Notable Blogs/List of Lists
I've been perplexed by the lack of serious reviews of blogs. There is no reliable evaluation of blogs as there is of say, movies, books and music. There is no where to go to hear about the best street fashion blog, say. Sure, people have favorite blogs, but there is no sensible critique or systematic recommendations of them.
For the past several years, Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous has presented a short list of the best blogs of the year, and his annual list is the closest I've seen to a good blog review. (There are blog sites that list the top blogs, but most of these have little annotation making them weak. ) Unlike most such year-end lists, the Fimoculous Notable Blogs list is extremely well researched, intelligent, and refreshing. First of all, Sorgatz apparently reads all blogs so his perspective of the landscape is stunningly broad. Therefore, he is capable of considering a blog with similar or competitive ones. In his list he'll mention comparable sites, or blogs that "you'll like if you liked this one." He includes the well-known sites if they've had a good year, but often seeks out the marginal blog, or upstart, if they are doing something interesting.
I also like his style and find that we often converge in our approvals of blogs we read, so naturally I think his choices are smart. Every year I pick up more than a few new great reads to add to my fairly selective RSS list.
This year I was blown away to find that the Technium, my book-in-progress blog, was ranked #11.
Fimoculous also produces the world's best meta list every year. Its annual List of Lists lists all the "best of lists" on the web. Categorized by kind. So you can get all the Best Movies lists published in English this year. Or Best Books lists, etc. The genius of this meta-list is the scope. There's more than 650 lists, and they include stuff like the list of Best Comics, Best Games, Best Videos, Best Predictions, etc. Fimoculous has done this for 6 years; it's a staggering amount of work. I am waiting for someone to parse these lists and come up with the Best of the Best Lists, which combines and correlates the winners in each category into one pan-annual list.
DIY language learning
Language Acquisition Made Practical
This handbook teaches you how to learn any language on your own, in the language's home turf, by teaching a native speaker to be your teacher.
The trick is to instruct your local agent to teach you something he/she is hardly aware of -- the structure of their language. You will supply the plan and so are teaching yourself through them. Comprende? It's done slowly, naturally, and playfully - the way you learned English. Your assistant doesn't even have to speak your language.
You begin using a few easy words, trying to make as many mistakes as you possibly can, entertaining the folks in the marketplace or anywhere else they'll put up with your blabberings. Then you systematically add additional words in steady daily use, guiding your guide in what you want to learn next. This well-tested method was devised by missionaries trying to learn languages lacking scripts, courses, or guidebooks, and works great for dialects, or indeed any language you want to learn.
The text of this workbook shows you how to construct your own exercises that fit the language you are after and later how to discover its grammar by yourself. The goal is multiculturalism, inseparable from multilingualism. Like realizing that you don't need a degree in anything to build your own house, learning that you can become fluent in another language without a course or classroom is deliciously radical.
If you like this approach check out other online texts by missionary linguists which take the same approach of enabling an intermediate to become your language teacher.
This DIY process works best on location, rather than before you arrive.
-- KK
Language Acquisition Made Practical
E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth Brewster
1976 (1998 printing); 384 pp.
Available from Amazon
or $15 from Lingua House
Author's website:
Lingua House
135 North Oakland
Pasadena, CA 91182
818/584-5276
There's more of the same approach (different book) here at SIL, also a language site for missionaries.
Sample excerpts:
To prepare for a Comprehension drill, you need to plan a list of related activities and have Kino make up a 3 x 5 card with activities written in his language. The activities for the first day might include sit, stand, squat down, clap your hands, scratch your leg, stretch your arms. In the drill, Kino will instruct you in his language to do an activity; for example, "stand up." He will stand up and you observe and then mimic the action by standing yourself. Do not say what he says. Kino then introduces the second item, performing the activity while giving you the verbal instructions. You mimic the activity - for example, "sit down." Kino then again gives the first instruction, "stand up," and you respond by standing. Then Kino can give the instructions without acting them out himself - "sit down," "stand up," and you respond to his verbal directions. When doing comprehension drills, respond rapidly without hesitation and make a distinct robust response with your body.
*
*
Production of Modifiers
Kino says a sentence with modifiers. You repeat the basic sentence without modifiers.Kino: "The blue jug with the pretty flowers is on the high wooden shelf."
You: "The jug is on the shelf."Then reverse roles -- he says a simple sentence and you embellish it.
Kino: "This is a book."
You: "This is a good book about the people of this country."
Kino: "This is a candle."
You: "This is a red candle."Look around you. You can talk about virtually any object, then restate it with modifiers.
*
*By using these sentence patterns you can get extra drill on new vocabulary while talking with people. You can touch an object and ask "What is this?" They may answer, "This is Kefala." You can then touch a similar object and ask "Is this Kefala?" and they will answer positively or negatively.
