Francis's News Feeds

Successful - PledgeBank: sign up to St Albans Greens' Prize Draw, or donate £25,

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:09:40 +0000

'I will sign up to St Albans Greens' Prize Draw, or donate £25, but only if 9 other people will do the same!.' -- Simon Grover, St Albans District Councillor

Daily interesting photos - Flickr: Interesting photos - 13 May 2012 - Flickr

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:49:40 +0000

John Redwood MP: The gathering storm in the Euro area

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:05:03 +0000

Yesterday I joined in the Queen’s Speech debate on the economy. I wanted to draw attention to the gathering storms over the Euro. Time was limited, so let me add a few points.

Yesterday it seemed unlikely that Greece can form a government. New elections are likely to produce a government even more strongly against the current EU/IMF loan package and austerity requirements. If a government can be cobbled together at the last minute from the present Parliament, it will have to go to Brussels to request a change of policy.

There are three possible outcomes following the formation of a new Greek government demanding a change of tack. One is that the EU/IMF say they can give no more. They have twice negotiated this package, and have accepted one large write down of Greek state debt owned by banks and other private sector individuals, companies and funds. They could take the perfectly sensible view that allowing another lapse in conditions of the loan would simply lead to other countries demanding the same treatment. It would undermine the discipline the zone needs, and would send a signal to all that there is no need to meet solemn requirements entered into. Either Greece has to back down and try to do implement the agreement, or they need to move quickly to arrange an exit from the Euro on this option.

The second possibility is we have another temporary fix. The EU/IMF would heave a sigh and give Greece some formula to relax the demands a bit. Maybe more debt could be written off. Maybe the timetable for meeting the requirements for reform and budget deficit cuts could be extended. The ECB might issue yet more money to other worried banking systems to support other states in trouble. Just enough cash would be released for Greece to pay the basic bills and stave off full bankruptcy. It would remian a matter of time before we had the same crisis again.

The third possibility is the Euro area moves more swiftly to fiscal union, with the richer areas accepting their responsibility to send much more money by way of transfer payments to the poorer parts like Greece. It is difficult to believe Germany would be willing to do this. Mrs Merkel has just suffered a bad regional election defeat and is unlikely to want to have to tell her electors in the run up to the German General Election next year that they are going to have to pay a lot more tax to subsidise the weak parts of the Euro zone.

There is a paralysis in decision making at the heart of the zone. Just as this phase of the crisis blows up France is undergoing a major change at the top. The new central partnership of Merkel/Hollande is still to be developed. Mr Hollande will be pressing his domestic demands, fresh from the French election trail, at exactly the moment both need to concentrate on Greece. More people are now saying Greece has to leave the Euro, but there is still no clear sign that that has become the prevailing view of the main players. To do it they will need speed, confidentiality and united purpose. They will also need a Greek government to deliver the Greek end of it.

It seems most likely we are in for another round of brinkmanship and temporary expedients. The worry some commentators are now expressing is that talk of Greek exit could lead to yet more money being shifted out of Greek bank accounts. The more the political leadership of the problem drifts, the more damage the markets can do. The drain on Greek bank deposits so far has represented a further tightening of cash and credit for the Greek private sector, at a time when that sector needs more money to grow to start to ease the pain.

eagereyes: Tableau Public Viz of the Day

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:30:00 +0000

There is no shortage of sites and twitter accounts that point to a new visualization every day, some even more often than that. So why start another one? Tableau’s Viz of the Day is unique in that it draws from the wealth of Tableau Public, and all its picks are interactive visualizations with multiple, linked views.

I know it sounds like marketing-speak, but people post a lot of amazing stuff on Tableau Public, much of which is only seen by a handful of people. Many users post their creations on personal blogs or facebook, where they may only reach a few dozen of their friends – a real shame.

Viz of the Day is an attempt to show off some of that work. There are now over 50,000 workbooks on Tableau Public, many of which contain elaborate visualization views and, what is more, interactive dashboards that allow you to interact with the data directly in the browser. Have a question the dashboard doesn’t answer? There is a download link where you can get the whole package and do your own work (and hopefully publish it again). A recent feature also lets you play with the view and post a link to your current settings to Twitter and Facebook without leaving the browser.

You can follow Viz of the Day on Twitter or subscribe to the feed on the Viz of the Day website (there’s even an option to subscribe via email if you’re into that kind of thing).

Disclosure: This posting blatantly promotes a service by Tableau Software, where I am currently doing my sabbatical. I was involved in the creation of the idea and the subsequent discussions. Sometimes, I walk over to the folks who are running Tableau Public and Viz of the Day just because I can.

Infotropism (Skud): Fresh links for May 14th through May 15th

Tue, 15 May 2012 03:13:55 +0000

Mitt Romney, Bully In Chief? – s.e. smith brings a solid analysis of Mitt Romney's school "pranks" (read: homophobic bullying) and what it could mean for his possible presidency.
Chumbawamba – The Diggers’ Song – YouTube – Who knew that Chumbawumba had recorded an album of songs of political rebellion from 1381-1914? Not me for sure. This is their rendition of "The Digger's Song", a 17th century song by the same group that Billy Bragg sings about in "The World Turned Upside Down".
MOTU 4pre – Really nice looking 4-channel mixer/analog-digital converter from MOTU. I've got the Ultralite Mk2, but if this had been around when I was shopping, I would have bought it for sure. The two "Hi-Z" inputs so you can plug in an instrument without a DI look particularly handy.
What’s behind the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece? – A good overview of what's going on with Greece and the neo-Nazi party "Golden Dawn", who won a surprising number of seats in the country's recent election.
Mapping hacks for the 17th-18th centuries – Say you're an early modern historian with a bunch of data about 18th century Paris. How do you display it using modern mapping tools, given that old streets may have changed or disappeared?

Geekcycle (Liverpool): Comment on How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords by Lyle McKeany

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:36:00 +0000

Cold calls can be tough to make yourself commit to, but they can provide some rewarding results. When you convert a sale from start to finish on your own, it feels great.

IdeaTransplant: Loud people in a meeting

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:30:00 +0000

Here is a strategy to sabotage new ideas in a meeting. Have a dominant personality. Be very loud. Make general statements. Distract attention from the point discussed. Avoid difficult questions. Shoot from the hip. Make personal attacks.

Such meeting dynamics requires careful presentation design. Identify all the key points you want to make. Make very bold, very simple, even simplified visuals to support each one. The objective is that the highly simple chart becomes a mental placeholder for the verbal discussion, its actual content is not that relevant (factual details can be in an appendix). Burying the sentence “Having 2 IT help desks in Luxembourg does not make sense” somewhere in a list of 7 bullet points does not help. Showing tiny Luxembourg on the map with 2 looming call center org charts will create that mental logo.

Now group all the discussion points in terms of importance and controversy. Then, create a final check list, overview map, pro/con table with a visual link to the mental place holders you created before. As soon as a random comment comes up, you can deflate it by pointing out that you already talked about it. As soon as someone tries to deviate the discussion you can point at it and say, we are now discussing this one.

Visual agendas can be more powerful than written or verbal ones to keep a discussion on track.

Charlie Stross: This is what the future of the EU hinges on

Tue, 15 May 2012 01:46:33 +0000

Lots of meaty analysis from Paul Mason, economics editor at BBC's Newsnight, on the nature and origins of SYRIZA, the Greek leftist bloc that is opposed to German-imposed austerity measures (as opposed to PASOK, the main centre-left party, which is reluctantly going along with things).

SYRIZA is an umbrella organization with a bewildering, mangrove-like array of tap-roots. It's also quite possible that there'll be a new election in Greece next month—if the current attempt to form an emergency government of national unity, being brokered by President Karolos Papoulias, fails—and SYRIZA will get to form the next government.

As Mason notes:

the resulting government may, in effect, be little more than a left-social democratic government, despite its symbology and the radicalism of some of its voters. By forcing the mainstream parties into positions where they could not express the will of the majority of centrist voters, the EU may end up destroying the Greek party system as it has been shaped since 1974.

Meanwhile, I note with interest that Greece has the highest per-capita military budget in the EU, the military budget has barely been touched by the austerity measures devastating the rest of the Greek economy, that Greece imports most of its weapons from Germany and France (generously funded by German and French bank loans), and that the military, within living memory, have taken an over-active role in Greek political life. (One hopes that the fate of the junta will act as a salutory warning to any would-be successors.)

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): "In 2010, a crazy idea I had about mapping DC’s public art became a DC government funded project. In..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 01:26:09 +0000

“In 2010, a crazy idea I had about mapping DC’s public art became a DC government funded project. In 2011, we launched 1.0 versions of 2 mobile apps. In 2012, we launched a major redesign, I gave a TEDx talk about it, and now? We’re live on Kickstarter.”

- girl eat machine: My DC Project (ArtAround) => San Francisco

Don’t need a grant.

P2P Foundation: Project of the Day: Common Welfare Balance

Tue, 15 May 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Website: www.common-welfare-economy.org

Description

“The pursuit of common welfare will not only become the new legal goal of all (private) business, but also the new meaning of entrepreneurial success. The CWE places the human being and all living entities as well as fulfilling interpersonal relationships at the center of economic activity. It transposes standards that bolster human relationships as well as constitutional values to an economic context, rewarding economic stakeholders for acting in a humane, cooperative, ecologically sound, and democratic way; as well as for demonstrating solidarity. A new key balance sheet complementing the traditional balance sheet based on financial data and figures will therefore be established in order to measure the success of every company: the Common Welfare Balance. Instead of measuring success in monetary terms, it employs indicators that measure the contribution of a business to the common welfare. “Common welfare” as well as the set of values and indicators measuring a company’s success will be defined in a broad democratic process. Actively engaged entrepreneurs have already adopted five core values that embody the key elements of the common welfare economy, and should be measured. These values are human dignity, solidarity, ecological sustainability, social justice, and democracy. A company that complies with these values must not only uphold them, but will also pass them on to stakeholders: employees, owners, customers and clients, business partners, suppliers, the regional population, state leaders, future generations, and the environment.

The Common Welfare Matrix (a simplified chart of the Common Welfare Balance Sheet) crosses the five values with the stakeholders of a company. The Common Welfare Criteria in the cross-sections are measurable and attached a certain value: the Common Welfare Points. The sum of all Points provides the Common Welfare Score, at a maximum of 1000 Common Welfare Points. There is also a maximum of 200 points for each of the five value categories. Because all values are considered equally important, neglecting one of them cannot be compensated by points in another value category. An electronic calculation program is used to facilitate processing and to check weighting in the Balance. Knock-out Criteria punish extremely harmful acts to common welfare that are still legal. Companies exercising hostile takeovers, generating electricity by nuclear power, genetically modifying seeds or constructing large-scale power plants in ecologically sensitive regions receive zero points in a whole category of values, regardless of other achievements in this category. Those achievements will still be indicated, but not rewarded.

The Common Welfare Points are awarded exclusively for measurable Common Welfare Criteria, and companies can decide which criteria they will accept, and to what extent. This means that points are awarded only for accepted standards that exceed those set by law. The purpose is as follows: Today, most companies are far from the common welfare ideal (best possible environmental protection, co-determination of staff and other stakeholders, justly distributed income, gender equality). Theoretically, corresponding minimum standards could be formulated in order to oblige companies’ to behave ideally. However, companies’ self-interest (egoism) drives them to fight increases in legally binding standards with all their power. Keep higher standards voluntary while legally rewarding those companies that achieve them (tax incentives, customs duties, interest rates, public contracts, etc) could change this. In this manner, more and more companies would begin to promote this gentle political redirection of entrepreneurial aspiration towards common welfare. The Common Welfare Balance can initiate a process that guides companies from their current state to the target state in accordance with market conditions. The Common Welfare Balance serves as the catalyst in this process: The more companies apply Common Welfare Criteria, approach, and reach the Common Welfare Goals, the more plausible it will become to translate criteria from the Common Welfare Balance into legal minimum standards, thus making room for newer and stricter voluntary Common Welfare Criteria. In this way, the whole entrepreneurial landscape would move towards common welfare, and those companies that keep the “old” set of values would eventually run the risk of going bankrupt!”

Geekcycle (Liverpool): Comment on Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price? by Brian Johnson

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:51:00 +0000

I’m having to consider this debate for a startup bootstrap I am working on. The market is limited, but is willing to pay a premium for good service. For me A sounds more appealing because it sounds more exciting. However, B sounds like I could really dig in and offer something specialized for a small group of needy customers. I could feel pretty good about myself pulling that off.

Hack a Day: Mapping the surface of a video game moon

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:01:20 +0000

Writing for Hackaday isn’t all fun and games; occasionally I need to actually write posts and reply to emails from builders around the globe. Usually, though, I’m knee-deep in a personal project, or just hanging out playing a few video games. Recently I’ve gone off the deep end with Kerbal Space Program, an awesome little [...]

Jax (from Kentwell): Cybher: I wish

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:30:11 +0000

I wish we didn’t need to discuss the word feminism and whether we need to reclaim it.

I wish I’d managed to get my hands on some of those cupcakes.

I wish I could work out who I met and who I didn’t meet. And remember names. Ppl seem to like it when you remember names.

I wish that when we thought we’d solved the problems of famine with feed the world, we really had.

I wish that I’d got a picture of me with Tigerboy at some point, and taken more pictures of the ppl I met through the day.

I wish that I knew what we could do to solve the problems of the world.

I think I do know. I think it needs us to act, not wish. Do as well as blogging. Give as well as tweeting. Encourage our neighbours, friends, family to do likewise. Pressure our government to see ppl as individuals, both here and abroad, in order to change lives for the better.

Cybher cost me money. Not the ticket or the hotel, but almost the first thing I did after signing in was visit the WorldVision stand and sign up to sponsor a child. I chose a boy, 9 years old, from Niger. Check out my Silent Sunday post to meet him. Turned out that that fitted in really well with the announcement at the end of the conference that Sian aka GeekisnewChic is going to Niger next week. I’m hoping that I’m going to be doing a little work with WorldVision to help spread the word about what is going on over there.

I wish I could bottle the feeling of hope and determination and optimism and take on the worldness that I had at the end of the day. I’m trying. I’m going to sit everyday and remember that feeling, and see what I can do with it. I’m going to change me, I’m going to change this blog, I *am* going to make a difference.

What did cybher do for you?

