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This chapter considers desktop tools for agent-based modeling and simulation. Two simple but complete examples, Microsoft Excel agent spreadsheet models, are detailed. General tools such as Mathematica and MATLAB and specialized tools such as Repast for Python Scripting (Repast Py), NetLogo, and StarLogo are discussed.

This chapter uses examples from history to show how creativity, collaboration, and communication — in networks of people — have advanced civilization through to some of the greatest innovations of all time. Each example from history illustrates one of the key elements of COIN DNA. The chapter begins with how Homo sapiens eclipsed Neanderthals, and what this tells us about collaboration. Other examples from history include the Fugger banking empire of the German Renaissance period, Marco Polo, and the Rothschilds. The traits that make collaboration on the Internet so powerful, Linux, software patents, and Intel Research are discussed. Three additional examples — a campaign for the Kenyan parliament, Microsoft (both positive and negative aspects), and a “consul” that links entrepreneurs in the United States and Switzerland — expand the discussion of DNA and provide real-world, contemporary examples of how creativity, collaboration, and communication lead to innovation.

Intellectual property (IP) maintained its predominance over antitrust in the first decade of the 21st century. This chapter starts by looking at Microsoft, the most prominent antitrust case in recent years, exploring the IP aspects of the U.S. and European Union cases. It then examines innovation markets, standard-setting organizations, and patent pools before concluding with settlements and other activity in the pharmaceutical industry.

This first section of the book introduces the central issues of contracting out by asking ‘Why make when you can buy?’ This chapter begins by outlining a handful of contracting examples, most of which have been successful (Microsoft customer support, USA; Mambo Graphics, Australia; Marks & Spencer, UK), but one outright failure is also included (vehicle maintenance in Fairfax County, Virginia, USA). The chapter goes on to suggest what may have been the crucial elements of contracting decisions that resulted in success or failure. This provides an initial glimpse of the themes, the development of which is the main purpose of the book. The chapter also outlines the approach that will be taken in the book, which is not a contracting out manual, but an analytical tool to facilitate strategic thinking about contracting out.

This chapter focuses on the construction of MSNBC.com's web video player, the primary means by which NBC's cable news and broadcast news programs were made available to users and audiences online. More specifically, it examines the video player's interface and other features in order to elucidate the complex relationships, interests, and motivations devoted to the design of the everyday objects used in online distribution. It also considers the importance of syndication to MSNBC's web presence and how MSNBC.com was able to dramatically expand the reach of its online video by pushing clips to other web properties in Microsoft's online services division, including Bing and MSN.

Schools maintain a variety of records, but these aren’t necessarily analyzed as a source of data for improving school climate. Records of office referrals, suspensions, peer mediation cases, students serving detention, and other incident reports can be examined to learn about disciplinary issues and the school’s response. In addition to getting a sense of how many disciplinary infractions take place in school, it is also valuable to detect changes over time. By examining suspension records over a period of years, school leaders may realize that, along with their efforts to improve school climate and prevent violence, there is also a major increase in suspension rates, an indication that perhaps administrators have used suspension as a major strategy. Given the evidence on the negative outcomes of repeated suspensions, school leaders might reconsider their approach to violence prevention or punishment. Other schools may find that suspensions actually went down when climate improved because fewer students were being disciplined for incidents of violence. While many schools maintain paper records that are difficult to examine and process, others have computerized their reporting system. When computerized databases are available, the potential for educators to learn from the information and make improvements increases dramatically. Careful analysis of existing records can help identify what grade levels of students are most involved in certain behaviors and whether certain students or groups are committing the bulk of infractions. Analyses of these records can also help administrators to understand more about why students are getting in trouble, which students seem to be repeat offenders, and perhaps where and when the incidents are taking place. Absenteeism rates should also be examined in combination with other indicators. Patterns in the data can then be used to see what type of changes might be needed to eliminate the reasons that the students are getting in trouble. These records can also show whether there are certain times during the school year when problems are more likely to occur, such as at the beginning of the year or just before a break.

