Digital Musings

De la créolisation en lieu et place de la disruption

D'or et d'airain

D'or et d'airain: Méditations numériques

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nous embrassons un capitalisme du gigantisme digital. Souvent aveuglément, toujours avec embarras.

Les mots et expressions que nous employons en disent long sur la violence de notre relation à la prospérité numérique : « destruction créatrice », « disruption », « darwinisme digital », « uberisation », « big data », « monétisation », « the winner takes all »...

C’est finalement une bien étrange métallurgie que celle qui, à l’or des mots, préfère l’airain des néologismes bricolés à la hâte.

Et si nous méditions sagement notre rapport au monde digitalisé ?

La libre et instructive promenade que guide Éric Briys nous invite à flâner avec un historien, à faire l’école buissonnière, canif en poche, à reprendre le chemin de la bibliothèque, à apprendre à éplucher une banane, à franchir le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, à écrire de la twittérature, à converser avec les robots, à prendre le pouls de la classe moyenne.... et à ne plus confondre l’or et l’airain pour, enfin, agir.

Disruption? Créolisation?

Antifragility and Bregman Divergences

After Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb comes up with Antifragility (book to be released very soon).

Very briefly, antifragility means that some things may benefit from disorder. Usually we tend to think that things are either fragile or robust. Well, this way of, in a sense, striving for robustness misses the whole point: What we should aim at is antifragility. We should try to gain from noise when possible, in other words shoot for convexity.

In the attached paper, Brice Magdalou (Lameta, University of Montpellier), Richard Nock (Ceregmia, University of French West Indies) and myself draw on information geometry concepts to show that important ideas in Antifragility can be captured into a premium which we call Taleb's premium. This premium is structured around so-called Bregman divergences (which by he way are linked to Jensen's inequality).

You will learn not to trust the Almighty Mean!

One piece of advice: Walk (slowly), muse, gaze and look around you what is or could be antifragile. Believe us, this is time well spent!

Here is the paper.

Amira Laifi, professeur à l'Ecole de Management de Normandie, et Cyberlibris dans la Revue Française de Gestion!

C'est l'histoire d'un professeur de management qui devient entrepreneur et qui, douze ans plus tard, lit le récit de son aventure narrée par un autre professeur de management (photo ci-contre) dans la Revue de Management la plus prestigieuse de France (la Revue Française de Gestion).

C'est une belle mise en abyme à laquelle nous ne pouvions pas rester insensibles. Relire son histoire, appuyer sur le bouton "rewind", remonter le temps sont des expériences étranges et enthousiasmantes à la fois.

Etrange, car le regard (académique) de l'autre sur une histoire qu'il n'a pas écrite mais qu'il tente de décoder agit comme un révélateur photographique. C'est une photo dans laquelle les détails fourmillent, détails qui ont parfois fait la différence alors qu'ils n'étaient pas perçus comme tels sur le moment. C'est une photo qui invite comme toute photo du passé à la nostalgie: on y revoit des visages, des lieux, des moments que le temps avait injustement ensevelis. 

Enthousiasmante, car l'entrepreneur s'il recherche avant tout la sanction entrepreneuriale de ses pairs et de ses clients n'en est pas moins sensible à l'exigence du regard académique, surtout lorsque, comme Cyberlibris, il opère une partie importante de ses activités commerciales dans le monde académique.

Merci au professeur Laifi pour ce pari académique qui a débuté sous la forme d'une thèse de doctorat : il fallait une bonne dose de bravoure académique et de conviction personnelle pour embrasser un sujet aussi pétri par l'incertitude, pour s'attaquer à une aventure  dans laquelle la chance ou la malchance peuvent jouer un rôle aussi fort. 

 

 

Google nous rend-il (fr)agiles?

Qu'est-ce-qui est le plus important?: Se souvenir de l'information ou bien se rappeler de l'endroit où on peut la trouver (c'est-à-dire de l'endroit où on l'avait trouvée antérieurement)?

Et d'ailleurs, le fait que l'on sache où la trouver implique-t-il que l'on n'éprouve pas (plus) le besoin de la mémoriser?

Ce sont évidemment des questions qui (dans la lignée du fameux article de Nicholas Carr) prennent un relief particulier dans un monde connecté dans lequel l'information est à un clic de souris. Ce sont des questions que des chercheurs de Columbia University, de University of Wisconsin-Madison et Harvard University résument dans le titre d'un article récent: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Voici en quelques citations leur angle d'attaque et leurs conclusions liminaires:

"Our research then tested if, once information has been accessed, our internal encoding is increased for where the information is to be found rather than for the information itself."

"It would seem from this pattern that people don’t remember where when they know what, but do remember where to find it when they don’t recall the information. This is preliminary evidence that when people expect information to remain continuously available (such as we expect with Internet access), we are more likely to remember where to find it than we are to remember the details of the item. One could argue that this is an adaptive use of memory—to include the computer and online search engines as an external memory system that can be accessed at will."

"We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. This gives us the advantage of access to a vast range of information—although the disadvantages of being constantly “wired” are still being debated."