If you are talking with children, this can become quite a game and give you lots of practice with new words. Children will often catch on, and participate with you in the game. First, you can ask the questions while they answer. Then you can trade roles and let them ask the questions while you try to answer. If you enter into the spirit of the game, everybody can have fun while you practice vocabulary.*
A New Kind of Mind
Every year John Brockman (who is my literary agent and a friend) asks a Big Question of his circle of scientist friends and clients. This year his question was "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" My answer is below. But go to his 2009 Edge Question site and read the rest of nearly 50 other contributions; most are very interesting. I especially like Danny Hillis' answer which resonates with mine.
"What will change everything?"
A new kind of mind.
It is hard to imagine anything that would "change everything" as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We'd use artificial intelligence the same way we've exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we'd plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.
This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.
Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputers would first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add them to the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.
However, the snowballing success of Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will not be bounded inside a definable device. It will be on the web, like the web. The more people that use the web, the more it learns. The more it knows, the more we use it. The smarter it gets, the more money it makes, the smarter it will get, the more we will use it. The smartness of the web is on an increasing-returns curve, self-accelerating each time someone clicks on a link or creates a link. Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.
As more commercial life, science work, and daily play of humanity moves onto the web, the potential and benefits of a web AI compound. The first genuine AI will most likely not be birthed in standalone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion CPUs known as the web. It will be planetary in dimensions, but thin, embedded, and loosely connected. Any device that touches this web AI will share —and contribute to—its intelligence. Therefore all devices and processes will (need to) participate in this web intelligence.
Standalone minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped, a penalty one might pay in order to have mobility in distant places. A truly off-the-grid AI could not learn as fast, as broadly, or as smartly as one plugged into 6 billion human minds, a quintillion online transistors, hundreds of exabytes of real-life data, and the self-correcting feedback loops of the entire civilization.
When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We'll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?
While we will waste the web's ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we'll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we "know" something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.
Elance
Personal outsourcing
Elance is a global marketplace for freelancers. You post a job you want done, and freelancers around the world will bid on it in a matter of hours. Once the price and deadline are agreed upon, the work will be delivered to you very rapidly. Because of its global nature, your costs may be very low.
Elance has a pool of 135,000 pros expert in programming, design, writing, and legal matters. People use them to design a logo, create marketing materials, tweak a database, code a website, create an iPhone app. I've used Elance three times now and have had fantastic results. For instance recently I had to move 3,000 images from Cool Tools' old Moveable Type database to a new one in a very hairy non-trivial manner. Estimates from US shops for writing the necessary script went as high $6,000 and would take months from specs to testing. We went on Elance, got a bid for $250 to do it manually (without scripts) and it was done perfectly in a week. You could start a company with them. In fact Kevin Rose hired an Elancer to code the first version of the now-popular website Digg.
Elance's escrow service holds the payment and protects both the work provider and you the employer. The site provides status updates on work done, and plenty of communication between the parties. Workers must pass a competency test to qualify to be listed. Some freelancers can also pass expertise tests in a mild form of certification, say for working on java or ajax, etc. Elance freelancers did about $60 million of work last year and less than 1% of the jobs had any kind of dispute, and most of those were self-resolved by the fact that the entire transaction correspondence is logged.
While I went to Elance for cheap labor, others go to it to get jobs done in a hurry, or to find expertise that they can't find locally. (Fifty percent of Elancers live in North America.) If you have work, and you know what you want, this is a great service.
The real trick in using Elance, or its competitors RentACoder, GetAFreelancer and oDesk (which I have not used) and Guru (which I have used with satisfaction) is in being able to specify the deliverable you want without spending more time that it would take to do the project itself. This kind of outsourcing is best for bite-sized chunks of work. The more precise you can detail your job the better that Elance or the others will work for you. It's not good for consulting, hand-holding, or mind-changing assignments. But it can be cheap enough that you can try lots of things. It costs you nothing to post a job on Elance. (The winning provider will pay a 5-10% fee to Elance.) You can pay with PayPal.
And it is not just for coders. I hired a guy to run ethernet cable in our home, and others have found a videographer for their wedding, or a translator for their manual, etc. Like any remote relationship, you get what you put into it. Elance, Guru and GetaFreelancer use escrows, which protect you (and the worker). Elance has open bidding, GetAFreelancer has the option of closed bidding. To date, Elance is the marketplace that seems to have the most action so that is why I use them.
It's a great tool when you need to hire expertise.
-- KK
Breakup of the USA
In the world of scenario planning, the fact that something is unthinkable should not prevent us from considering it. The breakup of the Soviet Union was unthinkable almost until the day it happened. At the same time, of course, not every impossible thing will happen.