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): "Khan Academy has gained popularity recently with its 3200+ videos on more than just Computer..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:18:07 +0000

“Khan Academy has gained popularity recently with its 3200+ videos on more than just Computer Science. Categories include Math, Science, Finance and Economics, and Humanities. You can create an account if you like and track your progress or surf the videos anonymously. There are also unofficial apps for Android, iOS and a Roku channel.
Coursera offers free courses on a wide range of topics which include Comp Sci, Business, Humanities, Biology, Medicine, Mathematics and Social Sciences. Course duration ranges from 4 -12 weeks and start at various times throughout the year. These classes are hosted by Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania.
Udacity has a much smaller set of classes compared to the previous options but their ~10 classes are all geared towards Computer Science. Classes include CS101: Building a Search Engine, CS373: Programming a Robotic Car and CS387: Applied Cryptography. Udacity promises many more classes to come.
I’m currently taking a course offered by Udacity and plan on sampling some of what the other ones have to offer. Possibly an in depth review on the pro’s and con’s of each to follow.”

- Adjust the sails.: Free Knowledge!

Read Write Web: Stop Flying Blind: Use Big Data to Benchmark Your Startup

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Most startups fail. Nine out of 10 never amount to anything more than fond memories and a forgotten Facebook page. One reason is that they often lack a clear picture of exactly how they’re doing until it’s too late. But there are tools designed to help you assess your startup's progress compared to similar companies.

The best way for startup founders to improve their chance of success is by learning to make better decisions. But if you want to make better decisions, you need better data. And that’s where Startup Compass comes in: It’s designed to help you benchmark your startup’s performance against thousands of others to identify what you’re doing right and what you need to improve.

Startup Compass collects data from tens of thousands of startups around the world. It collects lots of data, then creates best practices, recommendations and benchmarks to help entrepreneurs make better product and business decisions.

Big Data for Small Companies

“This is a big-data approach to startup success,” says Startup Compass co-founder and serial entrepreneur Bjoern Lasse Herrmann. “Big companies have analysts to make sense of their data, and executives can make decisions based on that data. But startups don’t have any access to that kind of analytics. We wanted to put analysts in the cloud for startups.”

“Startups can learn three key things,” Herrmann says. “First, which key performance indicators actually matter. Most startups don’t even know which KPIs they should track or why they should track them. Second, they learn how their KPIs compare to other companies’ KPIs so they will know if they’re on the right track. See, for example, their customer acquisition costs. The third thing they learn is what actions they need to be taking. We help businesses take the next steps.”

Startup Compass calls its approach “cracking the code of innovation.” We call it “how not to kill your startup.”

The 5 don'ts

The real value of Startup Compass is comparing your company to others like it, but Startup Compass also summarizes its findings in its Startup Genome report. Here are nuggets of wisdom from the first Startup Genome report, five things not to do:

1. Don’t scale too early. This is the No. 1 cause of startup failure. Startup Compass has found that 70% of startups crash because they scale prematurely.

2. Don’t work part time. Sleepy? Get used to it. People who work full time on their startups raise an average of 24 times more funding than those who work part time.

3. Don’t go it alone. Maybe you are the smartest guy in the room. But solo founders raise less than half the money that two to three co-founders raise.

4. Don’t ignore customers. Yes, they’re annoying. (What do they know?) But startups that track customer metrics have 400% more user growth.

5. Don’t forget about the technology. Startups without a tech-oriented co-founder are twice as likely to scale prematurely and have three to five times less user growth.

If you want advice on an ongoing basis, you can join Startup Compass and in exchange for data on your startup, the company will benchmark your startup monthly, comparing you to similar outfits, so you can keep your priorities in line.

Startup Compass has 17,000 companies now using the service for things like checking whether their churn rate is too high or their retention rate is too low - or if they should be spending more money on customer acquisition.

“We have a number of companies that have gone through the process and tell us they used our product and realized they were falling behind on this or that metric and were able to fix those things and adjust accordingly. As a result they were better able to acquire customers in the long run and didn’t waste more money on things that were not productive.”

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

feeling listless: It's a third edition of AHistory!

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:53:32 +0000

Books If you've been following my Doctor Who reviews very long, you'll know the closest thing I have to a bible that isn't Shakespeare's complete works is AHistory, Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson's bonkers attempt to rationalise Doctor Who into some kind of workable chronological order from the big bang through to the far future.

The last edition was in 2007 and we were told at the time time it would be the last edition, ending with the third series of nuWho, first series of Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures's Invasion of the Bane (along with whatever spin-off material was concurrently knocking around). The book's TARDIS Index file says Lance:

"has stated that the practical limitations of researching a third edition and putting it into one volume would make a third edition more or less impossible."

Yes, well, would you look at this:

It's a third edition of AHistory!

Or the fifth if you include the two earlier editions of A History of the Universe this sprang from.

The last edition had Mona Lisa on the cover and it seems just right the 3rd should feature Vincent's self portrait. I've had a glance around and the only other mention I can find is on the publisher's own website which reveals it'll be out November 13th 2013 in time for the 50th anniversary.

As to contents: According to the Amazon page, this new edition has 784 pages. The 2nd edition had 432. What'll be filling the new 352 pages? You'd need at least a hundred to explain what's going on with River Song, but what about the rest?

Presumably it'll be updated through the seventh television series, to the finale of Torchwood's Miracle Day (good luck with that) and the end of Sarah Jane Adventures, with the mass of Big Finish audios, AudioGo specials and BBC Books as well as the DWM comics.

But will they also now have the comics from IDW, Battles in Time and Doctor Who Adventures? The authors have also long resisted short stories because of their often experimental nature, even to the point of including comics but not those from annuals. Perhaps they'll be in now too.

Thanks Lance and Lars! And good luck.

Global Voices (India): India: Entertainment Industry Seeks Court Ban on Torrents and Vimeo

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:45:08 +0000

Since the beginning of May 2012, some ISPs across parts of India had been quietly blocking access to the popular video sharing site Vimeo as well as various torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, BitSnoop etc.

According to media reports, this is because a film production house, namely Reliance Entertainment, has (once again) obtained a preemptive ‘John Doe‘ order from the Delhi High Court, prior to the release of some of their upcoming big budget films. The Company insists that this has been done in order to ‘prevent film piracy'.

Vimeo and Pirate Bay facing censorship in India. Graphic by author.

However, there was some confusion about the news because not all ISPs were seen to block access to the aforementioned sites.

On his blog Share Press, blogger Varma provided some more details:

As of now most of the Reliance Communications broadband visitors who try to access the blocked sites are redirected to a custom page saying “The site has been blocked as per instruction from DOT” message when browsing the above file sharing sites.

[…] There has been lots of Govt and private agencies looking for ways to block all illegal site access through internet. Their has been specific orders for all majors ISP’s in the country to block access of users to this website by taking appropriate steps like DNS name blocking on ISP level, IP address blocking via routers, and DPI based URL blocking.

Message that was appearing when trying to access sites like Vimeo on some ISPs like Reliance. Image by Share Press. Used with permission

Twitter has been abuzz with reactions and vehement protests against the blocking of the file sharing sites.

@lleshShah: I can not access #Vimeo.com. The emerging face of #censorship by #Govt of India… http://pic.twitter.com/eT8FRrPD

@ajantriks: has @vimeo been blocked in #india or only i am getting crazy error message? @anjakovacs @jackerhack @zainabbawa @geohacker

@jackerhack: @ajantriks Blocked on Reliance and maybe other networks. Reliance got a court order to block piracy before a film release @vimeo @anjakovacs

@kaustubh4evr: Vimeo Blocked in India Along with BitTorrent Sites: Censorship, at the behest of movie studios or music labels, … http://bit.ly/LepfJ4

@mihirfadnavis: Terrorism? Food shortage? Power cuts? Corruption? NO SIR, Vimeo is by far the biggest threat to India!

@varunasingh: @relianceworld Whatever you are doing is pathetic and against the motives of the internet.

@_anshulk: Blocking vimeo is stupid #reliance #censorship #india

@wewakesaynoy: For those of you using Reliance internet: they have blocked TPB, Vimeo & will follow with others. Do you really want an ISP that does that?

@TheBigGeek: @vimeo blocked by #reliance and not by #Bharti and #Tata #VSNL #CRAZY how can a DOT order be only for one ISP :****

The hue and cry over the blocked sites appear to have had an impact. The sites have been unblocked on the Reliance ISP, as this Facebook message by Chai Kadai informs us:

Vimeo is back on for us. Yay! Maybe Reliance Communications got some sense into its head or people found some other ways to download the movie. Whatever the reason. For now, happy to have Vimeo. Still don't understand how they got to block it in the first place.

Some of the tweeple have seconded the information that the sites can now be accessed on the ISP concerned.

@crazyscorpio12: Finally! TPB and vimeo unblocked on reliance india. Whew!

@aditya_bhatt: TPB and Vimeo are unblocked on Reliance now.

However, this appears to be a temporary respite. Until their next big release, that is.

Liverpool Daily Post - Dale Street Blues: Richard Kemp confirmed as Liverpool Liberal Democrat leader and Mike Storey returns to run campaigns

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:16:45 +0000

Richard Kemp has been confirmed as the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool. And former council leader Lord Storey is making a return to the frontline in Liverpool as he takes up the role of chair of the campaigns...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Global Voices (India): Pakistan: Manto Lives On!

Mon, 14 May 2012 21:14:08 +0000

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was a short-story writer, a dramatist and also a translator from Punjab. Today the people of the sub-continent are celebrating his 100th birth anniversary highlighting his significance in the India-Pakistan partition era. Art councils in Pakistan, press clubs, and literary clubs are organizing festivals to remember his legacy and his importance in today's society.

Manto's basic contribution to Urdu literature (with respect to partition) is that he considered the killing of thousands of Hindus and Muslims during migration as a massacre of humanity rather than of any single religion. He said:

“Don't say that a hundred thousand Hindus or a hundred thousand Muslims have been massacred. Say two hundred thousand human being have been slaughtered.” - Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto. From twitter: @siddharth426

This was Manto's message at the time when religious division was at its peak. People were divided - rather isolated - on religious differences and did not consider killing a major crime against humanity. In such times, Manto rose as a messenger of humanism in the subcontinental literature. He wrote dramas like ‘Toba Tek Singh' (name of a village in Pakistani Punjab), in which he highlighted the miseries of partition.

But is Manto relevant today? Yes! He definitely is relevant. His criticism on the hypocritical societal values, his attitude towards social taboos and ethos [Ur], and his whimsical remarked towards United States makes him a living legend. Manto, as Zahida Hina rightly says, was a visionary. Manto's writing can today help Pakistan to come out from the abyss of fundamentalism and extremism which is increasing day by day. The cultural and political crises which Pakistan is facing today were seen years ago by Manto in his article ‘Allah ka bara fazl ha' (God's benevolence is infinite).

Social Media was flooded with comments regarding Manto's life and his work.

B. P. Singh praises Manto with the following words:

Perspicacious man, a real human being, I have acted in one of his plays in India, and truly I follow some of his writing religiously. If the mankind seriously follows his writing spirit, the world really will become a heaven! True homage and salute to a nice person ‘Manto'.

Some tweets:

@navedjaved: Remembering a prolific writer and a genius of his times, Saadat Hasan Manto on his birthday- RIP Legend!

@manish0891: Its 100th birth anni.of Saadat Hasan #Manto, one of the best short story writer of the Urdu language.

@osamamotiwala: Saadat Hasan Manto, although you are just a memory, but some memories last forever. Shine on you crazy diamond.

Manto was never frightened from expressing his thoughts. He had to go to court for his writings. But, Manto only wrote what he saw. Nazir Ahmed Minto comments:

Manto only wrote what he SAW,…… and which those people did not want too see !

Naveeda Valentina tweets:

@NaveedaV: Janam din mubarak (Happy Birthday) Saadat Hasan Manto! A man who pulled no punches indeed. *jaam chalkaoing*

@NaveedaV: Happy Birthday Saadat Hasan Manto! A man who pulled no punches indeed.

Manto is being given overwhelming coverage in Pakistani media (for English see: DAWN, THE NEWS). This fact is praise-worthy enough to be quoted. Although fanaticism has risen in the soicety, but Manto's voice still lives on.

Ahmed Shakeel tweets:

@Ahmed_Shakeel: It is heartening to see birth centenary of short story writer in Urdu Saadat Hasan Manto finds wide coverage especially in non Urdu media.

Manto died on 18th January 1955 at the age of 43. His thoughts will always be with us. Vivek Martolia comments:

manto sahab amar rahenge hamesha ke liye , he is alive in his stories.

Manto will live forever, he is alive in his stories.

Overcoming Bias: Why Is Death Bad?

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:50:49 +0000

Shelly Kagan considers: why is death bad?:

Maybe … death is bad for me in the comparative sense, because when I’m dead I lack life—more particularly, the good things in life. … Yet if death is bad for me, when is it bad for me? Not now. I’m not dead now. What about when I’m dead? But then, I won’t exist. … Isn’t it true that something can be bad for you only if you exist? Call this idea the existence requirement. …

Rejecting the existence requirement has some implications that are hard to swallow. For if nonexistence can be bad for somebody even though that person doesn’t exist, then nonexistence could be bad for somebody who never exists. … Let’s call him Larry. Now, how many of us feel sorry for Larry? Probably nobody. But if we give up on the existence requirement, we no longer have any grounds for withholding our sympathy from Larry. I’ve got it bad. I’m going to die. But Larry’s got it worse: He never gets any life at all.

Moreover, there are a lot of merely possible people. How many? … You end up with more possible people than there are particles in the known universe, and almost none of those people get to be born. If we are not prepared to say that that’s a moral tragedy of unspeakable proportions, we could avoid this conclusion by going back to the existence requirement. …

If I accept the existence requirement, death isn’t bad for me, which is really rather hard to believe. Alternatively, I can keep the claim that death is bad for me by giving up the existence requirement. But then I’ve got to say that it is a tragedy that Larry and the other untold billion billion billions are never born. And that seems just as unacceptable. (more)

Imagine a couple had been looking forward to raising a child with their combined genetic features, but then discovered that one of them was infertile. In this case they might mourn the loss of a hoped-for child who would in fact never exist. Not just the loss to themselves, but the loss to the child itself. And their friends might mourn with them.

But since this is a pretty unusual situation, we humans have not evolved much in the way of emotional habits and capacities to deal specifically with it. Our emotional habits are focused on the kinds of losses which people around us more commonly suffer and complain. So naturally we aren’t in the habit of taking time out to mourn the loss of a specific Larry. But there are lots of people far from us whose losses we don’t mourn. That hardly means such losses don’t exist.