On ne peut s'empêcher de se demander si cette logique du juste à temps généralisée, du flux tendu au détriment du stock ne crée pas des vulnérabilités dont nous n'avons pas encore pris toute la mesure. Cette logique qui sous-tend nos économies élimine dans un souci d'efficacité, de rentabilité, les redondances. Ainsi, nos banques qui nous donnent bien du souci ces temps-ci fonctionnent avec le minimum de capital propre et, donc, l'effet de levier maximal. Résultat des courses: catastrophique! Nos entreprises travaillent en flux tendu et l'on vient à subir la productivité plutôt que de la partager. Comme le rappelait récemment un ouvrier de l'industrie automobile: "enfant je rêvais de voiture, je rêvais de les construire; adulte, à la chaîne, j'y suis mais je ne vois aucune voiture, que des fragments de voiture..." Il suffit d'un grain de sable, un sous-traitant défaillant, un tremblement de terre etc... pour que tout le système déraille tellement sa tension est grande: la fragilité a pris le pas sur la robustesse jugée trop peu rentable, trop peu performante.

L'obsession est à l'optimisation, la performance; optimisation et performance que nous prenons pour acquises tant nous faisons (aveuglément?) confiance à ceux qui nous les promettent. Et, les promesses n'engagent que ceux qui les reçoivent...

Fascinant lorsque l'on pense que ces calculs de rentabilité et de performance sont souvent erronés quand ils ne sont pas manipulés. Etonnant lorsque l'on plonge dans le monde de la biologie cellulaire pour y constater que les question de la robustesse y sont (en revanche) examinées avec la plus grande attention :

"In short, the trade-off dictates that high-performance systems are often more fragile than systems with suboptimal performance. Interestingly, there are studies reporting suboptimal metabolism performance in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli (Stelling et al, 2002; Fischer and Sauer, 2005). If the trade-off holds, metabolic performance has to be kept suboptimal to ensure a certain level of robustness against environmental perturbations."

"It is important to clearly define robustness and adaptation through evolutionary selection. Here, ‘robustness’ means an individual organism's capability of tolerating external and internal perturbations, such as environmental fluctuations, the addition of drugs, and mutations. Robustness–performance trade-off means that, when two individuals are compared, one is found to be more robust than the other but is outperformed by the other; thus, no individual can be more robust and at the same time exhibit higher performance than others." (Hiraoki Hitano, juin 2010)

"Defining any scientific term is a nontrivial issue, but in this paper, the following definition will be used: 'robustness is a property that allows a system to maintain its functions against internal and external perturbations." (Kitano, 2004a)

Google (employé ici comme métaphore) donne à nos cerveaux une agileté informationnelle remarquable. Mais ne soyons ni dupes ni candides. Cette agileté a un coût dont nous n'avons pas encore pris la juste mesure tant l'emphase est mise sur cette information toujours juste-à-temps. Tout système optimisé est certes performant (par définition de l'optimisation) mais il est aussi fragile, agile et fragile.

Alors que vaut-il mieux des cerveaux robustes ou des cerveaux (fr)agiles?

Faces and books: A never ending tale.

Facebook : I have all the faces.

Google: Sure thing. But I have all the books.

Facebook: What do you mean "all the books"?

Google: All the books, I mean it. Web metrics books and since today word books!

Facebook: Ok you mean it. So what?

Google: Well, let me tell you what: What do you do with faces without books? What's the point having all these faces if you can't even know what they read, worse if you can't even "measure" them? Your faces look pale to me!

Facebook: I see. But what's the point having all these books and equations if you don't even know who the faces are, what they do right now as we speak, who they friends are, what their friends currently do. You geek, are you from MIT (Stanford for that matter) that you can't even read? Your numbers look dry to me!

Google: You Facebook, are you from Harvard that you can't even count?

Facebook: Yes I am. That's where I was born by the way...

Wall Street 2, marchés de dupes: ce n'est pas que du cinéma!

Un compte-rendu original de Wall Street 2 et de cet excellent "Marchés de dupes" (Editions Maxima).

C'est ici : Aeco0049

ELibris: La bibliothèque numérique de l'Université des Antilles et de la Guyane

L'Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (UAG) vient d'innover avec Cyberlibris en lançant ELibris , la première bibliothèque numérique pluridisciplinaire adossée à un réseau social académique. ELibris est riche de plus de 10 000 livres en français et en anglais auxquels viendront s'ajouter sous peu de nombreux ouvrages en langue espagnole.

ELibris est le fruit d'un travail de coopération entre les équipes de l'UAG (en particulier le Service Central de Documentation dirigé par Sylvain Houdebert) et celles de Cyberlibris. ELibris couvre la Martinique, la Guadeloupe et la Guyane et ce n'est sans doute pas un hasard si un tel projet a pris racine dans la région chère à Aimé Césaire.

Les image parlent mieux que les mots et ci-après figurent les liens vers les vidéos qui expriment les témoignages de l'UAG:

Lien 1

Lien 2

Les personnels administratifsn'ont pas été oublié. La bibliothèque est bien celle de toutes les personnes qui font vivre l'UAG et ELibris compte, outre une collection Caraîbes, une collection Loisirs qui couvrent aussi bien la fiction que la non-fiction, le monde de l'enfance que celui des adultes.