Among the most unthinkable scenarios for most Americans is the unthinkable idea that the United States could become the disunited or turn into divided states. Even though this union accumulated very slowly in the first place, and against all odds -- in other words it was not inevitable -- the fact that the USA will not always be as united, or at least united in the way it is now, is considered, well... unthinkable.
But as Juan Enriquez notes in his amazing PopTech talk, based on his book "The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future", no US president has ever died under the same flag that he was born under. That is, the borders of the United States has constantly shifted even in modern times. The last state was added in 1959 (after I was born!) and more could be added still. Americans are comfortable ADDING states, but it might not take much to subtract one. The outcome of the US Civil War has biased Americans to disbelieving in subtraction, but that might change.
In past decades bold American thinkers have imagined how the US might break up, but these were more thought experiments indicating the cultural differences within this large country. There's no shortage of maps showing the alternative arrangements of North American countries. One of the finest is Joel Garreau' s 1981 scenario of the Nine Nations of North America.
However the current economic instability and the general devolution of nation states around the world has led to several outsiders considering the break up of the US as a serious possibility. Two of these scenarios come from Russians.
In the past year or so, traffic to Dmitry Orlov's online presentation about the 'collapse gap' has soared as word of mouth recommendations about his scenario flourished. Orlov's argument is that the parallels in the state of the USSR twenty years ago and the USA now make an economic collapse likely. Orlov does not specifically talk about breaking up as collapse. He says the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US.
The most recent breakup scenario was noted today in the Wall Street Journal in a piece about Russian professor Igor Panarin, who predicts the breakup of the US in the year 2010. He has been predicting the same for the past decade but is now getting an audience. The logic of his scenario goes like this:
He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
With his Soviet KGB background it may be no surprise that in Panarin's scenario the breakaway "countries" all succumb to foreign influence and are not really independent. In contrast American scenarios of breakup envision the resultant countries -- like the Pacifica coast -- as vibrant independent influences themselves.
It is certain that in the long run, the borders of the US will change. I think it is far from clear how it will change at the moment. I would be willing to bet the US will add something (Puerto Rico?) before it subtracts, but that is a minor matter. History is betting that at some point the nation as we know it will break up.
So, to my fellow Americans, happy new year!
Wi-Ex ZBoost 510
Cell phone signal booster
This cell phone booster will increase your signal strength by one or two bars. If your home or office has dismal cell phone coverage, as mine does, this booster can make a difference. Often a spot outside your building, or on top of your building will have better coverage. This device picks up the signal from a small stick-like antenna and relays it via a cable to a book-size station where you want the signal. Using this in my studio I can now get two bars where before I had none. The zBoost is the least expensive signal repeater I could find.
A few important caveats. This is not a miracle machine; if you have no bars outside, there is no signal to amplify, so you will still have none inside. Also, the antenna and relay station need to be separated by a wall or ceiling or several rooms so that you do not simply create a feedback loop where the antenna is recirculating the stations emissions, creating a useless squelch. Lastly, the radius of boosted signal is small. It can serve a large room, or maybe a few small rooms. In my experience it will not fill a home, or office with a boosted signal. It is best to think of this as providing a boost to a room. To cover a large area you'll need more than one, but I don't have any experience in what happens with overlapping coverage.
I have the dual spectrum variety of EZBooster, which covers most carriers, in part as a service to visitors. I also found that finding the optimal location for the antenna is not obvisous or trivial. Placement makes a huge difference; it's worth trying all kinds of positions. Sometimes attics and corners of rooms will work, and sometimes near windows are NOT better. There's a 50-foot interconnecting white coaxil cable which should be long enough, but can be ugly.
For years I've tried to get my local cell phone companies to boost the signal in our neighborhood, but with no success. This modest gadget at least gives me coverage in my home office.
-- KK
Wi-Ex ZBoost YX 510
$290
Avialable from Amazon
Manufactured by Repeater Store
Because communication--which in the end...
... is what the digital technology and media are all about -- is not just a sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.
This vanguard is not about computers. Computers are over. Most of the consequences that we can expect from computers as stand-alone machines have already happened. They have sped up our lives, and made managing words, numbers, and pixels quite extraordinary, but they have not had much more effect beyond that.
The new economy is about communication, deep and wide. All the transformations suggested in this book stem from the fundamental way we are revolutionizing communications. Communication is the foundation of society, of our culture, of our humanity, of our own individual identity, and of all economic systems. This is why networks are such a big deal. Communication is so close to culture and society itself that the effects of technologizing it are beyond the scale of a mere industrial-sector cycle. Communication, and its ally computers, is a special case in economic history. Not because it happens to be the fashionable leading business sector of our day, but because its cultural, technological, and conceptual impacts reverberate at the root of our lives.