It seems to me Kagan’s attitude above amounts to insisting that is impossible to imagine a vastly better state (of the universe) than our own. After all, if a vastly better state that ours is “possible”, then the fact that our actual state is not that possible state is a terrible “tragedy”, which he will just not allow.

But if possible states can vary greatly in the amount of good they would embody, then it is almost certain that the good of our actual state holds far less than the maximum good state. This only seems to me a “tragedy”, however, if we could have done something specific to achieve that much better state.

If we can’t see what we could do to allow substantially more creatures to exist, then it isn’t a tragedy that they don’t exist. It is a loss relative to an ideal world where they could exist, but it isn’t a tragedy not to know to create implausibly ideal worlds.

Charlie Stross: Bubble 2.0

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:44:21 +0000

The smart, fashionable startup-people these days are all trying to come up with brilliant and innovative new business models that disrupt struggling industries and synergize for break-out growth potential forming new markets. (Ahem. At least that's what they say.)

I submit that it is somewhat harder to disrupt an industry that has been dead for so long that the corpse is fully skeletonized. By the time that we've got people seriously pitching for an IPO on the back of the poetry market[*], we're scraping the bottom of the barrel that started out full of brilliant and innovative new business models. What next: a dot-com startup targeting the overdue-for-disruption steam locomotive market?

I am calling this a bubble economy in startup bullshit, and it's just about ready to pop; we are now at the stage of the shoe-shine boys offering stock tips, and if I had any money invested in hyperparasites like Zynga I'd be yanking the eject handle as hard as I could.

[*] I have nothing against poetry; it's just that it has been impossible for anyone to earn a living as a working commercial poet in the English language for close to three-quarters of a century and counting. For various reasons, we just don't seem to consume the stuff any more. Or we give it a backing track and call it rap or rock music or blues. Gramophone killed the poetry star.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): umbrellafly: If you understand this, I feel your pain! I’ve...

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:43:08 +0000

umbrellafly:

If you understand this, I feel your pain!

I’ve been spending a lot of time coding (attempting to learn to code), and already I’ve started using if-then statements in real life.

feeling listless: how to create bespoke rss feeds for The Space.

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:56:48 +0000

About If you use Google Reader, here is what to do if you want to set up an RSS feed for a website which has none, particularly if you want just search for a particular topic.

The example I'm going to use it The Space, the new joint venture between the Art Council and the BBC. I've wanted to keep track of when the various Shakespeare content is uploaded for my own benefit and so that I can add something to @shakespearelogs but rss feeds haven't been included yet.

So here is how to create bespoke rss feeds for The Space.

Firstly I went to the Google Alerts page, which you can see if you're logged into Google here:

http://www.google.co.uk/alerts?hl=en&gl=uk

In the site query box, type "site:" and then the URL of the website so:

site:http://thespace.org/

Sometimes, as it the case with http://www.bbc.co.uk every link on the website flows into the preview box on the left. But we want to just the Shakespeare links from The Space, so:

site:http://thespace.org/ shakespeare

Then select a result type. Since The Space is a static website, we need to select "Everything" from the drop down list so that it includes web pages.

Unless you want to create an email alert, ignore "How often". You'll see why.

If you look at the preview box, you'll see it's not "everything". That's because "only the best results" is selected in "How Many".

Change that to "all results".

Select feed in the "Deliver to" menu box.

Click the red "create alert" button.

This will bring up your list of alerts. Scroll down to the one you're looking for and you'll see next to it the selections you made plus a link to Google Reader.

Click that link.

Google Reader opens and usually automatically subscribes you to the search. The first entry is an automatically added welcome thingy, but after that the post you saw in the preview box will appear and then any new entries after that.

Needless to say a feed based on:

site:http://www.bbc.co.uk/ shakespeare

updates whenever a new page featuring his name is added to the BBC website. You can also add subdomains if you want to just search a particular section. That works better on some websites than other.

Hope that's of us to someone.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): ¡ANIMATED GIF OF 500 FOLLOWER CELEBRATION! Woo hoo! Life and...

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:48:29 +0000

¡ANIMATED GIF OF 500 FOLLOWER CELEBRATION!

Woo hoo! Life and Code, the learn-to-code blog written with journalists in mind, just passed 500 followers. Cool!

In honor of that, I’m working on a major update/extension to the popular Life and Code Learn To Program Resource Guide, which has umpty-ump free and freely available on the web programming 101 resources. Help out with that by answering a few questions here.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): What concepts should aspiring coders know BEFORE they start?

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:47:53 +0000

Hey nerds and aspiring nerds!

Exciting news today: Life and Code, the learn-to-code Tumblr written with journalists in mind, has reached 500 followers. Cool!

In honor of that, I want to add to the Life and Code Learn to Program Resource Guide with a list of basic concepts and tools that a beginner should understand BEFORE they pick up that first programming book or crack open that first tutorial.

What do you think is missing from this list? What do you think beginners should know BEFORE they start? What confused you when you were learning?

Algorithms
Variables
Arrays
Constants
Includes
Syntax
Text Editor vs IDE
Version control

Also, I want to include something on model-view-controller/object oriented, and functional/procedural, but I’m not quite sure what I’d call those categories. Halp?

Continuations (Albert at USV): Behance

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:32:18 +0000

Today’s post is over at USV, where we announced our investment in Behance.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:09:04 +0000

Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us:

DANAH BOYD. always reblog.

poptech:

By Danah Boyd

Most technology designers engage in their trade to make the world a better place. Technologists love to celebrate the amazing things that people can do with technology – bridge geography, connect communities and transform societies. Meanwhile, plenty of naysayers bemoan the changes brought on by technology, highlighting issues of distraction and attention for example. Unfortunately, this results in a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where’s the middle ground?

One of my favourite maxims about the role of technology in society is called Kranzberg’s first law. He argues that “technology is neither good nor bad – nor is it neutral”. It’s irresponsible to assume that the tools being built just wander out into the world with only positive effects. Technology doesn’t determine practice, but how a system is designed does matter. How systems are used also matters, even if those uses aren’t what designers intended. For example, as social media has gone mainstream, some fascinating shifts have emerged that require reflection. Yet, even as the conversation becomes more important to have, it’s often hard to talk in a nuanced way about the role that technology is playing in shifts that are already underway.

With this complexity in mind, I would like to introduce a question that I have been struggling with for the past few years: what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?

renaissance chambara (Ged Carroll): I like: Uniqlo Wake Up

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:01:25 +0000

Uniqlo has continued its work with Tokyo agency Projector, who developed Uniqlo’s Uniqlock and Uniqlo Calendar to come up with a better alarm clock that is indicative of delight through design of Uniqlo’s brand. Uniqlo Wake-Up wakes you up with a piece of music, screen colour, icon and voice instructions which announce the time and [...]

Infotropism (Skud): Huh! OSM on iOS

Mon, 14 May 2012 18:00:37 +0000

Somehow I missed this back in March (see also: not being very functional online lately), but it seems like Apple is ditching Google Maps in favour of OpenStreetMap. They’ve already started using it in iPhoto and word is it’ll replace GMaps throughout iOS in the not-too-distant future. Official announcement, more commentary and analysis from searchenginewatch.

This is great, because it saves me from trying to figure out how to do it myself. I’ve tried a couple of OSM apps for iOS but haven’t found a particularly good one. They tend to be slow, ugly, and of course not integrated with other apps. So, I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple delivers.

I’ve been trying to get away from using too many Google apps since they showed their true colours last year. Opting out of the Google monoculture only to buy into an Apple one wouldn’t seem like a win, except that the underlying data is open licensed, which makes a big difference as far as I’m concerned. In some ways this reminds me of a project I worked on at Monash University, lo these many years ago, where the policy was, “use whatever proprietary crapware you want, as long as it supports open standards.” At the time we used it to choose Netscape SuiteSpot (pause to laugh — but it supported POP, LDAP, iCalendar and the like) over Microsoft Exchange. I don’t now what Monash is using these days for email, but I bet the transition was made easier by the fact that they could drop in anything that supported those same standards.

Like the open standards that underpin the Internet, OSM’s open license means a variety of apps and platforms can be built on it, and users can choose between them. And, with any luck, corporations like Apple will contribute back (with money or staff or just a vague aura of legitimacy) bring OSM the same sort of respectability that Linux and other open technologies have gained over the last decade or so.

So anyway, once I can cut over to OSM on my phone, the most important Google apps I have remaining are mail and docs. With regard to mail, does anyone have an alternative which is:

as searchable as GMail is, or nearly so, and
has decent keyboard shortcuts?

I rely heavily on those features, and would find them pretty hard to live without. I’ve tried IMAP with Thunderbird and Mail.app in the past, and am not particularly happy with them, so let’s assume those are off the table for now. I’m actually almost tempted to go back to a command-line based solution, perhaps offlineimap and mutt with some heavy indexing.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): Adobe Brackets

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:42:01 +0000

Adobe Brackets:

This is a very early version of Brackets, a code editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript that’s built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): What is austerity?

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:41:38 +0000

Or should that read what is “austerity”?

The May 11 IHT has a headline “German line on austerity appears to soften,” and the article is about monetary policy and inflation targeting (I don’t see it on line). While monetary policy has ramifications for fiscal policy and output, I would not refer to tight money as “austerity,” in spite of the mood affiliation.

I googled “austerity define” and Wikipedia reports this:

In economics, austerity is a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided.

Notice that is mostly about spending, and notice the word “and.” I find this definition confusing, especially if one interprets the “and” strictly. Tax hikes are then mentioned:

Austerity policies are often used by governments to try to reduce their deficit spending while sometimes coupled with increases in taxes to pay back creditors to reduce debt.

That seems to make the “tax hikes” something other than “austerity policies.” The Macmillan on-line dictionary makes it all about spending and not about taxes at all.

A financial source in the top ten, Investopedia, reports this:

A state of reduced spending and increased frugality in the financial sector. Austerity measures generally refer to the measures taken by governments to reduce expenditures in an attempt to shrink their growing budget deficits.

That starts with spending, then shifts to the financial sector (?), and the second sentence shifts back to spending. That’s confusing too. How do higher taxes fit in? What are the baselines?

Krugman I do not think has offered a definition or measure of austerity (he spends more time doing a link-less attacking of others, including possibly myself, for claims about austerity which he does not document anyone making or they simply did not make), but he seems to think that automatic stabilizer-driven spending increases do not count as spending increases for the purpose of defining austerity. Neither does spending on bank bailouts count for him.

I could imagine a definition something like this: “the net effect of all government fiscal policies on ngdp, relative to the baseline of a stabilized path for expected ngdp growth.” Or should it read: “…relative to what will happen to ngdp growth in the absence of budgetary changes”? I wonder if some Keynesians have in mind the baseline of “the expansionary policies which I think would be appropriate,” in which case doing less than the Keynesian optimum is always a form of austerity. Angus notes correctly that clear definitions of austerity are hard to come by.

In Bucharest I cannot alas consult my library for further definitions.

In any case, austerity is a misleading and often misunderstood word. It is better if we describe policies more concretely, and in fact that is not hard to do. Furthermore, insisting on a clearer accounting should not be equated with “austerity denial.”

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Assorted links

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:47:29 +0000

1. An old but still interesting Bertola and Drazen paper on fiscal policy (pdf): “We propose and solve an optimizing model which explains counterintuitive effects of fiscal policy in terms of expectations. If government spending follows an upward-trending stochastic process which the public believes may fall sharply when it reaches specific “target points,” then optimizing consumption behavior and simple budget constraint arithmetic imply a nonlinear relationship between private consumption and government spending. This theoretical relation is consistent with the experience of several countries.”

2. Should Greece default now or later?

3. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to move toward a closer union.

4. 2005 me on the end of the euro; “It would be ironic if the strongest argument against the Euro was simply the eventual need to dissolve it.”

SplatF (Dan Frommer): 10 Stories I Missed While I Was In Asia

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:32:27 +0000

Making friends at Seoul's Gimpo airport.

I’m back after a couple of great weeks in South Korea and Japan. More about those trips over the coming weeks. But in the meantime, here’s a stab at some of the biggest stories I missed while I was gone.

