If you’ve read my previous posts on Ravel (one, two, three), you’ll know that I’m making the current beta available to Patrons on my 68th birthday, which is tomorrow: March 28th. This post covers:
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What I’d like Patrons to do with Ravel, which includes:
- Share it with friends—I actually want to get Ravel into as many people’s hands as possible—while respecting both their privacy and mine;
- Test using Ravel for data analysis that you customarily do using other programs, whether that’s just Excel, or something as advanced and complicated as R; and
- Give me and Russell Standish, who’s programmed Ravel into existence, feedback on it;
- How Ravel came about; and
- Why we’re sharing it now, rather than waiting until a commercial version is ready.
Share it
I’ll start with the second topic first. Though I’m making this beta available to Patrons only, I’d actually like to get it into as many hands as possible. So I actually want my patrons to share it with friends—but preferably, in a way that lets us gather the names and addresses of potential purchasers of a commercial version of Ravel, much further down the track.
We were going to do this automatically via an online web store, but Russell has checked out about six open-source stores, and they have all sucked, in one way or another. So tomorrow, we are going to simply give you an URL from which you or anyone else can download the current beta of Ravel.
To share it with friends, all you have to do is send them the URL—but please, ask first if they’re willing to share their names and email addresses with us. If they’re not, but you still want to show it to them, and they are still curious, then share it anyway. Getting the product into circulation is more important to me than collecting addresses for the future marketing of the commercial release of Ravel.
We will continue releasing subsequent betas to Patrons, and I’d ask that you don’t share these with friends: instead, if anyone wants to use the latest version, tell them to sign up to Patreon, either here or at Minsky’s page at http://patreon.com/hpcoder/.
Test it
For obvious reasons, I use Ravel to analyze and display economic data. But it is a generic data analysis and display tool, which can handle anything that you can put into a CSV file (other file import formats will be supported over time). I’d especially like to hear people’s experiences in using it with corporate, government, or scientific data, since if it does reach the commercial stage, they will be a far larger part of the market than just academics.
There will be many limitations to Ravel compared to the programs you’re currently using, simply because we haven’t finished designing it yet. But we believe that the Ravel itself—a graphical way of displaying multi-dimensional data—is a significant advance over existing programs, and that coupling this with Minsky’s existing ability to design equations visually makes it a potential “killer app”. It can do what Pivot Tables do in Excel, and in fact can take over many of the functions of Excel itself. It is also easy to audit a Ravel sheet because the equations are graphical, and one equation can take the place of tens of thousands of cell references in Excel.
Figure 1: Using BIS Debt database to derive GDP and credit
Give us Feedback
Russell and I have been developing Ravel in our spare time for several years now. Most of our time has been taken up in getting the basic engine to work properly—design at one end, bug fixing at the other. Now that the basic features are in place, we need feedback from users about how it feels to use Ravel rather than other programs—primarily, Excel, plus Pivot Tables in Excel and other programs.
So please, use it and let us know what the experience is like. Replies to tomorrow’s post where we launch the program will be a good start; sometime soon we’ll organize a place to discuss it properly—perhaps a channel on Discord.
How Ravel Came About
Before I became an academic, I was a software reviewer for Australia’s two leading computing magazines—firstly Australian Computing, then Your Computer. Both are defunct now, but that role gave me exposure to the entire spectrum of computer software during what could be called its “Cambrian” phase: when there was an enormous amount of experimenting, and no overall dominant software provider.
Those halcyon days are long gone. Now Microsoft and Google between them dominate the program world. And, frankly, we’re much worse off for it, because many of the programs that have died in the meantime were far better than the programs that are dominant today. They didn’t necessarily look better—the cosmetic features of software have improved as operating systems and faster chips have allowed more processor cycles to go to appearance rather than substance—but they were functionally superior.
One of these programs was PC Express. Think a spreadsheet, but with up to a dozen axes rather than just two, with formulas that operated on entire arrays of data rather than individual spreadsheet cells. I loved this product, and raved about it. The one thing I criticized it for was the lack of an intuitive Graphical User Interface.
Figure 2: My review of PC Express, later reproduced by IRAUS as a promotional leaflet
Some years later, the Australian division of Information Resources International, IRAUS, asked me to give the keynote speech at their annual conference, and suggested that I focus on its weakness—the absence of a GUI. Could I think of one for the speech?
Inspired by Javelin, another program that I’d recently reviewed that had a much better GUI but nothing like PC Express’s power, I came up with what today we call a Ravel.
Figure 3: Part of my presentation for IRAUS’s AGM in 1989
I was in discussions with IRAUS and its international parent IRI to sell my interface idea to them and incorporate it into PC Express, when the program was purchased by Oracle, and everyone I was dealing with disappeared from the company.
The idea went into deep freeze as I continued on my academic career—which had started in 1987. Then in late 1995, I and several other Sydney-based specialists in complex systems decided to run a conference on the complex systems approach to economics, called Commerce, Complexity and Evolution.
Figure 4: The book produced from the conference Commerce, Complexity and Evolution
One of the people who submitted a paper to that conference was Dr Russell Standish, who was then Head of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Unit, a joint venture by the Universities of New South Wales and Sydney. Russell and I became close friends afterwards. A few years later, the Universities shut the HPC joint venture down, making Russell redundant. He decided to go into commercial programming rather than look for another university role, while I rose from a tutor at UNSW in 1987 to a Professor at the University of Western Sydney in the mid-2000s.
In the early 2010s, I developed the idea of building Minsky as a systems dynamics program, and got funding for it from the Institute for New Economic Thinking. My first choice for someone to program it was Russell, and luckily, he was available.
Then in late 2012, I copped the same fate as Russell had a decade earlier, when the University of Western Sydney decided to shut its economics department down and make me and the 4 other Professors of Economics redundant. Since Russell and I were already working together on Minsky, I suggested that we start developing Ravel as well. Unlike Minsky, Ravel was developed as a sideline and without any funding—apart from some of my retirement savings. So it’s been a very slow burn, and we took some wrong turns along the way (including designing it as an Excel plug-in). We finally settled on building it on top of Minsky’s GUI, and finally Ravel is at a point where we’re willing to put it into other people’s hands.
Why now?
Our original plan was to develop Ravel as a commercial venture, and use the revenue from it both for our own lifestyles, and also to fund the research that Russell and I have always wanted to do, but have never been able to raise the required funding. I also wanted to hang onto the development reins of Ravel, since over the years I’d seen so many good programs die because of bad management. I was damned if I was going to let that happen to Ravel.
Then I read the work of William Nordhaus and friends, and I realized that I didn’t have time to run a company, as well as take on their civilization-threatening trivialization of the dangers of climate change. Nonetheless, development of Ravel was still continuing, and by the time I’d published my first critique of Nordhaus, Ravel was almost ready for prime time.
Figure 5: My critique of Nordhaus, published in September 2020
There was one problem: its handling of large data sets. That was addressed by adding the capability to handle sparse data arrays, and the work to get that right was only finished a month or so ago.
If we were going to go the product sales route, we would have kept it in house until it was ready for a first commercial release. But now that we both realize the effort that has to be put into first raising the alarm about how much worse climate change will be than economists have claimed, and then developing alternative analysis, we are open to other avenues. In particular, there’s no point in delaying a release: so why not give it away on my birthday to my supporters on Patreon? It’s as good a reason as any to get Ravel into the hands of more users.