Fantasy Economics. Mark Dionne points us to an article in Slate about the economic models emerging at EverQuest, a massively multiplayer online game. The article's conclusion: If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government…. [Joho the Blog]

maybe or a fascist government with a nice dictator.

Moving Work Offshore Not Just For Blue-Collar Workers Anymore. Plastic::Work::Work: Remember Ross Perot's “giant sucking sound”? Looks like IT's starting to hear it, too. [Plastic: Most Recent]

this should have happened about a year ago. but now people are noticing…

Future perfect. In answer to aquestion posed by Mark Pilgrim, “Does your boss read your weblog?” I can say I don't know…. [Blog de Halavais]

seems like another discipline is quickly heading the way toward very real irrelevance, as has been the recent claims made against empirical political science, sociology, and economics in the face of the real world. It doesn't seem like empirical or quantitative work is the answer for most problems. In fact, it is hard to say how any empirical social science isn't history, because they tend to lack fundamentally the ability to prediction about what will happen in the case of world events. Now this might change, but I don't see it changing. This is not to say that other methods are better or more scientific, but occasionally the deep understanding found in an ethnographic account can allow a human to expect certain things, though inarguably, i suppose it depends on more things about the human than the account.

BTW, totally by coincidence, my old friend Adam Green, the dBASE guru, and CTO at Andover, retired rich from the software industry, is now taking classes at Harvard to learn how be scholarly about the history of science. His aim is to be the first software historian. Adam is uniquely qualified to do that. He was doing his work, reading the ancient scientists, on his own, when people asked what he's doing, he'd tell them and they would look at him weirdly. Now he says he's studying the same stuff at Harvard and people's eyes bug out. I've noticed the same thing. Synchronicity. [Scripting News]

Good luck on being the first, there is already a Journal of Software History, heck I've even given presentations on software history with an STS slant to them. There is also Video Game History, and several other variations. Not to be irritated, but why does everyone think they will be the 'first x' everything has been done before, the biography of Ada Lovelace is Software History.

What Are the Chances?. A rapidly evolving set of computing tools allow mathematicians, engineers and insurance executives to understand the odds of catastrophe. By Seth Schiesel. [New York Times: Technology]

but really, will it matter?

Jeremy Allaire: “After eight years with Allaire and Macromedia, I've decided to move on.” [Scripting News]

Good 4 him, Macromedia virtually killed one of the best web editors there ever was, which was homesite.

Moral Authority. In his 1947 letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations Albert Einstein wrote of 'enhancing the moral authority of the UN' and portrayed the United Nations as a “transitional system toward the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority”. Is the United Nations the depository of the moral authority of the international community? Some say no. Is there really such a thing as moral authority or is it one of those intangibles that, as a Supreme Court justice once said about obscenity, we cannot define, but we know it when we see it? Could a “one world government” work and would it really produce “moral authority” ? (More Inside) [MetaFilter]

one world government would work, but it would nto be int he best interest of the wealthy countries. and the sole origination of moral authority in a pluralistic society does arise from democratic processes and their enculturation effects.

Stein Gives Bioinformatics Ten Years to Live. Lincoln Stein reflects on the role of bioinformatics in his keynote address at the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference. [O'Reilly Network Articles]

Here is a link to Lincoln's discussion. It was quite provocative. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

10 years is a long time, a very long time. i'd say 7 tops, that would be around 4 revolutions of computational power and perhaps 2 revolutions in theoretical applications.

The preliminary agenda for the Open Source in Government conference is
up at www.egovos.org and free registration is open. We have over 125
sessions in security, health and Federal Enterprise Architecture. We have the White
House, OMB, NSA and Europeans coming to speak, including all the major
vendors and Open Source projects.