Certain technologies (such as the integrated circuit chip) spur innovation and novelty in other technologies; these catalysts are called "enabling technologies." Occasionally an economic sector will leverage power and accelerate the advance of other sectors in an economy. These can be thought of as "enabling sectors." Computer chips and communication networks have produced a sector of an economy that is transforming all the other sectors.
Only a relatively small number of people have ever been directly employed in the world of finance. Yet ever since the days of the Venetian bankers, financial innovations such as mortgages, insurance, venture funding, stocks, checks, credit cards, mutual funds, to name only a few, have completely reshaped our economy. They have enabled the rise of corporations, of market capitalism, of the industrial age, and much more. Unlike many previous heroic industries such as the electrical power industry or the chemical industry, this small sector has influenced how all business is done, and how we structure our lives.
Nikon Monarch Binoculars
Bargain superior binoculars
Do high-priced optics really make much difference in a pair of binoculars? Yes. Great optics create a very bright image within a large viewing area, so that if feels as if you are looking through a magic window rather than squinting through a tiny peephole. Your eyes scan the scope easily, as if there were no glass in front of them -- except everything is closer. You can watch longer, in dimmer light, without fatigue, which is what you want for birding, sporting, or boating. If great optics are squeezed into a lightweight waterproof small object you can hold this magic window longer without the shakes. In short, superior optics make distance viewing clearer, easier, weather tolerant and all around better. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Birder's World, the best buy for high-quality optics birding binoculars are the Nikon Monarchs. The go for about $216 on the street.
These are startlingly bright, wide-eyed, and lightweight (21.5 oz), which has made the Monarchs a best seller. Because they are waterproof and shockproof -- with an amazing 25-year warranty -- they are also very popular with hunters. They can also focus as close as 8 feet -- ideal for dragonfly and butterfly viewing (thus the name Monarch).
If you have not examined binoculars recently they are undergoing a performance curve similar to cameras, getting better and cheaper each year. These $250 binocs would have cost $1,000 only 5 years ago. When friends view these Nikon Monarchs, they go "Wow! It's like a movie screen!" I've found the ease of viewing -- sort of like watching a flat screen rather than peering through a tube -- encourages me to use them more. I also like the fact they are waterproof so I can use them in the rain and mist without worry. I wear prescription sunglasses and these work perfectly fine with them. They also feel well-balanced in my medium hands. I find I can hold them fairly steady for long periods of time with one hand. None of this was true with my inexpensive binoculars in the past.
The very best binoculars today go for $2,000. But for only $216 (what I paid ), or one tenth the price, you can get a pair of these Nikon Monarch binoculars and get 95% of the same performance. Sure, in a one-to-one comparison, a pair of $2,000 binoculars may be a little better, but they are not 10 times better.
Other new models share many of the same features of these 8x42 Monarchs, including sealed optics, waterproofing, coated glass, and bright viewing, but these others cost a minimum of $500-600. There are certainly cheaper binocs (you can get decent ones for $50) but they suffer from dim views, narrow fields, short lives. The Nikon Monarchs make a fantastic tool: You get most of a thousand-dollar view for a bargain price.
-- KK
$216-$250 (price seems to vary on demand)
Available from Amazon
Manufactured by Nikon
Kiva
Peer-to-peer microfinance
Micofinancing is among the better ways for the haves to help the have-nots. Small loans are made to poor but ambitious workers, who expand their livelihoods with the small loan and then pay it back. Which is then lent out again. The previously recommended agencies Opportunity International, and Trickle Up are great tools for individuals in developed countries to kick-start other folk's self-development. These agencies do the hard work of identifying and training the recipients, and tracking loans and performance.
But why not use the peer-to-peer model to allow individuals with money to loan to specific individuals in need of a small loan? That's what Kiva does and it works wonderfully.
Kiva enables you to make small $25 or above loans to an individual or small group of individuals in a developing country. They use these small loans (aggregated to about $200-$400) to finance a food stall, repair shop, hair salon, sewing machine, new cash crop, etc. When they pay it back to you in about 11 months, you can then re-lend it to another person of your choice.
The advantages of Kiva over the other worthy agencies are three fold. One, you can direct your loans to the kind of projects or livelihood you deem the most important or the most sympathetic. Maybe you are into food so you gravitate to funding small cafes or local fruit growers. Or maybe you think women's sewing centers are a key. Secondly you have more direct contact with the borrowers. They have names, faces, stories. Not a few Kiva lenders have met up with folks they have lent to. Thirdly, while most microfiance agencies are thrifty, Kiva is particularly thin in administration thanks to the well-designed software platform that runs this service.
The payback rate for Kiva is about 97%. That's a better "investment" than stocks this past year! The variety of folks you can lend to is exhilarating. The karma is good. These loans make a difference. Kiva lends $1 million dollars every 10 days. It is easy to do. A few folks are already on their third cycle of re-loaning the same money they first put up three years ago.