Avec ELibris, la bibliothèque numérique démontre les richesses que le web peut apporter dans la relation aux livres et au auteurs.

Plus ça change, moins ça change!

ADDRESS ON THE BANKING SYSTEM

[Delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress, June 23, 1913.]

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Congress:

It is under the compulsion of what seems to me a clear and imperative duty that I have a second time this session sought the privilege of addressing you in person. I know, of course, that the heated season of the year is upon us, that work in these chambers and in the committee rooms is likely to become a burden as the season lengthens, and that every consideration of personal convenience and personal comfort, perhaps, in the cases of some of us, considerations of personal health even, dictate an early conclusion of the deliberations of the session; but there are occasions of public duty when these things which touch us privately seem very small, when the work to be done is so pressing and so fraught with big consequence that we know that we are not at liberty to weigh against it any point of personal sacrifice. We are now in the presence of such an occasion. It is absolutely imperative that we should give the business men of this country a banking and currency system by means of which they can make use of the freedom of enterprise and of individual initiative which we are about to bestow upon them.

We are about to set them free; we must not leave them without the tools of action when they are free. We are about to set them free by removing the trammels of the protective tariff. Ever since the Civil War they have waited for this emancipation and for the free opportunities it will bring with it. It has been reserved for us to give it to them. Some fell in love, indeed, with the slothful security of their dependence upon the Government; some took advantage of the shelter of the nursery to set up a mimic mastery of their own within its walls. Now both the tonic and the discipline of liberty and maturity are to ensue. There will be some readjustments of purpose and point of view. There will follow a period of expansion and new enterprise, freshly conceived. It is for us to determine now whether it shall be rapid and facile and of easy accomplishment. This it cannot be unless the resourceful business men who are to deal with the new circumstances are to have at hand and ready for use the instrumentalities and conveniences of free enterprise which independent men need when acting on their own initiative.

It is not enough to strike the shackles from business. The duty of statesmanship is not negative merely. It is constructive also. We must show that we understand what business needs and that we know how to supply it. No man, however casual and superficial his observation of the conditions now prevailing in the country, can fail to see that one of the chief things business needs now, and will need increasingly as it gains in scope and vigor in the years immediately ahead of us, is the proper means by which readily to vitalize its credit, corporate and individual, and its originative brains. What will it profit us to be free if we are not to have the best and most accessible instrumentalities of commerce and enterprise? What will it profit us to be quit of one kind of monopoly if we are to remain in the grip of another and more effective kind? How are we to gain and keep the confidence of the business community unless we show that we know how both to aid and to protect it? What shall we say if we make fresh enterprise necessary and also make it very difficult by leaving all else except the tariff just as we found it? The tyrannies of business, big and little, lie within the field of credit. We know that. Shall we not act upon the knowledge? Do we not know how to act upon it? If a man cannot make his assets available at pleasure, his assets of capacity and character and resource, what satisfaction is it to him to see opportunity beckoning to him on every hand, when others have the keys of credit in their pockets and treat them as all but their own private possession? It is perfectly clear that it is our duty to supply the new banking and currency system the country needs, and it will need it immediately more than it has ever needed it before.

The only question is, When shall we supply it—now, or later, after the demands shall have become reproaches that we were so dull and so slow? Shall we hasten to change the tariff laws and then be laggards about making it possible and easy for the country to take advantage of the change? There can be only one answer to that question. We must act now, at whatever sacrifice to ourselves. It is a duty which the circumstances forbid us to postpone. I should be recreant to my deepest convictions of public obligation did I not press it upon you with solemn and urgent insistence.

The principles upon which we should act are also clear. The country has sought and seen its path in this matter within the last few years—sees it more clearly now than it ever saw it before—much more clearly than when the last legislative proposals on the subject were made. We must have a currency, not rigid as now, but readily, elastically responsive to sound credit, the expanding and contracting credits of everyday transactions, the normal ebb and flow of personal and corporate dealings. Our banking laws must mobilize reserves; must not permit the concentration anywhere in a few hands of the monetary resources of the country or their use for speculative purposes in such volume as to hinder or impede or stand in the way of other more legitimate, more fruitful uses. And the control of the system of banking and of issue which our new laws are to set up must be public, not private, must be vested in the Government itself, so that the banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative.

The committees of the Congress to which legislation of this character is referred have devoted careful and dispassionate study to the means of accomplishing these objects. They have honored me by consulting me. They are ready to suggest action. I have come to you, as the head of the Government and the responsible leader of the party in power, to urge action now, while there is time to serve the country deliberately and as we should, in a clear air of common counsel. I appeal to you with a deep conviction of duty. I believe that you share this conviction. I therefore appeal to you with confidence. I am at your service without reserve to play my part in any way you may call upon me to play it in this great enterprise of exigent reform which it will dignify and distinguish us to perform and discredit us to neglect.


Source: Project Gutenberg's President Wilson's Addresses, by Woodrow Wilson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: President Wilson's Addresses

Author: Woodrow Wilson

Editor: George McLean Harper

Release Date: December 31, 2005 [EBook #17427]

Language: English