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson fired — busted with fake computer science degree in bio. This is both funny and sad, but the reality is that even if Thompson actually didn’t know he had a fake degree in his bio, he shouldn’t be CEO anyway. If you can’t pay attention to detail in your own bio, what does that say about the business you’ll run or the products you’ll ship? Many writers — myself included — saw Thompson’s supposed computer science background as his main selling point; a chance to rebuild Yahoo’s status as a Silicon Valley technology company. Now that it’s clear that was bullshit all along, he’s no longer welcome. (In a twist, Thompson also disclosed he has just been diagnosed with cancer. All the best in treatment and recovery, of course.) New Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn — also not an engineer — seems popular, and should help Yahoo regain some face after the latest embarrassments. But there’s still a lot to fix there. Meanwhile, as I had tweeted, Jerry Yang has got to be loving this.
Microsoft invests in the Nook. Fascinating, and a lot of ways to look at this: Microsoft building out its content ecosystem to compete with Apple and Amazon. Microsoft buying a cheap hedge on its Nokia bet. (Hey, the Nook isn’t too shabby a device. Why couldn’t they eventually make phones?) Microsoft buying market share for Windows 8, giving developers another potential reason to build apps for it. Microsoft buying into B&N without the messy job of winding down a retail operation. Reminder: The most impressive thing about the Nook Tablet is that it exists.
Why might Apple do a 7-inch iPad? China. More reports that Apple is preparing a smaller iPad. I have no doubt that Apple has tested many iPad sizes, and that eventually it could sell a larger or smaller iPad. (I recently had a dream where Steve Jobs scolded me for a question I asked him about a new, 20-inch iPad.) One thing that comes to mind is that China is now Apple’s second-biggest market, is growing like crazy, and that a smaller tablet might be more important there. Hand size for one — actually only slightly smaller, according to this random website — but also gadget fashion. I haven’t been to China recently, but the Samsung Galaxy Note seems to be doing well in Asia, and maybe there’s more interest in mid-sized devices there. Would love your thoughts on this.
Apple preparing new Maps app for iOS 6. This is an obvious change — it always made sense for Apple to eventually control the back-end for one of its most important apps, and not rely on Google — and I’m excited about it. I hope it doesn’t mean losing some Google-driven features, such as public transit directions — those are incredibly helpful, and saved me a lot of time and stress in Asia this month. Anyway, I’ve long wondered about the future of another Apple/Google app mashup: YouTube, which has been built into iOS devices since the first iPhone, and is another instance of Apple building and controlling the app but Google owning the back-end. At some point, you’d think that Google might want to own the entire thing. But being a rare built-in app probably drives usage that Google wouldn’t get otherwise. So it’s an interesting set of tradeoffs. (Also, from John Gruber: iOS Low-Hanging Fruit.)
Guy in suit poops on Mark Zuckerberg for wearing a hoodie to IPO roadshow. I don’t know Michael Pachter, the Wall Street analyst who apparently said Zuckerberg’s outfit was a “mark of immaturity”. Maybe he was just talking on TV and said something he didn’t mean; that’s easy to do. Maybe he’s an ageist jerk who really thinks Zuck’s outfit matters. Or maybe he has a point. Back in my rowdy blog days of 2008, I wore a hoodie on TV and Valleywag made fun of me for it. That was awesome! Then I wore the same hoodie to a fancy Akamai party at the IAC building and felt pretty dumb talking to people who were nicely dressed. Anyway, I don’t know what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking that morning: The one time I met with him at Facebook HQ, I’m pretty sure he was wearing a tie and was dressed nicer than I was. Clearly the guy sometimes suffers from (or has previously suffered from) acute anxiety; maybe the hoodie comforts him. (I’ve been there. It’s no fun.) What I’d love to be the case is if he had bet Sheryl Sandberg $100 that morning that some stiff in a suit would make fun of his outfit on TV that day. Either way, Zuckerberg’s amazing history building Facebook speaks for itself, and people shouldn’t worry about his wardrobe. And if the question is whether he sees his new shareholders as chumps who are just lucky to be along for the ride… why shouldn’t he feel that way?
iOS 5.1.1 update released… and ruins my phone. I had previously been one of the lucky few to have a flawless experience with iMessage, Apple’s brilliant-in-theory messaging service. Now it is a disaster. Messages I send say they’re not delivered, even when they are. Messages people send me say they’re not delivered, even when they are. Duplicates are then sent. Money is wasted on text messages. And there doesn’t seem to be a reliable solution. (It seems to be worst on wi-fi.) I feel lost, and for the first time in a long time, am angry at my iPhone. Not good, Apple.
For American Airlines passengers, the division of wealth widens. American — my airline of choice — recently made some announcements about the future layout of its widebody planes, used mostly for long-haul, international flights: That its business-class cabins would be more luxurious, including lie-flat seats and direct aisle access for everyone. And that in the 777 coach cabin, it would stuff an extra seat in each row: 10 seats across, up from today’s 9. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. (Except for devoted, elite-status fliers, like me, who can select premium-economy seats — 9-across with more legroom — for free.) Why is this happening? Economics. As Brian “The Points Guy” Kelly tweeted from American’s press event, its premium fliers — though a small percent of its passengers — represent a staggering percent of its business: “24% of @AmericanAir customers generate 70% of revenue and even more profit.” The same way smartphones are crucial to Nokia’s recovery, premium fliers are crucial to American’s recovery after bankruptcy. So expect things to get nicer “up front” and worse for the cattle in the back.
The real reason why websites publish slideshows: To make money. At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal pokes the slideshow bear, reminding the media world that breaking an article into 25 “slides” is a crappy user experience, and that, in theory, it’s crappier for advertisers, too. But he seems to miss the point of why web publishers do this. It isn’t even to juke their traffic stats or to create more ad inventory. It’s because pageviews are money, and slideshows are an easy and reliable way to dramatically multiply a reader’s pageviews and ad impressions per visit. Therefore, slideshows are revenue multipliers. (Assuming a high sell-through of ad inventory, which any good publisher with a competent sales team or ad network should be able to accomplish.) Don’t the advertisers complain or revolt? Everyone I’ve ever asked about this says that no, they don’t: Either they don’t know what’s going on or they don’t care. Relative to their overall marketing budget, one site’s little ad buy doesn’t mean much. Shouldn’t media companies be moving beyond per-impression banner ads, anyway? Perhaps. But it’s still the way that most big “brand” advertisers — the types of companies whose logos you want on your site — buy ads. So why not exploit it? What about the user experience? Yeah, what about it? That’s some high-minded thinking there, and you should be applauded for it. But the reality is that people are simple creatures and when something attracts them, they click. And click. And click. And even if you lose a few readers to frustration, there are billions more new ones out there.
“Nobody seems to understand what Jeff Bezos is doing. Does he?” Another fun essay from Farhad Manjoo, this time for PandoDaily. It’s easy to gaze lovingly at the way Apple makes an absurd profit every quarter with a very simple business model while Amazon runs closer to break-even with an often-confusing business model. Some people, especially in the Apple sphere, even seem to turn their nose at Amazon’s model. To me, that’s stupid. Speaking as a frequent customer, Amazon is one of the greatest services in the world. If it were profit-obsessed, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as great. I’m very happy to have Jeff Bezos running around, trying all sorts of different stuff, giving away the razors one day and the razorblades the next. As long as it’s making enough money to keep funding Amazon’s growth and experimentation, that’s all I’d ever ask for. This is hardly a mature industry — e-commerce is still less than 5% of overall retail sales. I’d hate to see Amazon slow down.
“Draw Something” has been losing users after getting acquired by Zynga. Uh, yeah. I don’t think anyone should be surprised by this. OMGPOP timed its sale perfectly, as activity peaked. But it’s still a wildly popular game and the no. 12 highest grossing app in the App Store. It’s obviously not “Angry Birds”, but did anyone think it was?
Bonus! The Chicago Bulls crash and burn in the NBA playoffs. This is sad, and as we say every year in Chicago, “wait til next year”. But remind me to write a post complaining in detail about the NBA’s terrible game-TV streaming service. For something that MLB makes so easy, so magical, and seem like such a great value, the NBA does so poorly that I’ll never be tricked into that ripoff again.

round the merseyrail we go: Escape from Shell Island

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:11:41 +0000

Unlike most of the other stations on the Cambrian Coast Line, Barmouth is a significant presence in the town. Like most of them, however, very little of it is actually used for railway purposes. The 19th century building on the southbound platform has been lovingly restored, but it's now used for a tourist information office.

The opposite platform - because this is another rare spot where there are two tracks - has a fairly recent redevelopment on it, "Cambrian Court" - an L-shaped building with shops and cafes and a public toilet. (The food place next to the loos was called the WC Cafe; unsurprisingly it seemed to have gone bust). Again though, there's nowhere you could, I don't know, buy a ticket, or ask about services elsewhere in the country, or anything else you might want to do in a railway station. Sigh.

The station has been prettily enhanced by photographs of the town, supplied by a regeneration company, along with potted histories of important places. It gives you something to read while you wait for your train, which I always appreciate.

It was half seven in the morning, and I thought that my train would be unoccupied; most holidaymakers stay in bed until gone nine, after all, and this isn't exactly prime commuter land. I hadn't realised that the 07:51 service was a school train. Slowly the platform filled up with hyper teenagers, bouncing around with far too much energy for that time of the morning, getting it out of their system before they reached school. It was fascinating watching the hierarchy of the station, the way the smaller, younger boys moved to the far end, while the sixth formers noisily occupied the centre. I imagined the excitement every September when you moved up a spot.

It seemed that I had unknowingly occupied the territory of some 14 year old girls by sitting on a bench. They strode in confidently then did a double take at me, their faces assuming that look of disgust that only teenage girls can adequately convey. They were forced to stand a couple of feet away from me, throwing me evil glances now and then, teetering on vertiginous heels they hadn't really planned on standing on.

The train arrived and the schoolkids swarm all over it, annexing the table seats and throwing down bags of Haribo for the journey. I was inwardly tutting at their consumption of sweets at this time of the morning (child obesity crisis!) until I remembered that I used to do the same thing myself. I went through crazes - there was a time when it was all Trebor Softmints, then there was the XXX Extra Strong Mint phase (sadly not named after Major Amasova), and there was a whole term of watermelon Nerds. I don't approve of Haribo though, largely because they have the worst commercials ever made.

The guard suddenly appeared, the nice jolly one who'd been on a few of my trips the day before, but who was in gruppenfuhrer mode. "I don't want a mess like yesterday," she scolded. "There are bins in this carriage - use them. I won't open the doors at Harlech until you tidy up."

Fortunately I was only in this mobile Grange Hill for a short while, as I was getting off at the next station. Llanaber felt like a world away from the relative buzz of Barmouth; a small platform set into a hillside, built on top of the sea wall. The salt water spray was turning the metal shelter brown with rust. I got off and a solitary schoolgirl got on; I felt sorry for her, waiting alone on this platform every morning. It must be awful in winter, when it's still dark and the wind whips across the Irish Sea.

My plan had been to walk to the next station, Talybont, along the shore. There was a slight problem with that.

The tide was in, meaning that the only way I could walk along the shore was if I had a scuba tank tucked in my back pack. I did not.

I returned to the platform to get the station sign and to reconsider my options. My OS map didn't seem to have much in the way of paths to Talybont, unless I was willing to go out of my way into the hills above the village. I was afraid that would mean I'd end up missing my connection at the next station, so with a sigh, I realised it was time for another bus. The Traveline Cymru app I'd downloaded said there was a bus from the stop outside the station, so I pushed up the rough track to the main road.

After an hour of sitting on a wall, the bus arrived. The driver was mad, of course, silently resentful that I'd interrupted his slalom around the mountain roads by becoming his first passenger of the day. I took a place on the empty bus so I could experience life as it is lived by a pair of underpants in the rinse cycle of a washing machine. I was hurled left and right, almost toppling out of my seat, until I was able to get out at Talybont and experience the pleasure of stillness again.

The village was pleasing and well-kept, with a post office, hairdresser and a little village green with a public toilet tucked behind the bus shelter. It was all very ordinary, with only an Italian restaurant called "Tony's" hinting that there might be more to it that just another farming community.

This is prime caravan park territory. I shouldn't sneer, because my parent's first home after they married was a mobile home, and so the first eleven months of my life were spent in one (yep, I really am trailer trash). I just don't get them. I don't get why people drive a couple of hundred miles to spend their weekends in a tin box listening to next door's stereo.

They talk about getting away from it all, enjoying the peace and quiet, but these parks are just housing estates. Your neighbours are always going to be the same, the staff are always the same, your caravan's in the same place. It's just like that semi you left behind, except here you have to empty a chemical toilet every other week. Caravans are such an odd halfway house. You're not getting back to nature, as you can in a tent, because you've got a roof and a telly; but at the same time, it's still cold in winter and hot in summer, and you have to shower in a block along with everyone else on site.

I pictured an evening at the Sands Leisure Complex, sitting in the corner of the bar where the same faces are singing the same songs on the karaoke while you tuck into your burger and chips. It'd be the same on the fiftieth visit as it was on the first, only without the element of novelty. Perhaps some people like that. Perhaps some people like the reassurance, the saminess, the idea that you know exactly what you're getting. No surprises.

I walked past a field of lambs; the charming pastoral scene was slightly ruined by the smashed bottles of blue WKD and Carlsberg in the grass. The station's tucked under a bridge at the head of the parks, and had just recently had a new coat of paint, ready for the summer season. They hadn't bothered wiping the bird shit off the perspex roof of the shelter, but nice effort anyway.

The bus trip meant I had a while to wait for my train. I leaned back on the seat and let myself relax, as best as you can relax in a turquoise box with metal seats. Some of the stations didn't even have a seat, just a metal bar, which is only any good if you want to do a particularly low rent production of Sweet Charity.

Suddenly the payphone started ringing. I never know what to do in these circumstances; it's not going to be for me, is it, so what's the point in answering? It seemed particularly insistent though, so I finally picked it up and said "Hello..?"

It carried on ringing. I was stood with the receiver in my hand but the phone was still clanging away. Memories of Acorn Antiques came rushing back; I felt like I should be wearing a jersey two piece. Before I could ask them if they had Leonardo da Lisa's Mona Vinci at a very reasonable price, the phone stopped. Whoever it was, they didn't call back.

Two of us got off the train at Dyffryn Ardudwy; me and a young pretty girl. While I stopped on the platform to take a picture of the old station building (now a house of course), she crossed the tracks to hug a girl who looked exactly the same. Either they were sisters or there's a sinister cloning facility hidden inside one of those mountains. Frankly either explanation could be valid.

The station's on a very minor road in the middle of fields and dunes; it probably would have closed years ago if it weren't for the presence of another holiday park down the road. It was one of those days where the clouds would dearly love to rain, but can't quite manage the effort; instead the grey skies just sat there, casting a pall over me. It certainly wasn't a day for the beach, but that was where I was headed.

I had to actually walk through the holiday park, past what I suppose would be called "chalets" in the brochure, but just looked like double glazed sheds to me. It was deserted, unsurprisingly, with just a tractor slowly tugging a new caravan into place providing any excitement. There was a minor pleasure in a K8 phone box, the none-more-sixties updating of the classic red booth. It's a very rare sight these days, and I was pleased to see it still in service - though it also had the effect of underlining just how dated the holiday park felt. I wouldn't have been surprised if the manager was Peter Butterworth.

Out the other side, and soon I was clambering over the high dunes of the Morfa Dyffryn Nature Reserve. The dunes here are shaped entirely by the wind, and are constantly shifting; signs warned you to stick to the paths, as there were fences buried beneath the sands.

The expanse of sand seemed hopelessly huge; a flat plain of yellow, rubbing up against the clear blue Cardigan Bay. I was completely alone in every direction. There weren't even birds, just me and the empty shore. It felt exhilarating and, at the same time, humbling; I was a tiny pin prick in the mass of nature.

Morfa Dyffryn is famous for something else beside its stunning natural beauty; gratuitous nudity. A stretch of the sands form Wales's only naturist beach. They're very keen to "warn" you that, yes, there may be naked bodies in view. Personally, I think the signs are too polite; they should just have "Look out! Minge!" in big neon letters. Do people have to be warned about nudity, anyway? I've been to parks in Berlin where there are testicles everywhere you look, and it didn't cause me lifelong psychological damage. Not even the man just wearing a pair of chaps.

Apparently wardens have to regularly drive men out of the dune area; there's a proportion of gentlemen who stand up there and, ahem, "enjoy" the view a bit too much.

Being entirely alone, you'd think it was ideal for me to drop my pants, but it's actually more intimidating to take your clothes off when there's no-one else around. A group of naked people makes a naturist beach; one naked man on his own is just a pervert. Did I take all my clothes off? No. I left my boots on.

Not the first dose of crabs to be on that beach, etc.

