Information Currency and Information Engineering

icws-0.2.3 released!

2006-12-23T19:48:00.000-08:00

ICWS version 0.2.3 has been released. This version of ICWS has the first classes used for exchange of information currency. The distribution includes the class utilized with ActiveMQ for creating the market server - right now a proof of concept more than anything else.

An Internet-draft has been released to present the documents and operations for trading information currency. Unfortunately, this I-D (draft-jpbedell-information-currency-trading-00.txt) only contains an example trade, without addressing exceptions or details of the messaging infrastructure. The I-D is intended to present ideas for discussion, and I'm hoping for the fire of criticism to get me to write more. ;)

this is not an update title

2006-11-30T00:14:00.002-08:00

The purpose of the too-clever-by-half title is to meekly acknowledge that I haven't been getting a lot of software written. I've been preparing for the Casualty Actuarial Society's Exam One, to be taken on Friday, December 1.

My dream is that information currency will enable sophisticated financial engineering mechanisms to be applied to the management of information. My hope is that actuarial qualification will be a way to practice financial risk management and financial product development in a way that incorporates new technology and innovative approaches. Sounds delightful, no?

from the development-is-ongoing-i-promise department

2006-11-21T01:21:00.000-08:00

I've been setting up the development environment for the Information Currency Exchange Server and getting ready to start work on the Information Currency Analysis Server. My hope is that I will have a demonstration system for the creation, exchange, and analysis of information currency from YouTube videos by mid-December. There's nothing like a timetable to focus the mind!

Creation and simulation of a financial market (in this case, for information currency) requires multiple participants. For now, there's only one developer (little old me, in other words) on the information currency project, so I am using the Cougaar Agent Architecture to create multiple clients that are first generating IC with the IC issuance server and then sending IC exchange messages to the IC exchange server.

The Information Currency Exchange Server will be ActiveMQ-specific, with a custom interceptor written to process IC exchange messages. The ActiveMQ project is part of a very impressive group of projects, with very productive contributors - Hiram Chirino was nice enough to quickly answer a newbie question asked on the activemq-dev list. The exchange server will also have a web interface to display the market conditions, and the Information Currency Analysis Server will draw information from the exchange server, as well as the issuance server, as well as user-generated content (think every ICAS a wiki-powered financial analyst - but perhaps not by mid-December!).

The first part of the Directions to Freedom podcast series (not that I would give my efforts a pretentious title, or anything ;) has been released on my other blog.

Make sure to look at Marianne Richmond's interesting marketing blogs:
Conversational Media Group and Resonance Partnership.

information currency for education system organization, part one

2006-11-06T19:03:00.000-08:00

One of the primary motivations for the development of information currency is the creation of a new system for organizing education. At the present time, the evaluation of information created in an educational setting is generally performed by teachers, recognized as having expertise in the area in question. The process of performing the evaluations, to say nothing of the subjects of study, can have a rather arbitrary basis in the discretion of the teacher. While there are social norms for the subjects to be studied, as well as social norms for the evaluation (grading) of academic work, there is no direct correspondence between those social norms and the ultimate requirements of the larger society. Indeed, it is often recognized that there is an "education crisis", and education systems often demonstrate a stubborn resistance to social, economic, and technological change.

The ubiquity of government ownership (and operation) of the means of production in school systems has a strong effect on innovation in education and the performance of educational systems. As with famine in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the persistent underperformance of learners in many state-run school systems is a consequence of centralized political control of production. In the case of education, however, the famine of intellectual stimulation that so many students suffer is less apparent than the malnutrition that so many North Koreans experience - but in our highly technological and intensely competitive society, a famine of intellectual stimulation can have life-long consequences.

An important characteristic that food in North Korea and education in North America have in common, however, is that the political control mechanisms are self-serving and self-perpetuating. The tyrants ruling North Korea, who enjoy first priority in the allocation of food, surely understand that a starving population is more easily controlled. Our dear leaders in the Western world, overwhelmingly educated at a tiny number of exclusive, elite schools, are continuing a long and sordid history of population control through government schooling. While the role of intertia in sustaining socialist education bureaucracies should not be underestimated, and sincere good intentions may underlie some of the (deeply misguided) efforts to place and keep the government in control of young minds, there is a recognition on the part of political leaders throughout history that subjugating populations is most easily and imperceptibly accomplished through the control of education.