I think the peer-to-peer lending service of Kiva is such a wonderful tool that I have started a Cool Tools Lending Team. The intention is to gather like-minded folks to make microloans to folks needing tools to start or build a livelihood. I've seeded the team with the first $300 of loans to three borrowers planing to use the loans for tools and I'll add up to $1,000 of Cool Tool's ad revenue as the team identifies borrowers hoping to secure tools. Ideally, other Cool Tool readers will join me in lending small amounts to enable others to self-develop and remake their lives. If you are interested, please join me at the Kiva Cool Tools Team.
-- KK
UPDATE: Good news and bad news. Good news is that word-of-mouth praise drew many folks to Kiva this holiday season and all available lendees have been funded. There were several thousand a week ago, so this is a great thing. Bad news is that if you are headed there for the first time, you won't find anyone to loan to. I trust this is temporary but I have no idea when they'll be an "inventory" of loan candidates. When there are lendees available, you can join the Cool Tools team by signing up for the team, then making a loan to an individual in the ordinary way and choosing Cool Tools from the Team option when you "checkout."
Sample entrepreneur:
My name is Khursheed Bibi. I am a fifty-year-old woman. I have lived in the city of Pakpattan, Pakistan, for 15 years. My husband, Mr. Rafiq, is a mason. I have three kids: one son and two daughters. My son runs a furniture making business. My elder daughter is in 9th standard and my younger in 8th standard. I run a decorative embroidery business. I embroider dresses and sell them in clothing markets. I charge $3 per dress. I invest my income in my daughters' education (paying school and tuition fees). I've successfully repaid two previous loans from Asasah (a microfinance institute of Pakistan). Now I am applying again for a loan to buy lumber to expand my son's furniture making business. I am the leader of a group of entrepreneurs sharing this loan.
How ironic that ever since the future has arrived,...
...GM is now the counter example. Today, if your company is like GM, it's in deep trouble. Instead, pundits point to Microsoft. Microsoft is the role model. It is the highest-valued company on Earth. It produces intangibles. It rides the logic of standards. Its sky-high stock valuation reflects the new productivity. So we look ahead and say: In 40 years all companies will be like Microsoft.
History would suggest this is a bad bet. The obvious lesson is that we tend to project the future from what's fashionable at present. Right now software and entertainment companies are very profitable, so we assume they are role models. Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley, has handy theory of economic history. He says that various sectors of economy wax and wane in prominence like movie stars. The history of the American economy can be seen as a parade of "heroic" industries that first appear on the scene as unknowns, then heroically "save" the economy by doing economic miracles, and for a time are treated as economic stars. In the 1900s, the automobile industry was heroic: There was incredible innovation, many, many car company upstarts, incredible productivity. It was a wild and exciting time. But then the heroism died away and the auto industry became big, monolithic, boring, and hugely profitable. In DeLong's view, the latest heroic savior is the information, communication, and entertainment complex. Businesses in the realm of software and communications are now valorous: They pull successes out of a hat, stack up unending innovation, and perform economic miracles. Long live computers!
There is a lot of common sense to DeLong's view of heroic industry. Just because Microsoft is heroic now, doesn't mean all companies will follow their lead and replicate intellectual property on floppy disks with a profit margin of 90%. No doubt many, many companies in the future will not resemble Microsoft at all. Somebody has to fix the plugged toilets of the world, somebody has to build houses, somebody has to drive the trucks hauling our milk.
Even Wired magazine, mouthpiece of the digital revolution--where I serve as one of the editors--does not approach the ideal of an intangible company. Wired is located smack in the middle of an old-fashioned downtown city, and in one year turns 8 million pounds (or 48 railway cars) of dried tree pulp, and 330,000 pounds of bright colored ink into hard copies of the magazine. A lot of atoms are involved.
So how can we make the claim that all businesses in the world will be reshaped by advances in chips and glass fibers and spectrum? What makes this particular technological advance so special? Why is the business hero of this moment so much more important than its recent predecessors?
Anchor Optics
Diverse optical supplies
Remember Edmund Scientific, the perennial advertiser in the back of science magazines? They sold lenses in addition to all kinds of scientific knick-knacks and basement experimenter supplies. Anchor Optics is a division of Edmund's upscale optics company, selling mostly to professionals, but at a discount. They've got loupes and microscopes, but also Fresnel lenses, commercial grade front-side mirrors, laser parts, optical bench gear, prisms, and advance fiber optic stuff -- just about anything optical you can imagine at good prices, Anchor sells Edmund's surplus or "seconds" -- but only second in some cosmetic or inessential way. If you need a lens or an optical flat mirror of a certain size, you'll probably end up here.