The wind whipped across the sand with increasing ferocity as I rounded the headland; I was getting a facial scrub I really didn't want. Thankfully my glasses protected me from the worst of it, but it still started getting distinctly boring. I turned inland, back into the dunes, and walked towards my next station, Llanbedr.

The dunes seemed to go on forever, one difficult to climb hill after another. I thought I must have reached the end, only to crest a mound and find a view of more sand ahead of me. Finally I scrambled down to a well-made road, and I realised I was on Shell Island.

This is one of the largest camp sites in Europe, though it's rather more back to basics than you might expect. Shell Island is laid out in such a way that it discourages tents from being too close to one another, and has few facilities. This is a place for wild camping, a chance to experience a more rough and untempered world of canvas.

I was surprised to find there were actually people there, bravely pitching up in the little copses, the flaps whistling in the strong winds. It can be hard on you here - I passed a giant wheely bin with a torn tent poking out the top. I imagined an Oxo dad shoving it in exasperatedly with a "sod it - we're going to Majorca next year."

There's an old air force base at the island's eastern perimeter, which restricts your access, but I'd seen a pathway that circled it and would get me to the station in plenty of time. Except... it was closed. The council had blocked it off for refurbishment works. It meant I had to double back, through the way I came, and onto the campsite's established roads.

I was frustrated and angry. The double back meant I had wasted a massive amount of time, and now it looked like I was going to be late. I walked over hills and through fields, passing through what seemed like dozens of empty camping sites, just trying to find a way out. Then, in the distance, I heard the parp of my train passing. I had missed it. That meant the end of my carefully planned schedule for the day.

Seething at Gwynedd Council, Shell Island, campers and humanity in general, I located the way out, through the facilities complex. Perhaps it was just my negative mood, but it all seemed a bit too wholesome to me; the sort of place that cults set up for special weekends of worship, and which are then blown up by the FBI because it turned out they were stockpiling AK-47s in preparation for the end of days. Put it this way: I bet they sold Kool-Aid in the supermarket.

The site is accessed via a causeway, which floods at high tide; it means the landscape is flat and brown and dull. The sea waters trickles through channels. I must have looked a pathetic sight, my jeans still covered in sand around the bottom, my backpack dangling off one shoulder, the only vertical in a horizontal landscape. The causeway just added to the end of the world feel. You weren't just camping here - you were ready for the apocalypse.

I passed round the other side of the RAF base, dark and empty, with signs saying "warning: unstable roof" on the asbestos huts. The only sign of life was an air cadet centre; I wondered where on earth all the cadets came from, because the area seemed completely unpopulated. Maybe they helicoptered in.

Then, blessed be, there was Llanbedr station, a little blue speck in the distance that got bigger and bigger. It wasn't much to write home about, but it didn't matter by then. It was a place where I could have a nice sit down and a drink. That'd do.

round the merseyrail we go: Dovey Tailing

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:11:41 +0000

Hell is other people, said Sartre, presumably while waiting in the queue at Argos. It's a maxim that's particularly true of rail travel. All those people, crammed together in a tiny tin tube, breathing in each other's air, smelling their perfumes, listening to their conversations. Just one bad travelling companion can completely destroy your journey and send you scurrying to the taxi rank.

At Tywyn, there are two tracks, a rarity on the Cambrian Lines, so trains wait there to allow each other to pass. It meant that for five minutes, waiting for the train to get going, I had to sit across from one of the most negative, miserable, and generally unpleasant women I have ever had the misfortune to be in close proximity to. She had a bowl of tight blonde hair which looks like it was screwed onto her skull at puberty and hasn't been touched since. Across from her was her husband, a man with a moustache and the defeated look of a man who's inadvertently chained himself to a Rottweiler for the rest of his life.

She first entered my consciousness as she loudly demanded he repay her for the coffees they'd had that morning. "How much money have you got on you?"

"I don't know," said her husband. He pulled out his wallet, one of those ones with a section for coins that are used exclusively by the emasculated, and she snatched it off him. She rifled through it, pulling out a fiver and dumping a load of coppers from her own purse into it. "Are you giving me all that change?" he said.

"Yes," she said. "I'm sick of carrying it around. I'm taking this five pound note. You can pay for the drinks tonight. And the Radio Times, when that's due." A look round the carriage, her face contorted into a sneer, and then she complained that the train was on time. How dare it be efficient!

As we take off, the guard appears, a chirpy girl they recognise and call Nellie. "It's a bit quieter than the last time you were on here!" said the guard.

"Yes, thank God. It's not that the children were shouting. There were just far too many of them."

The train carries on, as does Helmet-Head's monologue to the guard about children, noisy trains, the inconvenience of train travel, the inconvenience of her friends for living away from Tywyn, the inconvenience of having to pack a bag when you stay overnight. A pause at an open gate leaves her fuming at the farmer at the side of the line. "Dickhead!" she shouts, as though he can hear her. "Now he's held up the train."

"They have to be careful," says Nellie. "You don't want to accidentally hit some one. That can traumatise a driver."

"I know," says Helmet-Head. "You hear about these suicides throwing themselves on the track. It's so selfish. I mean, I've been depressed, but I got over it. You just need to pull your socks up."

Fortunately we stopped at Aberdovey before I had time to finish crafting a rudimentary garotte out of the straps of my backpack. I stepped onto the platform lightly and with genuine pleasure at the idea that I wouldn't have to sit across from that woman all the way to Newtown.

Perhaps the escape made me especially generous to Aberdovey station. I don't think so. It was in a charming spot, close to the sea, with a bowling green behind it. The station building had been turned into a private residence, but it wasn't fenced off from the platform, and it still gave the halt a sense of importance.

It also had, as you can see above, a Harrington Hump. These are ramps built onto a station to avoid the expense of raising an entire platform to modern train heights: typically they occupy the centre and mean that it's easier for less able passengers to board. I just love that they're called Harrington Humps; it's from the same world as Belisha Beacons and zebra crossings, eccentric names for something boringly practical.

The sun had decided that yes, it would grace us with its presence, after a day of being ambivalent about whether it was needed or not. It meant that there was something approaching a pleasing warmth as I walked down to the main road for the sign shot.

Aberdovey has two stations, which is quite ridiculous for a town of its size, but handy for me. They were either end of the main street, so I followed it into the centre. Above me on the clifftops were white villas with sea views; they looked almost exactly like somewhere a vindictive colonel would be murdered by his despairing family in a lesser Agatha Christie.

In fact, Aberdovey had a general Christie-ness about it, a gentility and elegance that you didn't expect from a seaside resort these days. Perhaps it's because it's still a working harbour, rather than just a tourist trap, but there was a sense of authenticity to it you don't often get. The promenade curves round the bay, lined with eighteenth-century houses painted bright colours, while behind it are tiny Georgian streets that intersect at wild angles.

I was disappointed to spot a Fat Face in the town square, though. That shop instantly marks the town as a place where it is acceptable for men to wear both three-quarter length trousers and Breton shirts; the hipsters had discovered it. Fortunately they all seemed to be out of town during my visit - presumably they were all in England.

I did a couple of circuits of the centre before going into the Dovey Inn. It had caught my eye with its carved board near the roof:

This house was built by Athelstain Owens Esqr.

Ano Dom 1729

I was disappointed to find that inside it had been modernised within an inch of its life. Not in an especially ugly way; in fact it was inoffensively tasteless, all blonde wood and frosted glass. As I sat down in a corner with my pint of Milkwood, though, I wished it still felt like a three hundred year old inn, rather than a Wetherspoons with a nice frontage.

I watched the light bouncing off the sea for a while, glinting among the wavelets, and slowly knocked back my pint. I could live here, I thought. I could live in one of those houses, overlooking the bay, watching the fishermen leaving in the evening for their catch. Drinking a beer on the balcony while I listened to the sea below me. Then wandering down into town to find a nice quiet restaurant for the evening. The slow life.

Of course, it would drive me mad in reality, the moment I realised I'd have to go fifty miles to get that brand of toothpaste I like, or when all my friends suddenly started trying to use my house as a free hotel. It was nice to dream for a while.

I carried on through the town, feeling vaguely as though I was in a pirate cove, striding among the close fit houses and the sea walls. The presence of a Literary Institute, with signs advertising both a "News Room (Visitors Welcome)", and a billiard room, did nothing to convince me I was in the 21st century.

Soon I'd reached the other end of the town, close to Penhelig station, and I realised it was a lot smaller than I'd planned for so I still had a while before my train. I picked another pub close by, the Penhelig Arms, to kill time in. It was built into the rock face behind the town, with no pavement outside and the railway bridge overhanging it, and I was pleased to find it was a much more old-fashioned pub than the Dovey Inn. There seemed to be a "posh bit" upstairs, with a terrace, but I'd wandered into the slightly more threadbare lower bar, the place the locals frequented.

The bar was so authentic, they'd not even bothered with levelling the floor for the tables, and I managed to spill a centimetre of beer right instantly. I mopped it up with my handkerchief while I listened to the barmaid tolerating a regular talking about his day. He'd been up until 4am watching a documentary about Burt Bacharach; "do you know he made Cilla Black do 19 takes of Anyone Who Had A Heart?" I was going to suggest that Burt should have made her do a few more, but instead I stuffed my beer-soaked hankie into my pocket and relaxed.

A heavy clock over the fireplace noisily ticked away, knocking down the minutes until my train. The barmaid perched on a sttol, turning the pages of her Western Mail, enjoying a moment's silence while John regathered his thoughts. Suddenly he exclaimed: "I don't care what anyone says; I like sprouts." She took the non sequitur in her stride, and joined him in a chat about which green vegetables are best (the winner: broccoli). I heard the Pwllheli train rattle past, and realised it was sadly time to go, before I could stir things up by chucking kale into the equation.

Penhelig station was just across the street, with a metre of pavement giving me space to stand and take the sign picture. Above it was a narrow staircase taking you up the embankment to the platform. No wonder they put in a Harrington Hump at Aberdovey - this is very wheelchair-unfriendly.

The station is built in the brief gap between two tunnels in the rock. The train has just enough time to emerge from the darkness and stop before it's back inside for another underground trip. The Welsh version of the Colour Tsars had struck again, painting the little wooden shelter red, green and white.

It was probably the two pints of beer, but I found the little hut charming, even more so when I found that the local graffiti artists were clearly as OCD as me. There was a window in one wall of the hut, but not the other, so someone who deeply values symmetry had drawn one in:

It could have done with a ruler and set square to get the angles right, but well done you.

My train turned up and, even better, stopped for me (I was worried that the driver wouldn't see me in the time it took for him to come out of the tunnel). My next stop was the famous - almost legendary - Dovey Junction. Even the guard seemed to recognise its special place on the line: "Ladies and gentlemen. This... is DOVEY JUNCTION," pausing for it to sink in as though it were a headliner at the Las Vegas Hilton.

As I've said before, the Cambrian Line is in two parts: the Main Line heads south to Aberystwyth, while the Coast Line heads north to Pwllheli. The point where the line splits is at Dovey Junction and, for reasons best known to themselves, the line's architects constructed a station here. Now it's one of the least used stations in Britain, and as such, on Robert's list for his Station Master blog (but I've beaten him to it, ha ha).

I was the only person to get off. Most people who want to change trains will stay on until Machynlleth, further up the line, which at least has a station building and somewhere pleasant to sit and get a Coke. I dropped my bag off in the shelter (who was going to steal it, a vindictive otter?) and walked down the ridiculously long Aberystwyth platform. There's been talk about restoring London services to this line, and this is reflected in a platform built for Voyagers. A refurbishment in 2011 also raised it above the flood plains and gave it new tarmac - it has the unfortunate effect of removing any old-world charm the station might have had.

It was a mile and a half from the station to the nearest road; a map advising you of where to catch a rail replacement bus was more or less just an arrow saying "walk this way". The road passes through high reed beds - it's a protected wildlife area - until you reach the "Station House", and with it, the main road.

In a further blow to Dovey Junction's image as an isolated spot, the main road was undergoing a major upgrade. There were diggers, trucks and steamrollers loudly hammering at the rock face, while workers crawled all over the site. The noisy jackhammers echoed throughout the valley.

Up the nose shot taken, I turned round and went back the way I came, pausing only to pee. I now had an hour to kill until the train back to Barmouth. The services aren't even aligned to help with the interchange; two eastbound services pass within ten minutes of each other, then it's almost two hours before the next westbound train.

To pass the time, I decided to make a little video.

Even during the course of that video, my attitude to the station was changing. I'd been let down at first. It was, after all, the famous Dovey Junction, and yet it wasn't that isolated and it wasn't that pretty. Look beyond the drab Arriva Trains Wales corporate colours and the easily maintained pebbles and you realise how lucky you are to be here; in the centre of a wide expanse of natural beauty, with no-one but yourself and your thoughts for company. Out there - beyond the platforms - out there was the world to explore; Dovey Junction was just a means to get there. Its magic is its surroundings, not the station itself.

I got back on the train and settled into my seat, taking just a moment to perv at the hot conductor (hello Alex!). It was finally time to return to Barmouth, to a shower and a drink and a sleep. Day one: done and dusted.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): Visualization with R Meetup, Washington DC @ HelloWallet on 5/16 at 6:30pm

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:05:15 +0000

Visualization with R Meetup, Washington DC @ HelloWallet on 5/16 at 6:30pm:

For my DC nerds, R is a language that’s SPECIFICALLY about visualization. You can make amazing stuff with it.

