, and starving millions. An additional eleven dams are currently in the planning process.

The Mekong River Commission was established as an international body to help protect and preserve the river as a shared resource for all of the countries it passes through. Not surprisingly, the only country not to have joined the commission is China.

Chenla: weblog

Ohfunato, Iwate Prefecture Japan Rebuilding Monument

Bread Cast Upon The Waters

We're Back

Chenla Concert

Chenla at the WorldBeat

Organization as a Human Activity

Organization as a Human Activity

Search Engines

Cataloging as an Organizational Technique

Chunking

Controlled Vocabularies & Folksonomies

Beyond a Search & Retrieval Based Web

Launch Party Photos

Chenla Launch Party

Update On Site Redesign

Mekong Runs Dry

Links