So here's a thought experiment. Let's say that a particular town is troubled with energy woes. The town council has asked everyone to turn down their thermostat on certain days when the power generator is overloaded.
So the town goes on for a month, and the following pattern emerges. On the "low-power" day, a dillema emerges for people in the town. No one knows what the rest of the townspeople are doing, and the common psychology amongst most of them is "No one else is turning down their power usage, why should I? I am just one individual, and my contribution will be a wasted drop in the bucket".
Okay, so let's say that the town decides to implement a different strategy. On everyone's thermostat, they decide to put on a sensor array that will report back exactly how many other people in the town are turning down their thermostats on low-energy days.
My question is, what happens then? My speculation is that this simple bit of information will induce people in this town to turn down their thermostats and act cooperatively to deter energy consumption in the town.
In a more direct example, let's take prisoner's dillema itself- with the goal of every player to minimize their penalty. In a game where the players only have knowledge of their own strategies and past histories, it becomes purely competitive and there is no nash equilibria. Each player given knowledge of each other's strategies can jointly minimize their penalties. While perhaps with prisoner's dillema, the end penalties may be the same regardless with or without the information...
My speculation, however, is that in a vast number of real world situations and games, more information will turn competitive games into cooperative games.
The application of IT in everyday life seems to have only started to scratch the surface of cooperative games for enhancement of everyday situations: traffic mitigations, litter control, using cellphones to pick optimal queues in supermarkets.
Shrimp are an abomination and equivalent to homosexuality. It says so right there in the Bible!!!
Also, check out aboyandhiscomputer for more lampooning easy targets :)
So Congress is currently considering a "database protection act" that
would extend copyright law governing databases of facts under a number of
circumstances.
As of right now, compilations of facts in databases is NOT copyrightable.
The current proposed law, even with it's exemptions would have a broad
range of chilling effects, including:
- making unavailble geographic data services (such as city street
information) except to mega coporations
- hobbyist collection and transmision of sports or stock market
statistics
- hampering the ability of NGO's, political parties, and other
non-profit organizations from use and publishing of factual databases
(such a list of congressional fax numbers).
- search engine caching (ala google)
If you have any other examples, please feel free to toss on the list.
Please take the few minutes to send a fax-via-web to your congress critter
at the urls below....
Please forward far and wide!!!!
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TAKE ACTION =>
http://www.publicknowledge.org/take-action/PublicAction.2004-01-29.5078945128/
Keeping an eye on Washington for you,
The Public Knowledge Staff
http://www.publicknowledge.org
Human Rights watch has published a report on the uprisings in Haiti. Was the School of Americas involved in the training of Guy Philipe? What are the actual reasons the U.S. has had a grudge against Aristide, seeing as how we put him there in the first place?