P2P Foundation: Why conservatism is bad for the commons

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:56:58 +0000

Excerpted from Jay Walljasper, who warns that slashing government budgets and making people precarious, is NOT good for encouraging the commons and volunteering:

The Tea Party, libertarians and other so-called conservatives devoted to slashing all government spending not related to the military, prisons and highways have an easy answer when asked what happens to people whose lives and livelihoods depend on public programs. They point to volunteerism—the tradition of people taking care of each other which has sustained human civilization for millennia.
It’s a compelling idea, which evokes the spirit of the commons (the growing movement to protect and expand the whole sphere of cultural and economic assets belonging to all of us together). Volunteers working largely outside the realm of government—neighborhood organizations, fire brigades, blood banks and other civic initiatives—are obvious examples of commons-based sharing and caring.
So that means Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney qualify as commoners (people working to improve the state of our commons)? Even with their adamant skepticism about Medicare, environmental regulations and campaign finance limits?
Not so fast! Volunteerism never rises above a convenient smokescreen, which right-of-center politicians use to justify shredding the social safety net. Increased support for the people and institutions that strengthen our communities, help the poor and the sick, protect the environment and generally make America a kinder and gentler place (to quote the most ardent proponent of volunteerism, George H.W. Bush) never make the final cut in right-wing blueprints for our future. Republicans (and too many Democrats) are all talk and no action when it comes to actually supporting the kind of cooperative efforts that make volunteerism work.
Theoretically you could imagine a classical conservative model of a commons-based society based upon strong incentives for everyday citizens to handle most of the services now provided by federal, state and local governments—everything from police protection to basic scientific research to the Public Health Service. (Although when you apply this model to the world we live in today, it’s hard to believe the dream of mutual aid could survive the juggernaut of corporate privatization without some kind of government intervention.) Creating such a society, however, would mean sweeping changes to current economic and social policies that today’s right-wing leaders would never tolerate.
For Volunteerism to Work, Everyone Needs More Free Time
To truly encourage widespread volunteerism, we’d need to make sure that everyone (not just the well-to-do) had the time to do it. Most people today, working longer hours for less pay, are frantic just to get through the day. Finding extra time in their crunched schedules to manage upkeep at the local park or take care of elderly neighbors feels impossible.
What it would take to make this happen is dramatically expanded vacation time, family-leave benefits and probably a four-day workweek—or at least stringent enforcement of overtime provisions for all people working more than 40 hours a week.
Even more important to boosting volunteerism would be a return to the days of the family wage—the period before the 1970s when a middle-class household could get by on one worker’s wages. This would trigger a wave of volunteerism that could change the face of America. The first step in making this happen would be enacting a Canadian-style health care systems and tripling the minimum wage. But unlike the days before the 1970s, minorities and low-wage workers would not be excluded from this social contract. And since we live in a different social era now, it’s likely that many couples would elect to both work half time.
I cannot imagine that political leaders who call themselves conservative would stand for any of the ideas laid out in the previous two paragraphs—although some of the people who vote for them might, including evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics and “conservatives” who are actually in favor of “conserving” natural resources and community values rather than sacrificing them in the name of exponentially expanding corporate profits.
Bachmann, Paul, Romney and many Democrats would recoil at these ideas because they shift the balance of power in society from the wealthy who finance their campaigns to the poor and middle-class who, in the famous words of Bill Clinton, “work had and play by the rules.” These pro-volunteer, pro-commons policies would also be unpopular with conservatives because they depend on government playing an important role: Enforcing the new vacation, family leave, work hours and minimum wage laws, as well as making sure everyone has adequate health coverage and access.
Right-wing Naïveté
Politicians and pundits on the right often accuse progressives of being naïve about human nature for not recognizing the true motives that drive people’s behavior. That’s debatable, especially in light of new evidence from many scientific fields that our cooperative instincts are stronger than our selfish ones.
But we certainly have a case of the pot calling the kettle black right here: conservatives laud volunteerism as the best way to maintain our social fabric yet naively believe that this will happen with no provisions to stop unscrupulous employers from stealing people’s time with low wages and stingy vacations policies so that they have almost no time left over to nurture the common good.

Vincent Loy: ‘The Avengers’ became the 12th film in history that grossed over 1 billion, and it is just the beginning…

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:35:46 +0000

I expected Marvel’s The Avengers movie would breaks box office record, but didn’t see it coming that FAST! It is no doubt that this movie opening right when Hollywood summer season begins would attracts more audiences especially teenagers who are usually in favour of superhero movies, not to mention this one that assembles not one [...]

Open Source Ecology (Global Village Construction Set): Open Source Ecology Documentary Fundraiser

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:34:48 +0000

We’re launching an online crowd-funding campaign today to complete our feature documentary film that delves deep into the revolutionary action of Open Source Ecology! The goal is to raise enough funds to complete the editing of the film over the summer so we can bring it to you by December 2012.

http://www.indiegogo.com/youaregodmovie?a=454890

Please share this link all over the blogosphere and through social networking like twitter and facebook, and consider making a contribution to make this project a reality.

This filmmaker appreciates it and so will future audiences hungry for sustainable change.

Cheers,

- Ian Midgley

No related posts.

The Baseline Scenario: Regression to the Mean, JPMorgan Edition

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:58:22 +0000

By James Kwak I haven’t been writing about the JPMorgan debacle because, well, everyone else is writing about it. One theme that has stuck out for me, however, has been everyone’s reflexive surprise that this could happen at JPMorgan, supposedly … Continue reading →

Information Arbitrage (Roger Ehrenberg): Building the perfect machine

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:46:56 +0000

If the goal is to do something exceptional, nothing is more important than building a great team. It is very rare that success is a truly individual discipline. Whether one is talking about world-class researchers, top-tier tennis players or sought-after start-up founders, stellar results are the outgrowth of carefully coordinated and chemically-balanced team efforts. I had the benefit of witnessing this first-hand during my Wall Street career and subsequently in my time as an angel and venture investor. The best leaders consistently attract and retain the best teams. But doing this requires a level of self-awareness and humility that is hard to find in nature.

Team-building is hard because it is partly a function of filling in gaps, not only in bandwidth but also in ability and skills. And for super motivated, opinionated, stubborn, high-performing individuals, it isn’t always easy to say “I suck at this: I really need to get someone who is much better than me and from whom I can learn.” But the best find a way to do this. And this isn’t just about Mark and Sheryl or Larry, Sergey and Eric, but about every start-up, every large corporation, and every focused unit where there is a concrete mission and a need for diverse skills and perspectives to achieve the mission. Running a bake sale. A Little League. A product team. It doesn’t matter: the requirements are the same.

My experience in constructing the IA Ventures team is a microcosm of the team-building challenge. When I first conceived of the firm, I recognized that to fulfill my vision of being the go-to seed stage venture partner for all things data I needed several elements, many of which I did not possess:

Deep technical and product knowledge, Ph.D-level depth plus years of practical experience, that could be used to both assess and advise companies on technical issues such as scaling, managing the release cycle and bridging the gap between technology and product. This is a skill set and range of experiences I definitely did not have.

Operational start-up experience, as one who has started a company, built the infrastructure, models and controls, yet has the skill sets of a financial manager that can help advise seed stage companies on modeling, budgeting and tactical decision-making. My experiences touch these areas but don’t represent the ways in which I can personally be most valuable as an investor, adviser, mentor, strategist and partner.

Higher-order financial modeling skills together with a voracious appetite and aptitude for understanding markets, analyzing the competitive landscape and constantly asking questions to keep our firm’s thinking rational and pure. This is an essential part of the connective tissue that keeps everything humming among the firm, the portfolio and the market.

To this end I went out and was able to lasso Brad and Ben, and subsequently Justin and now Jesse. They are all awesome but they are awesome not merely as individuals but because of the separate yet distinct roles they play on the team. Brad sits on a handful of Boards but has helped most if not all of IA Ventures portfolio companies as a sounding board on technical issues, tech recruiting, product roadmap and myriad other topics. Ben also has his complement of Board seats but has certainly helped the majority of IA Ventures’ companies with their budgeting, staffing and financing strategies. And Jesse is a gem of a resource that has literally helped several companies rebuild their financial models, perform very targeted research and stay on top of market developments. And I lead several investments while assisting all companies in our portfolio with financing strategy, business development, recruiting and ensuring that our portfolio company teams know each other and ways in which they might help each other. Rather than feel threatened that I have teammates and partners who are better than me at a bunch of stuff, I am so thankful that our team - the machine - is working well for the benefit of our company partners, our LPs and our firm. It was a very deliberate process and it has been the single most important thing I’ve done since starting IA Ventures. Without all elements of the team we wouldn’t be where we are today.

For the last 25 years I’ve been in pursuit of the perfect machine, that just-right group of people with whom to pursue a shared mission. Sounds a lot like the challenges of our founders, no? It is. Team first. Because with a great team, achieving even big, honking, seemingly insane and audacious goals are comfortably within reach.

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Greece fact of the day (but how many bullets did they fire?)

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:29:57 +0000

More than half of all police officers in Greece voted for pro-Nazi party Chrysi Avgi’ (Golden Dawn) in the elections of May 6. This is the disconcerting result of an analysis carried out by the authoritative newspaper To Vima (TheTribune) in several constituencies in Athens, where 5,000 police officers in service in the Greek capital also cast their ballot.

Here is more, via Chris F. Masse.

The Big Society: Crowdfunding creative regeneration and National Sharing Day: a round up of recent Nexters news

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:14:09 +0000

Here is a selection of recent news and developments from some of our Nexters. Nexters are rapidly becoming leaders of the emergent Social Investment sector.

Pimp My Cause: Finalists for Ben‘n’ Jerrys Join Our Core

Since Pimp My Cause launched last summer they have gone from strength to strength. They are one of twenty-five finalists in Join Our Core. Pimp My Cause’s recent article in The Guardian explains why you should support them. A vote for them is a vote for hundreds of causes and millions of beneficiaries.

Givey: Shortlisted for the Big Chip Awards

Givey have been shortlisted as Best Newcomer in the Big Chip Awards. The award recognises enterprises that show particular promise of becoming successful.

The People Who Share: The Launch of a Marketplace of Sharing on National Sharing Day

On the 20th June The People Who Share will be holding a number of crowdsharing events across London as part of the Festival of Transition and A Good Week. On this date they will also launch their Marketplace of sharing, funded by Nesta’s Innovation in Giving Fund.

Founder of The People Who Share Benita Matofska has been nominated for 2012’s women’s social leadership awards.

Spacehive: Crowdfunding a new project to create a hub for social enterprises

After successfully raising £792,756 to fund a Community Centre in South Wales Spacehive are aiming to crowdfund £140,000 to open a derelict East End dock converting it into a hub for social enterprises (50 jobs), artists studios and gardens.

The funding campaign is being backed by singer Billy Bragg, actor David Suchet and London 2012.

Spots of Time: Over 70 people same time, same day volunteering in care homes across East London

Spots of Time held their first major event on the 5th May with their view of small moments can make a difference, over 70 people volunteered an hour of their time in Care Homes across East London. Spots of Time are working with My Home Life to launch an exciting new initiative ‘Home is Where the Heart is’ to help care homes connect with Londoners who can share their skills, interests & time. And from next month they will be expanding into Essex too.

Nexters: Up-coming events – A can do culture through technology

The Nexters programme continues to encourage others to create a can do culture through technology through a number of events.

An Evening with Martyn Sibley, 21st May, Somerset House, London

Nexters present e-education, 12th June, Somerset House, London

Social Investment Research, 4th July, Somerset House, London

For more information please visit www.nexters.co.uk or email frances@thebigsociety.co.uk

Overcoming Bias: Why National Med?

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:10:23 +0000

People offer many noble rationales for public education, but the data suggest they were adopted to create patriotic citizens for war. I suspect a similar data analysis could show why so many nations have recently adopted national medical systems:

Even as Americans debate … Obama’s healthcare law and its promise of guaranteed health coverage, … many far less affluent nations are moving in the opposite direction – to provide medical insurance to all nations.

China … is on track to .. cover more than 90 percent of the nation’s residents. … Two decades ago, many former communist countries … dismantled their universal health-care systems amid a drive to set up free-market economies. but popular demand for insurance protection has fueled an effort in nearly all these countries to rebuild their systems. Similar pressure is coming from the citizens of fast-growing nations int Asia and Latin America. …

Some countries have set up public systems like those in Great Britain and Canada. But many others are relying on a mix of government and commercial insurance, as in the United States. …

In countries such as India, politicians have learned that one of the surest says to secure votes is to promise better access to health care. … The Thai system, set up a decade ago, has survived years of political upheaval and a military coup. “No party dares touch it.” …

Columbia’s universal system, set up in 1993, has cost more than twice what as expected. (Today’s Post, article by Levey, p. A11; link will go here when available)

My guess: for our distant ancestors, medicine was a way to show that they care about each other. So today there is a demand for medicine to be provided by units of organization toward which we, or they, want us to feel solidarity. But I’m not sure what are the most direct and proximate causes of such a need for solidarity.

Read Write Web: How and Why Your Startup Should Go Virtual

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:30:00 +0000

Working virtually sounds like heaven to many startups. After all, not having a central office staffed with employees saves money on rent, utilities, parking, etc., freeing you to invest in research, development or marketing.

On the other hand, operating virtually is no panacea. Before you make the virtual leap, you need to figure out exactly what working virtually means to your business.

The concept of virtual work has many names, from telecommuting and teleworking to distributed companies and remote workers. And virtual companies can be structured in several ways:

1. Lead a distributed workforce, consisting of full- and part-time employees, independent contractors or some combination, all working out of their respective homes.

2. Operate out of an office space (either your own or shared). You allow your staff to split their time between working at the office and working at home.

3. Be the only actual employee of your company. When you need something done, you outsource it to freelancers and independent contractors.

Thanks to improvements in broadband and collaboration technology, the ranks of virtual workers are swelling. According to the latest (albeit a little dated) numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010:

• 64.2% of self-employed and contract employees worked at home

• 25.8% of part-time employees worked from their homes.

Good for young and old companies

While it obviously makes sense for brand-new startups to begin virtually, the concept also works for existing startups that began life in more traditional offices. My own company - GrowBiz Media - did just that. We leased space for about 18 months before realizing we could save many thousands of dollars by working from our homes.

Even established businesses can benefit from virtual arrangements. Matthew Goldstein founded Idea Consulting about 12 years ago, but the company went virtual about seven months ago. The firm’s 53 freelancers and part-timers are now happily collaborating on a huge project, the EuraMedia 2012 summit, while scattered across the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia.

But Goldstein admits: “We are still making mistakes.” His biggest hurdle was finding high-quality virtual workers.“The majority of the people we found were not qualified and overcharged,” he explains.

Goldstein also found that, despite what the virtual job placement agencies he worked with (Odesk and Elance) promised, “There is very little accountability" when it comes to contractors. You may not be satisfied with the completed work, but since the placement companies get a commission, “they tend to always side with the contractor.”

So how can you make virtual work fly at your company?

“You must put in systems of accountability that replicate those of a brick and mortar office,” advises Goldstein. “There needs to be constant monitoring, incentives and penalties, and strict management.” Also key is finding the right technology to make your project work. “Collaborative sites like Basecamp are great for helping to engage workers and get them to collaborate,” says Goldstein.

Ask the Expert

Sara Sutton Fell, CEO and founder of FlexJobs, a website for flexible jobs, offers more tips for virtual startups:

• Plan ahead. If you want to take a physical business virtual, you first have to think about all the facets of your business and how you envision them continuing to run virtually. What will this change mean for outside stakeholders — clients and partners? How can you make sure the transition goes smoothly for everyone? Sometimes the best way to go virtual is gradually, transitioning existing staff to home offices [or adding contractors] in small increments, so that your clients and partners barely notice the changes.

