What's Up With STEEM's Price?

Over at steemit, I have a theory about why the price of STEEM has been dropping, despite reports of rapid growth.  In short, I am guessing that it's safe to call "a bottom."  Here is the conclusion, but click through for the explanation.

So my theory is that STEEM demand dropped when people learned they could liquidate their SBD holdings without going through STEEM as an intermediate step. Now, $0.85 should be more or less stable going forward, as $0.15 probably represents the risk premium associated with the 7 day SBD to STEEM conversion process. If that holds steady, STEEM should have hit a bottom and now be free to start reflecting user growth again.

Does facebook’s economic structure promote incivility?

What I'm thinking about at the moment:

In the past couple of evenings, I've spent a little time playing around with tsu.co and steemit.com. These two social media sites differ from facebook because they pay their members for contributing content. I have already posted in facebook several times that I think it will be necessary for all social media sites to adopt that model and pay their users at some point in the future. Eventually, I think that free won’t be good enough, and people will demand a share of the revenue that their content draws in.  But today, my thoughts have drifted in a different direction. How does the monetary incentive affect the way that people interact in social media?

A Tenth Amendment Voting Strategy?

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to discuss an apparently unusual way of thinking about voting, and to ask the question: Is there a simple voting strategy that can reinforce the checks and balances that are designed into the American Constitutional system of government?  I don’t claim to answer the question here, but here are some opening thoughts.

From half a lifetime’s worth of observation of the public at large, it seems to me that there are three widely espoused voting strategies: (i) Vote for all candidates from one political party; (ii) Research all candidates on the ballot and vote for the most qualified candidate; or (iii) Don’t vote.  It also seems to me that these strategies are all ineffective.

It is important to recognize that the vote of an individual typically doesn’t matter, but the aggregate of voting strategies is what decides our country's balance of power.  So if large groups of people are following ineffective voting strategies, elections are bound to be unsatisfying.  Despite the negligibility of influence from an individual vote, I would argue that choice and promotion of a voting strategy is still an important civic role.

In this article, I intend to discuss three possible replacement strategies that can harness the incentives of two-party politics and make use of the checks and balances built into our system of government.  One form of checks and balances include so-called “horizontal checks” which are the contests between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.  A second form is the “vertical checks” which are delineated by the 10^th amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

These vertical checks arise from the tensions that exist between state and federal levels of government.

The next  section will contain cursory coverage of the existing voting strategies.  Suffice it to say that current events seem to prove that these strategies have been insufficient.  The final section will contain brief thoughts about some other possibilities.

Craig Wright, Satoshi, and Turing Completeness

I am only passingly familiar with Bitcoin technology, but I have been intrigued by recent claims that Craig Wright is the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto.  I was also intrigued last December, when the first claims came out.  At that time, I knew even less about Bitcoin  then I do now, and I knew nothing about the people who were involved in its creation.  But I watched this video,




and at around 17 minutes, I thought it was funny that "some guy" (who I now know is Nick Szabo, another Satoshi candidate - who denied it.) was arguing with "Satoshi".  Here is an approximate transcription at 16:34:

Architecture Viewpoints for Documenting Architectural Technical Debt

Introduction

Architecture Viewpoints for Documenting Architectural Technical Debt is a chapter in Economics-Driven Software Architecture.  The authors are Zengyang Li, Peng Liang, and Paris Avgeriou (LLA).  In this chapter, the authors propose a set of viewpoints which are meant to facilitate the documentation of architectural technical debt.  This blog post provides a summary and commentary.

There are three stated contributions for this work.  They are:

1. Identify architectural technical debt stakeholders and their concerns.
2. Propose their architecture viewpoints.
3. Provide evidence for the effectiveness of their viewpoints.

Following a common pattern for articles on technical debt, the authors begin by describing what they mean by their use of the term.  In this case technical debt is taken to mean the compromise of some quality attribute (QA) in exchange for a business advantages.  Quality attributes can include things like modularity, encapsulation, maintainability or evolvability.  Business advantages can include things like time to market and cost savings.  Architectural technical debt (ATD), specifically is when architectural decisions are made that incur or repay technical debt.  As seen in this work, architectural debt normally influences maintainability or evolvability.

Architectural Debt Viewpoints

Hello World

What is there to say about Cunningham's 1992 paper, Experience Report -- The Wycash Portfolio Management System, except that it started it all?  That's enough.  It is now impossible to write a paper (or blog) about technical debt that doesn't begin by citing Cunningham:

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

With that short excerpt, Cunningham introduced three ideas with staying power.

1. "not quite right" code is like a form of debt.
2. Time spent maintaining this code is like a form of interest.
3. Technical debt can have positive or negative effects.  Negative effects can be crippling.

Over the years, not quite right code has evolved into not quite right technology, and this phenomenon developed the name technical debt.

It is interesting to see how interest in the concept has developed over time.  In A systematic mapping study on technical debt and its management, Zengyang Li, Paris Avgerioua, and Peng Liang provided this graph with the number of studies from 1992 through 2013.