-- KK
Encounters at the End of the World
What a brilliant film-poem! I like how the marketing puts it: "There is a hidden society at the end of the world. One thousand men and women live together under unbelievably close quarters in Antarctica, risking their lives and sanity in search of cutting-edge science."
Superficially this is a film about strange other-worldly creatures and ice formations beneath the the South Pole, and about the eccentric people who live in harsh and unappetizing conditions to study them. But musically scored with a soundtrack of eerie religious chanting, this film feels more like a prayer. It has the same mix of science discovery and spiritual awe you might expect if you were accompanying astronauts on a visit to another planet of life. Which they are. You can feel souls being expanded, and that soul expansion is what is captured here, at the bottom of the world, where unattached philosophers seem to collect as they float over unknown species on this planet. Tempering this exaltation are scenes of the brutal industrialization of a pristine place, annotated by a haunting, depressive narration. The film's title indicates not just the bottom of the world, but also its end in time. It delivers soaring, stunning visions of life made possible by, or in spite of, dirty, mechanical probes into its heart. Somehow this duality of uplift and pessimism works for me. Others may find it too esoteric. I take it as a visual hymn to science.
In fact if there was such a thing as a religion of science, this film would be a good recruitment trailer for it.
-- KK
Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog
2007, 101 min.
DVD, $20
Read more about the film at Wikipedia
Rent from Netflix
Available from Amazon
Here's official trailer:
The tricks of the intangible trade...
...will become the tricks of your trade.
The new economy deals in wispy entities such as information, relationships, copyright, entertainment, securities, and derivatives. The U.S. economy is already demassifying, drifting toward these intangibles. The creations most in demand from the United States (those exported) lost 50% of their physical weight per dollar of value in only six years. The disembodied world of computers, entertainment, and telecommunications is now an industry larger than any of the old giants of yore, such as construction, food products, or automobile manufacturing. This new information-based sector already occupies 15% of the total U.S. economy.
Yet digital bits, stock options, copyright, and brands have no measurable economic shape. What is the unit of software: Floppy disks? Lines of code? Number of programs? Number of features? Economists are baffled. Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp, likes to grumble that federal economists can tell us exactly how many left-handed cowboys are employed each year, yet have no idea how many software programs are in use. The dials on our economic dashboard have started spinning wildly, blinking and twittering as we head into new territory. It's possible the gauges are all broken, but it is much more likely the world is turning upside down.
Remember GM? In the 1950s business reporters were infatuated with General Motors. GM was the paragon of industrial progress. It not only made cars, it made America. GM was the richest company on earth. To many intelligent observers, GM was the future of business in general. It was huge, and bigger was better. It was stable and paternal, providing lifetime employment. It controlled all parts of its vast empire, ensuring quality and high profits. GM was the best, and when the pundits looked ahead 40 years they imagined all successful companies would be like GM.
Wooden Horses
Horses made of driftwood. Not photoshoped but woodshopped. This kind of maniacal love (and why else would you do this?) makes my spirits lift.
Despite its fragile appearance, each horse weighs three quarters of a ton and is free standing. Artist Heather Jansch has created almost 100 of these wooden horses, along with the occasional deer stag. Each stands at about five and a half feet. From an interview in the Mail Online.
Q How do you fix the bits of wood together?
A By whatever method works. I love solving problems and experimenting. Each sculpture is different. One needs to give a lot of thought to it and have an understanding of the stresses and strains created by different poses and some idea of the weights involved. The structure must not only be self supporting, it must also be stable enough to cope with high winds without falling over. Further, it must be strong enough to withstand being lifted by a crane to be positioned for exhibition. The larger sculptures require a steel frame. This is first painted with a rust inhibitor and then coated with fibreglass to give a roughened surface which both makes it easier to hide and stops the wood from slipping on bare metal. The wood is held in position for me to see and then tied with wire until I am sure it is right. Finally it is screwed together and the screw heads covered with filler and stain. Inevitably we miss one or two as people take great delight in proving.
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir is an expert on undersea volcanic vents. Looking at the planet as a complex system of moving minerals, changing gases, and blooming life, he sees the geological evolution of Earth as the natural progression that is now being shaped by human activity. In an article in Harvard Gazette he speculates on the future geological stages our planet might go through as human impact increases. Like other recent geologists (see Mineral Evolution) he understands that life is a geological force shaping the landscape and composition of the planet. And like others he believes that humans-plus-technology is becoming a geologic force.
Planets may proceed through a natural series of evolutionary steps that transform them from lifeless balls into the home of bacteria and other microscopic life and then into a place that supports more complex life. Along the way, life interacts with the nonliving parts of the planet in planet-changing ways there’s no guarantee that a planet will proceed from one to the next. Each step represents a moment of both crisis and opportunity.