• Think about the technologies (computers, software, services, phones, etc.) that are essential for working virtually. Security and usability are two big concerns for teleworkers. You want to make sure everyone can access important information securely and easily, using reliable technology. Sometimes [usually] your workers' home computers just won’t cut it. If possible, provide remote employees with a complete suite of required hardware, such as laptops, monitors, scanner/copiers, webcams, microphones and more. If you use independent contractors, don’t give them equipment, it can raise questions with the IRS.

• Consider communication services. When you’re managing a remote team, it’s vitally important to keep everyone communicating with each other. This helps keep people on task, reduces feelings of isolation and boosts engagement. Employing a wide range of collaboration tools like Yammer, instant messaging (IM), email, Join.Me and Skype can help keep everyone in the loop.

Technology isn’t everything. Schedule regular meetings (at least weekly). It’s also helpful to create channels and leave time for virtual water-cooler conversations to let the team connect and build camaraderie and trust informally.

No matter what you do, don’t expect an overnight transition. “Working virtually is not easy,“” Goldstein says, “and you must be ready to put aside at least three months to track people and test them out before you can count on truly developing a team.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Three Quarks Daily: Happy 60th Birthday to 3QD friend David Byrne

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:27:53 +0000

by S. Abbas Raza

David is one of the rare rock stars who continues to innovate and surprise in several artistic fields decades after his rise to fame as lead singer of the Talking Heads in the 1970s. Today, even as he enters his seventh decade he shows no signs of slowing down. Last week I got the following email from him:

Last year I did some songs for a film by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (check out his previous film Il Divo). This new film, This Must Be The Place, stars Sean Penn as a kind of present-day Robert Smith (The Cure). I wrote the music, Will Oldham wrote the lyrics and Michael Brunnock sang the songs. In the film, these songs appear on a demo CD that the Sean Penn character is handed. Now, the "Italian Academy Awards" have awarded us for best score and best original song!

If you want to get it, the soundtrack is available now on Amazon and iTunes and for people in the UK, there is also a vinyl collectors edition available.

I constantly listen to David's collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and you can hear it too, here.

Five years ago I wrote about the amazing experience of seeing David perform live at Carnegie Hall. You can read that here.

We hope that David will continue to enrich our lives in his particular and quirky ways for decades more to come!

[Photo from last.fm.]

Steve Blank: 9 Deadliest Start-up Sins

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Inc. magazine is publishing a 12-part series of excerpts from The Startup Owner’s Manual, the new step-by-step “how to” guide for startups. The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com, highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Feedback from my readers suggested you’d appreciate seeing the series posted here, as well. [...]

Charlie Stross: The death of genre

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:58:46 +0000

This is not the blog entry you are expecting.

Science Fiction literature is unusual in that much of the work within the field exists in constant dialog with other works. Author A writes something; Author B reads it and writes something else by way of an oblique rejoinder. (For example: you won't get all the jokes and references in "Saturn's Children" unless you've read Heinlein's "Friday", to which it is in part a response. Again: Jo Walton's Among Others—on the Hugo shortlist this year, and I'm voting for it—contains numerous references and discussions of the sort of SF/F that a bright, bookish child growing up in the UK in the 1970s would be familiar with: and indeed, it spoke to me, because I was reading many of those works at the same age and time ...)

Authors responding to one another isn't unusual. But in SF/F it's particularly visible. It got started in the pages of the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and continues today, both in short fiction (we're unusual insofar as we still have a vibrant short fiction ecosystem) and at novel length.

So you probably began reading this blog essay expecting a cunning reference to Elizabeth Bear's essay in Clarkesworld, Dear speculative fiction, I'm glad we had this talk ... or to Abi Sutherland's response in "Making Light", on talking it over. Both well worth reading, I should add: Bear's conceit is that SF is reified into personhood and is of course having one of those annoying mid-life crises, wanting to be taken seriously and consequently dressing in black and reading too much bad goth poetry while hanging out outside the doors of literary award bashes thrown by that cool kid, Mainstream.

Well, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about something much more concrete: the likelihood that within another decade, two at most, science fiction as a literary genre category may well die.

What, you ask, is the problem?

Well, the process has already begun (indeed, is well under way) in some other media: in film, for example, around 30% of the big budget movies to come out of Hollywood each year are recognizably science fiction. I mean, aliens: that's a pretty obvious signifier, isn't it? And Hollywood feels no need to market these movies as SF; they just are, big budget glossy special-effects beanfests featuring aliens. They're grown-up, quite capable of finding their own audiences. But something is missing upstairs. They're the sixty-foot-tall armoured cyborg idiot children of our genre. All fire and tantrums and no cerebral context whatsoever. There's no internal genre dialog going on, and precious little introspection. (Yes, you can name exceptions like "GATACA"; the fact that you have to note the exceptions is itself a warning sign.)

I am not sure it is possible to write introspective, complex SF as a screen medium. The natural length of a feature movie is around 120 minutes; the traditional movie script runs at one page per minute, with 250 words per page—that buys you, in literary terms, a novella. Add in the expectations of studio executives and the dumbing-down effects of editing by committee you end up with huge pressure to make the script commercial rather than complex. Some director/scriptwriters have the clout to get what they want: but then you end up, as often as now, with George Lucas. Nor is there much scope for a dialog in which directors build on someone else's ideas. So a large chunk of cinematic SF is stuck, spinning its wheels, mistaking ever better special effects and ever bigger first weekend box-office draws for progress.

Written SF harbours a much more complex ecosystem in part because the works are potentially bigger (big enough to encompass big ideas) and in part because it's still, to some extent, ghettoised.

Ghettoised?

Well, let's look for a moment at the semiotics of book cover design, and what it says about the contents, and the effect it has on what we choose to read.

A book cover is a promotional vehicle intended to achieve two goals:

a) To make a reader who is unfamiliar with the author and/or the book pick the book up in a bookstore (because retail psychology teaches us that customers who handle the produce in a shop are more likely to buy it),

b) To tell the book store staff where in their curated produce display they shold place the item, for best sales impact.

Point (a) eludes many readers (and authors). The cover isn't meant to accurately depict the content of the novel; it's meant to make someone who doesn't know the author of their work handle the product. The fans already know what they want; you could market the book in a brown paper bag and they'd buy it. So the goal is to reach out to the vast majority of potential customers who don't know they're customers yet.

Point (b) is less obvious, and it is a function of the economics of retail. Shops cost money to run. In particular, floor space costs. You have to rent it. And books, physical books, are bulky. I reckon you can cram about 50 paperbacks onto a one meter wide shelf. And you can have as many as ten shelves stacked above one another. You need another eight centimetres in front of the shelves for the poor bewildered customer to stand in, so that's a square metre of retail floorspace that you can't use for any other purpose, eaten by a scant 500 paperbacks, some of which will be duplicates (because the top-selling titles need to be available to multiple customers coming in on the same day). A typical bookstore can only carry single or low-double digit thousands of titles; this is why the long tail effect works so well for Amazon. Regular bookstores have to rely on churn, to attempt to provide a customer who returns every month to buy a couple of books with a fresh selection, to provide the illusion of something wider than the choice dictated by the rent they pay on floor space.

But suppose you're a reader looking for a new novel by your favourite author in a shop with thousands or tens of thousands of titles! You need some sort of indexing system. Consequently, books are filed by category—which in fiction means by genre—and then, hopefully, alphabetically within their category.

The book store clerk, then, has to be able to rapidly identify the category to which a book (coming in one of several cartons, along with hundreds of other books) belongs. And that's where the rocket ship logo on the spine, or the headless woman with a stake (back turned to reveal the tramp stamp) comes in. It tells the store clerk that this is a work of SF, or a work of paranormal romance. Which in turn tells them where to shelve the book.

And this is where our genre ghetto comes from.

Why is it going away?

The answer is both simple and non-obvious: ebooks.

Back in 2007, ebooks accounted for less than 1% of sales of fiction. By the end of 2012 they'll be up to 40%, and they're on course to hit 60% in the next few years—probably by 2015.

Now, the people who write ebooks are the same people who write p-books. The ebook is just an alternative distribution channel, like the mass market paperback or the hardcover or the cuneiform clay tablet. And for the most part, the people who read ebooks with a given type of genre content are the same as those who read p-books in that genre. But there is a key difference: the distribution channel has changed.

You do not buy ebooks in a physical bookstore. You buy them online. It doesn't matter whether you buy them directly from a publisher like O'Reilly & Associates or Baen or a huge retailer like Amazon; it is still an online purchase.

And the curation of soft goods delivered online is fundamentally different from the curation of physical lumps of paper on shelves in rented retail premises. By "curation" I'm talking about how the digital goods—the ebooks—are organized and made accessible to the customers. No longer do we have harried clerks unpacking cartons of stuff and shoveling them onto shelves, looking for visual cues to remind them which particular category the book goes under. Instead, we have tags—metadata identifying the work as being by a given author, part of a series, of interest to readers who want SF, police procedural, near-future, virtual reality, dragons, MMOs. (That's a plausible tag set for "Halting State".) We still have a pictorial cover, but it has to be legible when shrunk to roughly 160 pixels: and this includes the author's name and the title. (Look at your recent book acquisitions. Have you noticed anything about the title length, or the typeface, or the font size on the cover? Have they changed in the past year, relative to five years ago?)

Ebooks are going to be simultaneously easier to find and buy—and much harder.

We are in the position, as readers, of being stranded in an infinitely large bookstore. There are millions of items on the shelves. Many of them are junk, the incoherent ramblings of schizophrenics with hypergraphia, who hitherto merely clogged up publishers' slushpiles but which are now flowed through into virtual print because of the ease of access to the virtual storefront. Many more are generated by spambots: this, for example, or this (don't buy them! They're overpriced rip-offs of my wikipedia entry, assembled and published by web scraping robots). There are translations of books you have already read in foreign languages, often with confusingly changed titles ("Halting State" in Germany is "Du Bist Todt"—a great title, but likely to excite and then disappoint English-reading readers searching for my name on Amazon.com).

Getting readers to tag their recent purchases and rate them is a great way of collecting data, and it permits new types of marketing: Amazon's recommendation system is eerily prescient, except when it isn't. (Ask anyone who has bought a book as a present for a friend what it did to their reader recommendations!)

The infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us. To add to the fun, once we enter the world of ebooks, nothing ever goes out of print. So works going back many years or decades are presented with equal priority to the latest new titles.

Upshot: we badly need better curation. Amazon and their competitors could present the results of author searches pre-sorted by time since publication and by language and by series. But that's barely a start.

Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work. You are an editor, presented with "Rule 34": do you choose to market it as SF, as crime/police procedural, or as mainstream literary fiction? Wouldn't it be better to market it as all three, with different cover designs and cover blurbs and marketing pitches and reader recommendations and reviews for each bookstore category? We've seen this in microcosm with Harry Potter: the use of adult-friendly covers allowed parents to buy the books and read them during their commute to work, for example.

On paper, that's very expensive/hard to organize: in electronic media it is simply a matter of commissioning as many cover designs as your book design budget will stretch to, and then convincing the big retailers to associate a different cover image with the results of each search by genre category.

We already see ebooks being tagged as multiple categories. It's only a matter of time before publishers and authors develop more sophisticated electronic marketing strategies that either micro-target a specific audience, or that target multiple readerships in parallel.

(Length is also a ball and chain. I've previously blogged about how the length of a story may be dictated by physical printing constraints—the cost of binding a big fat book turns big fat books into the domain of best-sellers (at least in the USA), while the exigencies of selling mass market paperbacks to fill supermarket wire racks during the 1970s and 1980s forced publishes to increase their page counts (to justify price increases during a period of inflation). In electronic form there's nothing stopping us from selling novelettes and million-word blockbusters on an equal logistical footing.)

But anyway, to summarize: my point is that our genre sits uneasily within boundaries delineated by the machinery of sales. And that creaking steam-age machinery is currently in the process of being swapped out for some kind of irridescent, gleaming post-modern intrusion from the planet internet. New marketing strategies become possible, indeed, become essential. And the utility of the old signifiers—the rocket ship logo on the spine of the paperback—diminish in the face of the new (tagging, reader recommendations, "if you liked X you'll love Y" cross-product correlations by sales engines, custom genre-specific cover illustrations, and so on).

This is going to drastically affect the quality and content of the internal dialog within our genre—the subject matter of the imaginary conversations by Elizabeth Bear and Abi Sutherland to which I linked up top.

I don't know what it means, yet. Jo Walton opined that the conversation will go on, and I'm sure it will ... among those of us who are already aware of it.

But there was so much less SF in the 1970s that it was quite possible for those of us who grew up reading the field back then to acquire a comprehensive coverage of it. Today, there's far more stuff out there: but without the clear signifiers, the tags saying "queue here to join the ongoing conversation", it may become increasingly hard for new readers to recognize what's going on and join in.

What is to be done?

PW Style: Alexander Selig’s Illusions Cosmetics Campaign is Stunning…

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:51:43 +0000

“Ever since I’ve been really young, I’ve had a knack for knowing fashion,” says Alex Selig.

Over the past three months, the Temple University graphic design major has created a faux makeup campaign for Illusions Cosmetics. The campaign was initially intended to simply serve as his senior project, but quickly transformed into a work of art itself.

“I knew I wanted to create a piece I was proud of, and something I could use after college. I also wanted to do something where I could incorporate photography and design skills,” Selig said. “A makeup company was the perfect match.”

Selig scoured the internet for a cosmetics line with the potential to be a staple in the makeup industry and found Illusions Cosmetics. “[The project] was about revamping [something],” Selig said. “I found the Illusions makeup website, and it was terrible. If I were a chick, I’d block that website.”

The next challenge involved finding the right face that can compliment a wide array of makeup styles, while complimenting the intricacies of each look.

“I wanted a fresh face,” Selig said. “Makeup is all about being youthful.”

After considering several models, the photographer decided to use his younger sister Zoe Selig. “She’s incredible at makeup so we collaborated really well,” Selig said.

Each partner in the dynamic duo brought a unique skill set. Zoe had the makeup expertise, and Alex had the vision for what the makeup line could be.

The photo series started out with a photo of Zoe wearing a modern take on ancient Egyptian queens. Someone mentioned to Selig that his sister resembled Egypt, and the time period piece came to life.