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. - Woodrow Wilson

The preceding quote by the 28th President of the United States explicitly reflects prejudice about the capabilities of many individuals, but also implicitly asserts that it is the role of government to define both what a "liberal education" is and who is suited to such an education. While the prejudice in President Wilson's statement is repugnant, the more harmful belief is that a static, inflexible government school system can both define the ideal education for individuals and deliver that ideal education to individuals. Without market incentives, which are suppressed and subverted by central planning, the allocation of resources in a school system will inevitably be inefficient and perceptibly unfair.

from the getting-closer-to-one-post-per-day department...

2006-11-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

Posted on my other blog...

Feedback welcome!

motivations and expectations for information currency

2006-11-04T18:04:00.000-08:00

Information currency is intended to provide a new economic means to value information. This mechanism, unlike existing copyright schemes, is not based on coercive legal mechanisms. Unlike a number of other proposals for incentivizing information creation (such as FairShare), information currency incentivization is based on transferable financial instruments, enabling the market exchange of property instruments to be used to coordinate the management and use of information. The insights of Hayek on the use of knowledge in society suggest that market prices will make it possible to efficiently aggregate information about information into those prices. The perspective of Hayek implicity assumes a general equilibrium state where all information is known and knowable, but this is clearly not the case. Information currency will provide another practical example of the accuracy of praxeology, where market prices support estimates and provide after-the-fact validation for the actions of individuals.

The technology underlying information currency is similar to that for (unblinded) digital cash - with the difference that there is a distinct set of "digital cash" instruments corresponding to each unit of information that is managed by the information currency server. Unlike other quantitative indications of information value, such as number of links, or number of views, the price for information currency is associated with direct economic motivations (the amount of money that the IC can be sold for). This will make it useful for making critical decisions on an assisted or automatic basis, such as security-related decisions. With lots more software development, and the operation of sufficiently reliable institutions, it will be possible to use well-known financial engineering processes to coordinate the generation and utilization of information. This, it is expected, will enable new means for influencing human actions, given the central role of information and ideas in directing human action.

For right now, though, there's lots more software development to be done!

Information currency video developed - YouTube IC market to follow!

2006-11-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

I've created a video describing the ways information currency might eventually be used, in particular to coordinate the production and valuation of YouTube videos. It seemed only natural to put it on YouTube, then:

Struts development for Information Engineering

2006-10-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

After considering the available options, I am working to develop a front-end for Amazon's E-Commerce Service using the Apache Struts framework. Why Java? Why Struts?

Java, because the only currently existing information currency software is written in Java, and it's anticipated that the large number of supporting libraries used in ICWS will also be essential for developing an information currency service.

Struts 2.0 because of the widespread use of Struts 1.2, and the intention to create a scalable large scale system for IC on the basis of the next generation of Struts.

Slow progress, so far!

Information currency software updates

2006-09-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

ICWS-0.2.2 has been released. This release adds only a new ant target so that users of ICWS can run a server by using the command "ant test-server". icsvn-0.0.5 has also been released. This release is a slight cleanup of the icsvn codebase, and was released at least partially because I wanted to be able to post to freshmeat.net.

Information Currency Development Update

2006-08-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

Since the last post, icws-0.2.0 and icws-0.2.1, as well as icsvn-0.0.3 and icsvn-0.0.4, have been released. I've posted a proposal to incubate the InfoEng project within the Apache Software Foundation - no positive responses yet, but that may change. For the development of the trading server, the Apache networking framework MINA will be used. For the IC management and trading client, the Eclipse RCP will be used.

Present Directions for Information Currency Development

2006-05-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

Today was a day of evaluating options for information currency development.

For the ICWS information currency issuance server, several enhancements are appropriate or necessary:

WS-Notification should be used to publish notifications of newly issued series and newly invalidated information currency units. Apache Pubscribe will likely be used for this purpose.
WS-ReliableMessaging (likely the Apache Sandesha implementation) should be used for ensuring that the messages transferring information currency are not lost.