Some geologists believe human impact on the planet is so strong it warrants viewing this period of time now as the dawn of the Anthropocene -- the geological period after the Holocene. The Holocene is defined as the post-glacial geological epoch during the advent of human civilization, the period of time marked by the force of agriculture on the land and atmosphere. But unlike the Holocene, the Anthropocene is marked by the effects of industry, mass consumption, heavy urbanization, and human-led species lost.
In a paper published in GSA Today in February 2008 called "Are we now living in the Anthropocene" a team of geologists put it precise scientific terms:
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic signature distinct from that of the Holocene or of previous Pleistocene interglacial phases, encompassing novel biotic, sedimentary, and geochemical change. These changes, although likely only in their initial phases, are sufficiently distinct and robustly established for suggestions of a Holocene–Anthropocene boundary in the recent historical past to be geologically reasonable.
According to Nobelist Paul Crutzen, who coined the term Anthropocene, a reasonable metric to mark the dawn of this epoch is by the current elevation of CO2. The problem with that is of course that it has elevated for other reasons in the past so it is not a singular metric. Two other potential metrics are changes in the ratio of carbon isotopes due to increased anthropogenic carbon, and the global spread of radioactive isotopes from atom bomb testing.
To assign a more specific date to the onset of the "anthropocene" seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter part of the 18th century, although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene). However, we choose this date because, during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable. This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several 'greenhouse gases", in particular C02 and CH4. Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1784. About at that time, biotic assemblages in most lakes began to show large changes.
The levels that characterize the start of the Holocene 10,000 years ago have been relatively level for the past 5,000 years, but now (as the chart above shows), in the last few hundred years a new set of risinging levels have appeared.
Scientists are just now starting to catalog the planetary scale changes due to the technium. As a starter list of Anthropocene effects Crutzen suggests these:
30-50% of the land surface has been transformed by human action; more nitrogen is now fixed synthetically and applied as fertilizers in agriculture than fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems; the escape into the atmosphere of NO from fossil fuel and biomass combustion likewise is larger than the natural inputs, giving rise to photochemical ozone ('smog') formation in extensive regions of the world.
A close up view of the Anthropocene may be seen in this mosaic of graphs below from Global Change and the Earth System (PDF). (Individually the graphs should be accepted with caution since some are based on actual data and others on computer models.) But they do give a sense of the general scale of change on global attributes.
The common fear stemming from snapshots like these is that the next stage of planetary development may derailed in the Anthropocene. As Langmuir writes:
Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth’s history. The Earth today may be at the brink of another step. Complex life has evolved into intelligent life that dominates the planet — ecosystems, food webs, and energy flow — as no species ever has before. Whether the planet takes the next step or not may depend on us.
Crutzen puts the challenge well:
...Mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind, requiring intensive research efforts and wise application of the knowledge thus acquired in the noösphere, better known as knowledge or information society.
Technology is shaping not just our lives, but also our world. If the technium continues to expand it will become the largest geological force at work on the geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere combined. It is becoming not just a human force, not just a civilizational force, but a planetary force.
This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics:...
...It is global. It favors intangible things--ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks.
Networks have existed in every economy. What's different now is that networks, enhanced and multiplied by technology, penetrate our lives so deeply that "network" has become the central metaphor around which our thinking and our economy are organized. Unless we can understand the distinctive logic of networks, we can't profit from the economic transformation now under way.
New Rules for the New Economy lays out ten essential dynamics of this emerging financial order. These rules are fundamental principles that are hardwired into this new territory, and that apply to all businesses and industries, not just high-tech ones. Think of the principles outlined in this book as rules of thumb.
Like any rules of thumb they aren't infallible. Instead, they act as beacons charting out general directions. They are designed to illuminate deep-rooted forces that will persist into the first half of the next century. These ten laws attempt to capture the underlying principles that shape our new economic environment, rather than chase current short-term business trends.
The key premise of this book is that the principles governing the world of the soft--the world of intangibles, of media, of software, and of services--will soon command the world of the hard--the world of reality, of atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by the sweat of brows. Iron and lumber will obey the laws of software, automobiles will follow the rules of networks, smokestacks will comply with the decrees of knowledge. If you want to envision where the future of your industry will be, imagine it as a business built entirely around the soft, even if at this point you see it based in the hard.
Of course, all the mouse clicks in the world can't move atoms in real space without tapping real energy, so there are limits to how far the soft will infiltrate the hard. But the evidence everywhere indicates that the hard world is irreversibly softening. Therefore one can gain a huge advantage simply by riding this conversion. To stay ahead, you chiefly need to understand how the soft world works--how networks prosper and grow, how interfaces control attention, how plentitude drives value--and then apply those principles to the hard world of now.