Some people change history by accident, and Niklas Zennstrom counts as one of them. This soft-spoken and still largely unknown Swede, described by the Washington Post as a “younger, hipper version of Bill Gates,” started two small companies in the early 2000s that have already done much to change how people exchange information in the twenty-first century. His first company created a filesharing software application called “Kazaa” that was destined to become the most downloaded program in history. Millions of people used Kazaa to exchange billions of songs in open defiance of national copyright laws. This chapter chronicles the filesharing movement, in which Zennstrom and Kazaa played a big role. At its height this movement led many to believe that filesharing might upend the central role of national copyright law in the distribution of information. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that this was not to be. And so in part, this chapter is a sequel to chapters 5 and 6, showing again the importance of law and national government, even for filesharing—a technology designed to be impossible to control. This chapter also introduces a crucial new theme: the effect of technological change on the market and the legal system. Filesharing introduced a cheaper method of distributing music that sparked massive changes in the economics of music distribution and the behavior of consumers. These changes were a jolt to the copyright law system that seemed to many to render it irrelevant. What appeared a threat to copyright law, however, turned out simply to be the law’s hesitation and adjustment in the face of a massive battle between the recording industry, technological upstarts, and music consumers over the spoils of a better music distribution system made possible by the Internet. As the 1990s ended, the music recording industry’s mood was optimistic. A new and sturdy technology, the compact disc, anchored the best decade of sales ever. A handful of major labels, a textbook oligopoly, exercised near total control over the distribution of music. And while the industry faced considerable expenses in the development and marketing of new artists, existing music cost little to manufacture and could be sold for up to $20 per album. The recording industry was rich, powerful, well-connected in Congress, and uninterested in changing a successful business model.

The early years of the microcomputer were characterized by a proliferation of machine architectures, each associated with a unique set of operating characteristics. As a result, many models enjoyed a relatively short production life, which in turn militated against the development of suitably robust and well-crafted software tools, especially in more specialist areas of activity such as music. By the dawn of the MIDI era, however, the design and development of these prototypes for the personal computer was proceeding on a more rational basis. Manufacturers had started to concentrate on generic approaches to the production of new models, in many instances designed specifically to accommodate applications developed for earlier technologies. These in turn facilitated early versions of the two architectures that have dominated subsequent developments to the present day, one pioneered by Apple, the other by Microsoft. Such environments were soon to prove increasingly attractive to musical applications, not least those that used the personal computer to control the functional characteristics of MIDI-based hardware. These included the control of performance characteristics using sequencing software, and also the editing of sound samples.

Something....-What? —A phenomenon. Something intrusive, something vague but insistent, pushing itself upon us. — Something outside? From afar? Something alien? — Something descending in the night, standing in the shadows at the foot of the bed. —An illusion? Hallucination maybe? A quirky twist of imagination? — No, definitely a presence, something that might be a someone, a someone with wires and electric sensors, probing, penetrating, exploring private parts. Something lifting us off the familiar face of the planet we thought we knew so well, beaming us outside the orbit of our comfortable homes. Definitely something indefinite . . . or someone. —We hear about them only from others who speak about sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, because we do not allow ourselves to be counted among the unstable few who acknowledge the possibility of something outside the circle of our sciences. Those unstable few accept belief in something standing in the shadows at the door. We listen closely to those speaking about incidents of the phenomenon. We do not look. — Something IS out there. We’ve seen and heard it in the night. It’s contacting us. The phenomenon certainly exists in late-night chat like the above. It exists as metaphysical hearsay, as an internal dialogue between what we believe and what we think we are willing to believe. Popular descriptions of “the incident” waver between child-like awe and tongue-in-cheek tabloid humor. Here is where our knowledge, as a culturally defined certainty, becomes most vulnerable. Here we discover the soft edges of knowledge as an established and culturally underwritten form of belief. What a thrill to feel the tug of war on the thin thread of shared belief! A blend of religious archetypes and science-fiction imagery supplies the words for those who tell about the incident. The stories often float up through hypnosis or “recovered memory” hypnotherapy, as in the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill who experienced abduction one September night in New Hampshire in 1961. Researchers have recently plotted consistently recurring patterns in thousands of stories, and the mythic dimension of the story line has not been lost on Hollywood.

