Luis von Ahn’s Trajectory
von Ahn is the guy behind reCAPTCHA (digitizes books through those captcha gateways), and before that the Google Image Labeler (which turns labeling Google’s image index into a game). Now he’s building Duolingo, where users translate content online while learning languages.
Essentially, von Ahn has mastered the art of building interfaces to large databases that incentivize (loosely at best) users to unknowingly manipulate the contents in order to generate value for the owner of the database.
It’s interesting to see his trajectory slowly trend towards the participants rather than the database proprietor.
- Labeler. Purely for Google’s benefit (users get stupid points).
- reCAPTCHA. Served the public while providing service to webmasters.
- Duolingo. Users learn a valuable skill while translating the web.
Next step? Picture This.
Review: Pocket Neighborhoods
Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World.
I rely on architecture books to get my creative fix. Ross Chapin’s “pocket neighborhoods” are of particular interest to me as my professional life focuses on how communities can address instability in the global system. He’s on to something.
The book is a meandering look at what he calls “pocket neighborhoods.” In Oakland, the Dutch experience, Portland, Seattle. These are “a cohesive cluster of homes gathered around some kind of common ground within a larger surrounding neighborhood,” and are designed for the 60% us that live in ones and twos.
Here’s a diagram to clarify:
Essentially, these developments are designed to align neighborhood infrastructure with behavior that emphasizes the community rather than the automobile, street, or individual – in effect, formulating ‘synthetic tribes’. People who share a future, a present, and possibly a past – by participating in the design process. They share tools, buildings, places for kids to play, porch-conversations, community dinners etc. And their homes don’t boast giant street voids.
It’s a relatively simple concept and Chapin does a good job explaining and addressing obvious questions. Privacy – The homes “essentially spoon” to preserve privacy. There’s a zoning issue (too densely packed) in most places that needs to be addressed through legal means. And these houses are indeed on the small side (many examples of dozens of houses on less than 3 acres).
Interesting to note that he thinks the upper limit is 12-16 homes. (This may be true, though you can probable co-locate multiple neighborhoods to get closer to Dunbar’s 150 people.)
Overall, it was thought provoking. These are proto-resilient communities. By concentrating on efficiency gains (small, efficient homes with mild solar augmentation) they’re lightly insulated from the shocks of the global system. There’s a few pages I highlighted entirely to share with friends and family – pocket family compounds (a few houses in close proximity for you and yours), as well as the design principles that existing neighborhoods used (local ‘ingredients’ and best practices). There’s a lot more to be done, but this was a pleasant overview of what’s being done already, from the ground up.
Woonerf.
From Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World by Ross Chapmin (full review coming up):
Although a lane is a narrow road for cars that is easily shared with pedestrians, a “woonerf” is a pedestrian space reluctantly shared with cars. The term is a Dutch word that roughly translates as “living street.” It originated in the Netherlands as a place where pedestrians, bicyclists, playing children, and even casual loiterers have reign over the whole street. Motorized traffic is allowed, but only at a walking pace.
Woonerfs have no lane markings, curbs, sidewalks, signals, or crossing signs. They are, however, surfaced with paving blocks to signal a pedestrian zone. This contrarian approach blurs the lines between vehicular and people space. Unsure of what space belongs to them, drivers become much more alert. Jan Gehl, an urban planner from Copenhagen, finds that “people look each other in the eye and maneuver in respect.” The outcome is drastically slower traffic and far fewer accidents.
Bailouts for Morgan Stanley Chairman’s Wife
Another excellent Taibbi piece. Quotes:
The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loanseach to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses.
Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.
Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.
But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses.
“You ever watch soccer, where the guy rolls six times to get a yellow card?” says William Black, a former federal bank regulator who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri. “That’s what this is. If you have power and connections, they will give you a freebie deal — if you’re good at whining.”
Created just after Barack Obama’s election in November 2008, the program’s ostensible justification was to spur more consumer lending, which had dried up in the midst of the financial crisis. But instead of lending directly to car buyers and credit-card holders and students — that would have been socialism! — the Fed handed out a trillion dollars to banks and hedge funds, almost interest-free. In other words, the government lent taxpayer money to the same assholes who caused the crisis, so that they could then lend that money back out on the market virtually risk-free, at an enormous profit.
Cue your Billy Mays voice, because wait, there’s more! A key aspect of TALF is that the Fed doles out the money through what are known as non-recourse loans. Essentially, this means that if you don’t pay the Fed back, it’s no big deal. The mechanism works like this: Hedge Fund Goon borrows, say, $100 million from the Fed to buy crappy loans, which are then transferred to the Fed as collateral. If Hedge Fund Goon decides not to repay that $100 million, the Fed simply keeps its pile of crappy securities and calls everything even.
The company was founded in June 2009 with $14.87 million of investment capital, money that likely came from Christy Mack and Susan Karches. The two Wall Street wives then used the $220 million they got from the Fed to buy up a bunch of securities, including a large pool of commercial mortgages managed by Credit Suisse, a company John Mack once headed. Those securities were valued at $253.6 million, though the Fed refuses to explain how it arrived at that estimate. And here’s the kicker: Of the $220 million the two wives got from the Fed, roughly $150 million had not been paid back as of last fall — meaning that you and I are still on the hook for most of whatever the Wall Street spouses bought on their government-funded shopping spree.
The public has no way of knowing how much Christy Mack and Susan Karches earned on these transactions, because the Fed has repeatedly declined to provide any information about how it priced the individual securities bought as part of programs like TALF. In the Waterfall deal, for instance, we know the Fed pledged some $14 million against a block of securities called “Credit Suisse Commercial Mortgage Trust Series 2007-C2” — but that data is meaningless without knowing how many units were bought. It’s like saying the Fed gave Waterfall $14 million to buy cars. Did Waterfall pay $5,000 per car, or $500,000? We have no idea. “There’s no way of validating or invalidating the Fed’s process in TALF without this pricing information,” says Gary Aguirre, a former SEC official who was fired years ago after he tried to interview John Mack in an insider-trading case.
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Review: Visual Acoustics
If you like modern architecture, this is a great way to kill 90 minutes. (The visuals are quite enjoyable.)