Michael Palin's New Europe
My favorite travel host, Michael Palin, explores his own continent. With his usual agreeable wit, Palin departs from his home in Old Europe and with BBC crew in tow, he sets off by train to investigate all 20 newly opened European countries which were formerly off-limit to casual travel. Besides the expected classic Eastern Europe destinations, this journey includes the many new tiny Balkan countries, and several breakaway provinces near Russia, and little visited countries such as Moldavia, Albania, Kalinagrad. To present a country Palin mixes the grand and the tiny, the classic shot and the offbeat, the intelligent uplifting interview and the plain goofy stunt. What else would you expect from a former Monte Python member? This seven-part travelogue on Eastern Europe is fun, revealing, informative, and fresh, and made me eager to know more.
-- KK
Michael Palin's New Europe
2007, 350 min.
DVD, 3 discs, $35
A few clips are available at the official website
Read more about the series at Wikipedia
Rent from Netflix
Available from Amazon
Whole Earth Video
When it finally occurred to NASA (with persistent nudging by Stewart Brand) to turn their satellite cameras back on Earth, from whence they came, our planet took its first self portrait. That picture of the whole Earth became a catalyst for human environmental consciousness. It is now the emblem of our home.
Although there have been a few crude animations of a video version of this self-portrait since then, the following Whole Earth Video -- with Moon transit -- is quite handsome.
The still-unlaunched L1 point satellite DSCOVR would display a continuous year-round real-time image of the earth in full sunlight. It would be a mirror in space. Watching in multi-spectrums, this full-time eye would make video of earth a never ending webstream. Bush-politics have shelved plans to launch the $100 million completed bird now sitting in a warehouse. Maybe Obama can get it up where it belongs. Or at least release the FOIA-denied documents on why it was killed.
New, New Rules for the New, New Economy
The thesis of my book New Rules for the New Economy, published in 1998, is that we are now living in an economy based on ideas and communication rather than energy and atoms. Further, this "new" economy has distinct laws or rules so it behaves differently than the previous industrial economy. To do well in the new regime, we need to grasp the new dynamics of information. I reduce the emerging principles to 10 guidelines, and suggest a few strategies for businesses based on each principle.
I wrote New Rules in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom. At that time many reviewers convinced themselves the book was about the dot-com revolution. But in fact I avoided the dot-coms, never even mentioned them, and instead focused on the communication revolution. I talked about network effects, using the free economy, sharing, social media (not called that then), and many of the other developments now underway.
I did not talk about the stock market, either its ups or downs. Or crazy faddish gimmicks. In fact, I believe New Rules could be released today for the first time and still be extremely useful.
So that is what I am doing. Starting today, on its 10-year anniversary, I am re-issuing New Rules for the New Economy as a blog. Twice a week I will post the next section of the book on my New Rules blog.
Ten years is a long time in internet time. A lot has happened in that digital century. Many folks did not have email in 1998, and few were using the web daily. But I stand behind my analysis and today, 10 years later, I don't retract a single word of the book. If I were to change anything I might be persuaded to rename the book "New Rules for the Network Economy" (which was an alternative title at the time), but other than some stale examples of companies no longer around in the book, the text is as pertinent today as a decade ago.
From day one, I practiced what I preached in New Rules: this book has been available free on my website for the past ten years. I know that this freemium increased sales of the book. However the book is now out of print, so I have released a free PDF version of the book, which you can download here. As an experiment it contains opt-in contextual ads. For the diehard there are used paper copies of the book available on Amazon for cheap. The choice of format is yours: paper book, website, daily blog, or PDF.
In any case, your chance to comment on specific parts of the book (and I hope you do) is here on this blog. I read every comment and will endeavor to reply as much as I can. There are many places in New Rules that I know could be updated with more current examples: I'll leave those to you, the collective readers, to do -- as I say in the book, no one is as smart as everyone.
No one can escape the transforming fire...
...of machines.
Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. Is it any wonder that technology triggers such intense fascination, fear, and rage?
One by one, each of the things that we care about in life is touched by science and then altered. Human expression, thought, communication, and even human life have been infiltrated by high technology. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established. The mighty tumble, the once confident are left desperate for guidance, and the nimble are given a chance to prevail.
But while the fast-forward technological revolution gets all the headlines these days, something much larger is slowly turning beneath it. Steadily driving the gyrating cycles of cool technogadgets and gotta-haves is an emerging new economic order. The geography of wealth is being reshaped by our tools. We now live in a new economy created by shrinking computers and expanding communications.
This new economy represents a tectonic upheaval in our commonwealth, a far more turbulent reordering than mere digital hardware has produced. The new economic order has its own distinct opportunities and pitfalls. If past economic transformations are any guide, those who play by the new rules will prosper, while those who ignore them will not. We have seen only the beginnings of the anxiety, loss, excitement, and gains that many people will experience as our world shifts to a new highly technical planetary economy.