A visitor to the dell.com web page finds a message prominently displayed in the upper left-hand corner: “Choose a Country/Region.” The cisco.com page likewise asks users to “Select a Location.” Yahoo’s web page has a “Yahoo International” link that connects to a global map with over twenty-five hyperlinks to specialized web pages tied to particular countries (like Denmark, Korea, and Argentina) and regions (like Asia). Everywhere on the web, sites ask viewers to identify their geographical location. Geographical links are puzzling for those who think of the Net as a borderless medium that renders place irrelevant. But the puzzle disappears when we see that, globalization and the supposed death of distance notwithstanding, national borders reflect real and important differences among peoples in different places. As this chapter shows, geographical borders first emerged on the Internet not as a result of fiats by national governments, but rather organically, from below, because Internet users around the globe demanded different Internet experiences that corresponded to geography. Later chapters will show how governments strengthened borders on the Net by employing powerful “top-down” techniques to control unwanted Internet communications from abroad. But in order to understand fully why the Internet is becoming bordered, we must first understand the many ways that private actors are shaping the Internet to accommodate differences among nations and regions, and why the Internet is a more effective and useful communication tool as a result. The most immediate and important difference reflected by borders is language. People in Brazil, Korea, and France don’t want English language versions of Microsoft products. They want a version they can read and understand. Microsoft learned this lesson when it tried to distribute an English version of Windows operating system in tiny Iceland. Redmond executives thought the market of 500,000 worldwide Icelandic speakers did not justify translation costs and figured the English version would suffice because most Icelanders spoke English as a second language. But Icelanders felt that Microsoft’s plan would imperil their language, which has retained basically the same grammar, spelling, and vocabulary for more than a thousand years.

His words hovered in my mind for months, then boomeranged with painful irony. What he said over lunch held the future in a horrible way that neither of us could grasp at the time. His words foreshadowed a tragedy that would injure him and implicate our schizophrenic culture. At the time, the prophetic words were innocent of the shadowy terrorist the FBI calls “the Unabomber.” Lunch was at a Sheraton Hotel on the second day of a national conference on virtual reality held in Washington, D.C., December 1-2, 1992. I had organized the conference for the Education Foundation of the Data Processing Management Association, and Professor David Gelernter was the keynote speaker. I had been looking forward to talking with him, and lunch seemed a perfect opportunity. The Yale computer scientist had invented the Linda programming language and had also written eloquently about the human side of computing. I knew him not only as a writer but also as a friendly reader of my books. I looked forward to an exchange of ideas. Our conversation moved from pleasantries to questions about how to humanize the computer. Several of David Gelernter’s sentences imprinted themselves on my memory and later played back to me in ways I could not—would not—have imagined: “We are on a social collision course,” he warned. “One portion of our population is building computer systems—the software cathedrals of this era — while another portion grows increasingly alienated from computers. This situation holds the greatest danger of a cultural collision.” Here was a premonition about the cyberspace backlash. Seven months later, on June 24, 1993, David Gelernter opened a mail package on the fifth floor of the Watson computer science building at Yale, and the package blew up in his face. The office was in flames, and David barely escaped. He staggered to the campus clinic, arriving just in time to save his life. The permanent injuries he suffered from the mail bomb included a partially blinded right eye, damage in one ear, and a maimed right hand.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of two products of the military-entertainment complex—Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2: WWII Pacific Theater (2000) and the film Pearl Harbor (2000)—that remediate narrative and interactive forms of temporal engagement in different but symptomatically related ways. While Pearl Harbor does not literally engage the viewer interactively in real time, it stimulates aspects of a realtime aesthetic. Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2, a game that uses the Microsoft Flight Simulator game engine, simulates narrativity through its historical realtime recreation of the air war in the Pacific during World War II. They are both exemplary instances of the reorientation to historical temporality underway in and through the military-entertainment complex.

This chapter describes a transformational model of human motivation that defines the “what” of service and selflessness and shows why this management philosophy is critical to the business success of the monastic tradition. More specifically, it examines the goat-rodeo mentality that has been fueling Microsoft's explosive growth. The real secret to Microsoft's success was that Bill Gates and his executive team managed to connect their corporate mission to these transformational experiences: a transformational organization. This chapter considers two kinds of transformational organizations and how the goat-rodeos idea contributed to their success. In contrast to unconsciously transformational corporate success stories, which are typically short lived, consciously transformational organizations display an amazing ability to thrive over long periods of time. Despite obvious differences relative to their specific missions, all consciously transformational organizations have three things in common: a high, overarching mission worthy of being selflessly served; personal transformation as part of the mission; and a methodology for bringing transformation about.

New York Tech Meetup emerged in the early 2000s as a formative organization in the city’s innovation ecosystem. Every month, hundreds of mostly young people and a few potential investors come to see computer coders and startup founders “demo” new apps and platforms they have created. In the 2010s, the tech meetup was joined by other organizations that also claimed to mobilize and speak for New York’s tech “community,” notably, the nonprofit organization Civic Hall, specializing in “civic tech,” and Tech:NYC, a nonprofit industry association. The chapter uses ethnographic observations and interviews with leaders of these organizations to document their efforts to “leverage” the membership for a role in tech policymaking in the city.