For the information currency trading system, the trading server will be implemented using the Jetty servlet container, Axis for SOAP web services, and WS-Notification for distribution of trading messages. Use of SOAP web services may not be optimal for performance, but the consistent use of standards should enable information currency to be more readily utilized in future systems (particularly for grid computing systems).

The information currency trading client will be implemented as an Eclipse plugin, to take advantage of the Eclipse infrastructure and ecosystem, and to place initial applications of information currency trading squarely within the software development community. The use of Java for the ICTP client implementation will enable the use of Java web services components for the necessary client operations.

Information Currency Trading Software

2006-05-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

The client and server software to trade information currency is under development. In order to utilize emerging web services standards, the the server and client will utilize the WS-Notification standard for communicating trading messages. The client is intended to integrate with the Eclipse platform, so that software information currency (such as that created with icsvn) can be used more easily to coordinate distributed software engineering efforts.

No timeline established yet for delivery. :(

Information Currency for Traffic Signal Control

2006-04-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

In addition to functioning as tradeable property titles to information (e.g., commits to a subversion repository), it is intended that information currency units will serve as general purpose access control tokens. These access control tokens can be associated with authorization to utilize physical resources, such as "permits" to occupy a particular area (access-controlled vault or other secured space), or authorization to control a device providing communication or computation services (such as granting access to forwarding services in a wireless network or allowing a login to a computer system). One application that bridges physical access control and control of electronic service-providing devices is the control of traffic-signalling devices.

In this application, the presentation of an information currency unit from a recognized series allows the presenter to control the operation of the traffic signal, in a manner subject to essential safety constraints, for a specific amount of time. An individual who has purchased the information currency that will enable them to control traffic signals may use that IC in conjunction with real-time sensor systems to provide services that enhance the transportation experience.

The ultimate controlling authority for the traffic signal devices is the authority that creates and maintains signal access information currency. It should be expected that the underlying control system for the traffic signals, in addition to supporting information currency-based access control, will enforce consistency such that accidents are prevented. This would include the prevention of green lights in mutually exclusive directions, specified lengths of time for yellow lights, and other safety considerations. Additionally, there may be certain minimal service levels that are maintained for users of the traffic signal not presenting information currency for the use of the traffic signal.

The use of economic mechanisms to manage traffic signals should be highly effective in increasing the welfare and well-being of traffic signal users. The nature of economic calculation is particularly well-suited to traffic management, as there are many independently motivated users of automobile transport resources who currently utilize fixed transportation resources, generally without a price system, with a clear scarcity and exclusivity in the use of high-speed transportation resources. Additionally, the evolving technologies of mobile Internet communications and computing can be utilized for the exchange of information currency to dynamically coordinate the rivalrous allocation of transportation resources. The use of markets for the pricing of traffic signal device control enables a wide range of efforts to contribute to increasing the welfare of transportation market participants. An active, liquid market for economic instruments used for traffic signal access control will enable wide participation in transport efficiency enhancement, incentivizing the development of new systems to make transportation safer, faster, and more satisfying.

Traffic signal control by dynamic means is already a reality, of course, (along with associated non-market economic mechanisms) just unevenly allocated by non-market means. Does anyone else see a direct parallel between Soviet bread lines and American traffic jams? ;)

icsvn-0.0.2 released!

2006-04-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

icsvn development: Released icsvn-0.0.2 with support for payment IC, and including PaymentICManage.java class to manage icsvn configuration and stored payment information currency units.

ICWS release 0.2pre3

2006-04-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

ICWS Development: implemented a first step toward reliable transactions for issuance and exchange of ic. Celebrated by releasing icws-0.2pre3!

icsvn Development: used apr base64 routines (with little success) to create and process verification certificates.

first post!

2006-04-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

ICWS development: deferred acceptance of payment IC for issuance until last possible moment. Also ensured that ResultSets and PreparedStatements were close()d to minimize resource utilization.

icsvn development: started writing code to implement setup procedures, including various IC management functions.

Freshmeat stats for ICWS:
Vitality: 0.12% (Rank 807)
Popularity: 0.87% (Rank 5920)
3 URL hits, 23 record hits yesterday.

Not that I obsess over Freshmeat.net statistics, of course. :)