Musings Report #39 09-29-13 Accredit Yourself
You are receiving this email because you are one of the 400+ subscribers/major contributors to www.oftwominds.com.
For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Accredit Yourself
One of the key premises of my new book "The Nearly Free University" is that accrediting institutions of higher education has created a cartel based on artificial scarcity of credentials. The solution is to accredit the individual, not the school. This is of course the established practice in the professions. Why not extend this to every student in every field? The job of the college then becomes preparing students for an objective test of their knowledge and critical thinking rather than accumulating credits.
There is a third part of the solution that I am calling Accredit Yourself. The web and social media software is enabling an entirely new way of accrediting knowledge, experience and accomplishments: peer-to-peer accreditation.
There are already weak versions of this potential: LinkedIn, for example, allows you to "endorse" someone's skills but since the system doesn't rank or rate the credibility or strength of that claimed knowledge of another's skills, it is essentially meaningless.
For peer-to-peer (or mentor-to-trainee, supervisor-to-employee, etc.) accreditation to actually provide value to potential clients, employers or collaborators, the trustworthiness and credibility of the actual experiential connection between the people must be established in a way that can be verified by third parties. Additionally, the credibility of the endorser must be verifiable by third-party means.
This is the problem with Yelp, TripAdvisor and all the other customer-review based accreditation schemes for restaurants, services, B&Bs, etc.: there is no way to verify that the reviewer is 1) who they claim to be 2) credible 3) that they actually had the experience they claim to have had and 4) that they have any useful knowledge of what they're reviewing, i.e. they possess a base of experience that enables them to make a realistic assessment.
In other words, if a person has no verifiable knowledge of Chinese cuisine, why should their review of a Chinese restaurant carry the same weight as someone with deep knowledge of Chinese cuisine?
When it comes to Accrediting Yourself, it isn't hard to imagine an automated software system to allows individuals to post specific projects and accomplishments that make specific claims about expertise and responsibility for the work completed. These specific skills and projects completed could then be verified by participants in the system whose own skills and accomplishments were verified by other trusted sources or by documentation posted on the web that can be verified by third parties.
In such a system, participants would want to maintain high rankings for their own trustworthiness and credibility and as a result there would be a systemic bias against falsely accrediting someone's skills or accomplishments, because the discovery of the falsehood would destroy the credibility ranking of the accreditor. Every accreditation they had issued would immediately be suspect or withdrawn as a credible source.
This entire scheme relies to some degree on “the strength of weak ties” in self-organizing networks, as the most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.
In my view, this is the strength of Google's Page Rank (PR) algorithm for website rankings of influence and reach. (Page Rank is a scale of 1 (weakest) to 10 (strongest). It is very difficult to get higher than PR 5.) The PR system does not weight links posted on websites (that is easily gamed) or its search-rank placement (also easily gamed) but on the strength of the incoming links from other sites to the website being ranked. The higher the PR of the incoming links, the higher the rank of the website being ranked. This system cannot be gamed very easily, as the website wanting a high PR must convince other high-ranked sites to link to it. This is not very easy to do and generally fails to boost the PR over time. In other words, you can't game the credibility and strength of incoming links. (The oftwominds.com blog is PR 6.)
It seems entirely feasible to take the key features of Page Rank and apply them to a new system of peer-to-peer accrediting of the individual dircectly, rather than the accrediting a cartel or institution.
Market Musings
Take a look at this 3-year chart of the SPX (S&P 500) and see if you agree with my forecast. Nervousness over the political antics of the government shutdown is running high and markets have weakened for the past week. There will of course be some sort of resolution and a resulting rally on the economy being "saved" yet again. We see this potential for another spike in the stochastics.
But overall, the chart is showing weakness and the potential for a serious decline: indicators are negatively divergent, the 20-week moving average (MA) is at an extreme above the 50-week MA (i.e. the market is really stretched here), and the upper Bollinger band is flattening, showing loss of momentum.
I see some similarities with 2011: a multi-month topping process that in 2011 formed a classic head-and-shoulders pattern. This year, we might have a double top in place, or we might see one more new high to the 1750-1775 area--a target that some technical analysts have forecast for quite some time.
Regardless of whether the market double-tops or hits new nominal highs, the set-up for a major, extended decline is already in place technically.
Best Thing That Happened to Me This Week
We hosted some young friends who live in Southern California for dinner and met their 20-month old son (their first child) for the first time. Menu: Vietnamese grilled chicken, fresh kolrabi salad, green salad, carrot-daikon namasu, purple sweet potato (Hawaii-grown)-haupia dessert and fresh peach pie.
From Left Field
The Rise of Crowdsourcing: The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content,
solve problems, even do corporate R & D. (via Wayne A.)
“There is a revolution at our gates,” Crocetta said, “and if we don’t change everything — really change — the people will invade the government buildings. They’ll come in here to toss us out the window. And you know what?” — he paused and looked at each of the people in the room. “I’ll throw myself out along with them, because they’re right.” Long but worth the time...
Farm-City. State: (new documentary) What if an entire city could feed itself? (via John D.)
"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." John Adams
Thanks for reading--
charles