The time period theme allowed Selig to demonstrate the versatility of the makeup line in addition to his skill set, without having one overshadow the other. Being detail oriented, he drew inspiration from photos taken during the time period, created a color palate, and used makeup ideas from his sister to create eight makeup looks, each completely different from the next.

“I wanted to include bright colors to draw attention and any aspect that would pop off the shelves,” Selig said. The series is incredibly artistic, but his goal was to use his vision to remarket the makeup as a brand with a solid identity.

Using a simple colored background and a similar photo composition for each head-shot, Selig created eight very unique looks that compliment each other.

After devoting his life to the project for three months, Selig couldn’t pick a favorite photo. “There are little features I love about each one,” Selig said. “All the little touches make each one different from another, so that’s why it’s so hard to choose a favorite.”

After scrolling through the campaign, I was convinced that it was an actual product line he designed. After finding out it was his senior project, I was even more impressed that he used that level of detail, but Selig treated the project as if it were an actual re-branding campaign.

“People want perfection, and if they don’t see it in the campaign, they’ll question the quality of [your product],” Selig said.

[View with PicLens]

The Equity Kicker (Nick Brisbourne): Building a financing plan around value creation milestones

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:43:42 +0000

Twice in the last week I found myself coaching founders on how to build a financing plan around value creation milestones so I thought I would share what I said here.

The idea of thinking about value creation milestones comes from the observation that the value that investors put on a startup is generally moves in a step function, even when the company itself is making steady progress. There are certain types of events that investors look to as evidence that a company has overcome certain challenges and has therefore reduced risk in the business and become deserving of a higher valuation. For new investors in a business it is often hard to assess the progress being made towards the milestone and hence little credit can be given until the milestone has been achieved. An easy to understand example of this is in the run up to a product launch – whilst the team has been working hard, can see the product coming on in leaps and bounds and becomes increasingly confident that they will launch on time and customers will come rushing to the door, for investors it is very hard know whether the product will work and be well received until it is in the hands of customers. Hence the value of a company is often relatively flat in the run up to product launch and then leaps up once it is out of the door and starts to get traction.

Typical value creation milestones for technology startups include:

launching a product
achieving first revenues
breaking through revenue thresholds – e.g. run-rates of £1m, £5m, £20m and so on
demonstrating a repeatable sales model (typically telephone sales, direct sales, or channel sales)
for consumer internet companies, breaking through user based thresholds – e.g. successful public beta with thousands or tens of thousands of users, 1m monthly uniques and so on
identifying a scalable customer acquisition channel
demonstrating profitable customer acquisition (usually by analysis of unit economics)
signing distribution deals
demonstrating that signed distribution deals are working
achieving first international sales

Given that the valuation of a startup increases when milestones like these are hit it makes sense to build a financing plan based on when they are likely to come in. Because it takes time to raise money and investors generally want to wait until the milestone has been hit before they will engage seriously in discussions about investing at the higher price point I generally advise raising enough money to last six or nine months after the milestones is expected to drop. That builds in time for delay and time for a leisurely fundraising. In his book The Second Bounce of the Ball, Ronald Cohen, one of the founders of the UK venture capital industry, is even more conservative – he advises raising enough money to get past two milestones.

However, raising lots of money to buy lots of time is great if you can do it, but for a lot of startups it won’t be possible, at least not without excessive dilution. In that situation I still think you need to stick with the discipline of thinking through when the value creation milestones will occur and timing your fundraising accordingly, but look for ways to compress the timescales. If possible bring forward the trigger events for the milestones, and in any case take your plan, including the milestones to investors before you have hit the milestones. Explain to them that you want to raise money quickly once the milestone has been achieved and ask whether you can keep them updated with progress and at what point they would like to enter into serious discussions. Hopefully you will find an investor or two who likes you and your story who will work to get themselves into a position to make an offer as quickly as they can after the milestone has been achieved.

In one of the conversations I had last week we ended up thinking that they should raise twice as much money as they had originally thought now in order to give themselves twice as long to raise the next round (twelve months rather than six). Our thinking was that with twelve months money the following combination of milestones and investor communications will be possible:

Milestones

July – pilot deal with a major retail partner goes live
September – marketing support comes online
November – retail partner decision to roll-out product to rest of stores
January-March – anticipated strong sales months

Planned investor communication schedule

October – first conversations on the back of marketing launch and early data from pilot
December – tee up serious conversations for new year following positive decision to roll-out beyond initial pilot
Jan-March – work aggressively to close another round in the momentum months

This is an early stage business and hence any number of things could change and/or go wrong but to my mind this is a pretty solid plan. The timelines are tight, but realistic, with two months contingency and the milestones will all be meaningful to investors and if the business performs I think the planned conversations will all be of interest.

Three Quarks Daily: Our First Expatriate President

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:41:19 +0000

by James McGirk

Pundits on the right and left have described President Barack Obama as having a distant attitude toward the United States – on the right they call it narcissism and hint at secret agendas and question his patriotism, while on the left they wonder darkly whether he might be “too brainy to be president.” I think it is something else. I have never met President Obama, but our lives have converged in unusual ways. Perhaps unpacking my own intense and complex relationship with the United States might shed some light into what might at first seem like an aloof and distant attitude toward our homeland.

Mr. Obama spent his formative years as an outsider and that estrangement shaped his view of the United States in a profound way. At school he was peculiar, he had lived overseas and was a jangled mixture of races and cultures. His father was Kenyan, his stepfather was Indonesian and his mother was a Caucasian expatriate academic. And Hawaii, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, was more like a forward operating base or an embassy than a state. Men and material were flowing through it en route to Vietnam and the federal government had a far more pervasive and sinister presence in Hawaii than it did elsewhere. The United States wasn’t a fundamental part of himself - not in the unambiguous, automatic way it would be for someone born in Detroit, Michigan – rather his sense of belonging to the United States was something that had to be negotiated.

My early life was equally jangled. My parents were journalists and my grandfather was a petroleum prospector for Texaco, which meant that our family was estranged from the United States for more than 70 years. Growing up, the U.S. was a highly abstract concept that was paradoxically close and accessible to me. My information about the country came from mostly headline news, and was highly polarized; this was the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and more often than not the news contained tales of the tape comparing the United States with the Soviet arsenals. What little of I saw of the real U.S. came in brief glimpses during visits to embassies or when we visited relatives in Southern California. In comparison to the bleakness of the United Kingdom, Spain and India, the U.S. was a technologically advanced paradise where everyone looked and sounded the way I did.

Being American became something that underlined how different I was from my peers. Rather than let my accent fall into the posh London grooves of my classmates, I tried to speak in as vulgar and American an accent as possible. As the countries we moved to became increasingly poor, the United States seemed to be a paragon of democracy and civic leadership in comparison. In high school, in New Delhi, I attended an American school for the first time in my life, and was deeply dismayed by how little my professors and peers seemed to appreciate it.

I was quite isolated from my peers. My fellow American classmates and most of my professors lived on antiseptic embassy compounds and had access to American produce and groceries, while we lived the way the natives did (i.e. the wealthy natives, a fair approximation of the way that Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia, or even Hawaii, where he attended Punahou School, considered the state’s most exclusive). Our school curriculum, typical of a prep school in the 1990s, preached tolerance and diversity, touted multiculturalism as the solution to the world’s woes, yet the moment we ventured beyond the diplomatic enclaves we were singled out as strange visitors from somewhere so different, so wealthy and splendid, that packs of children and beggars would follow, begging for alms and attempting to grope our hair and clothing.

I took this squishy multi-culti curriculum as personal attack. It was absurd. How could India, where people were losing limbs in the street possibly be any better than the United States? I imagined the U.S. as crystalline and technological and perfect and scrabbled for fragments of it reading science fiction or the Last Whole Earth Catalog, or while in throes of hallucinogenic drugs or stumbling drunk. I resolved to abuse my brain until it shut down and I could reanimate it once college began.

Mr. Obama and I both began our studies in the West, he at Occidental College and I at the University of Colorado at Boulder (and a year later at the University of California, Irvine) before we both drifted eastward. My first glimpse of the real United States was a rude shock. Coming home was an absolutely traumatic experience for me, I was so disappointed in the country I had claimed as home that I lost the ability to speak without a severe stutter and spent an entire year almost catatonic, living with my nonagenarian, hoarder grandparents in California. During those dark years I had nothing to cling to other than my status as a former expat. I cherished the glimpses of it I had when I visited them on vacations or did internships overseas, and let my life stall while I waited be sucked back up into the globetrotting lifestyle that my parents and grandparents lived.

I was drawn to the idea of New York City as a world city - it seemed an acceptable compromise or at least a launchpad toward something suitably grand and international - and eventually completed my stalled education at Columbia University, which had a reputation overseas as being an international university. I’m not quite sure what it was that threw me so out of loop about returning home to the United States, whether it was seeing how crass and commercial the culture could be at times, or whether I just wasn’t mentally prepared to engage with it and projected my own insecurities onto it, but as I recovered I was left with a peculiar sort of double remove from the country I ostensibly belonged to. Mr. Obama spent a few years after college writing newsletters in New York City before getting a job in Chicago directing a church-related NGO, and perhaps it was there that he stabilized and quelled his own drug and alcohol abusing demons by discovering a universal connection to the state and his polygot roots through Christianity and service to the community.

There are, of course, some pretty significant differences between the way that Mr. Obama and I have been received by our respective homelands, and the biggest divergence is race. While I stuck out as a Caucasian in India and received unusual and uncomfortable attention because of my race, in the continental United States I was definitely in the majority. Up close I might have come off as a sounding different and not being quite as adept with pop culture as my peers, but to a casual observer I seemed no different than any other American. So where I experienced a double estrangement from my homeland, it was invisible and internal; he had to deal with a third level that marked him as a stranger to the dominant culture, although in being a member of a minority there is a paradoxical connection to community, in that to outsiders you are considered a member of the minority, whether you want to be or not.

About the time this column goes to press tomorrow, President Obama will pay a visit to my workplace. I won’t be anywhere near the man, so for me this means a snarled commute a pat down before I can sit down at my desk, but I still feel a sort of connection to the way that he seems to perceive the United States of America. Having been forced to re-imagine my place within the U.S. many times now, I have come to see being American as a far more fungible thing than I once did, it isn’t quite the colossus I once saw it for, but rather a cracked and vulnerable thing, an idea that still has tremendous strength if properly wielded. Let us hope that whomever wins in the fall appreciates this.

BBC College of Journalism: Innovation Award - shortlist announced

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:37:48 +0000

We're delighted to announce the shortlist for the inaugural BBC College of Journalism Postgraduate Journalism Student Innovation Award.

The judging process has so far proven to be very tough indeed, because of the incredibly high standard of entries we have received.

It has been fascinating to see the different and innovative tools, techniques and skills used by journalism students. We've been truly impressed by the way people are using these new methods to find, verify and tell stories.

A judging panel of senior figures from the world of journalism will be meeting this week to make the final decision.

The winner will be announced at the BBC College of Journalism Connecting Communities Conference - #BBCScc12 - at the BBC's new offices in Salford on Thursday 24 May.

Shortlist

1) Raziye Akkoc and Laurence Dodds, Goldsmiths University, London GLA Election Debate

2) Adam Smith, Greg Jones and Lisa Raffensperger, City University London, Purse String Theory - Science Funding blog

3) Brian Plummage, Liverpool Hope University, Civil Rights in the USA

4) Tim Long, Lincoln University, Goal Line Technology

5) Will Cooper, University of Winchester, Strike Day 30th November 2011

6) Nathaniel Dove, Alex Francis, Wil Hanford and Guy Wilson, UEA, 1601.

Once the award has been presented, we will be showcasing the work of all the shortlisted candidates, plus the best of some of the other entries, on the BBC College of Journalism website.

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Genoeconomics

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:31:21 +0000

An interesting piece from the Boston Globe on “genoeconomics”:

Though the name wasn’t coined until 2007, genoeconomics flickered briefly into existence once before. In 1976, the late University of Pennsylvania economist Paul Taubman published the results of a study in which he followed the financial lives of identical twins, and found there were curious similarities in how much money they made as adults. Taubman concluded that between 18 percent and 41 percent of variation in income across individuals was heritable.

It was a startling conclusion, and one that Taubman’s fellow economists didn’t quite know what to do with. One joked that Taubman’s findings meant the government might as well shut down welfare, since clearly some people would remain poor no matter what.

….After Taubman, the idea that genes had an important role to play in decision-making was largely abandoned in the world of economics. But with the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000, the first full sequence of a human being’s genetic code, people started wondering if perhaps it would be possible to push past broad heritability estimates, of the sort that Taubman generated, and figure out what part of a person’s genome influenced what aspect of his behavior.

…Over time, social scientists started coming to terms with the fact that even the most heritable of traits, such as height, were influenced not by one or two powerful genes, but by a combination of hundreds or even thousands—and that environmental factors, like a person’s upbringing, play a complex role in determining how those genes are expressed. “Every single direction has proved to be less promising than people originally expected,” said Laibson.

… hope lies in a new approach to data-gathering that is only just getting underway, wherein researchers look for patterns among thousands, and even millions of people—numbers that are only just becoming possible thanks to massive collaborations linking gene studies being conducted all over the world.

The researchers in question, Daniel Benjamin, David Laibson, David Cesarini and others, seem worried about the possibility of tracing attributes and behavior to genetics. Most of the big news is out already, however, and more easily observed in phenotype than genotype.

For more on the new approach see The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences.

BBC College of Journalism: Maintaining OpSec in the age of Twitter

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:27:12 +0000

One of the most important considerations for the military is maintaining operational security - known in the jargon as 'OpSec'.

Its critical importance was highlighted this week in the newly-published documents seized during the raid in Abbotabad a year ago in which Osama Bin Laden was killed.

In one letter, Bin Laden apparently orders a follower to create intelligence-gathering groups to anticipate future visits by President Obama or General David Petraeus to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or Pakistan, so their aircraft could be targeted.

The idea of OpSec was summed up succinctly by wartime propaganda posters which warned "careless talk costs lives" and "loose lips might sink ships".

But the US military defines it as "a process that identifies critical information to determine if friendly actions can be observed by adversary intelligence systems, determines if information obtained by adversaries could be interpreted to be useful to them, and then executes selected measures that eliminate or reduce adversary exploitation of friendly critical information".

In other words, seemingly innocuous snippets of information, put together like a jigsaw, might give away an army's plans or positions.

When senior dignitaries visit dangerous countries, planners go to great lengths to try to prevent details of flight schedules or meetings from leaking out, for fear that the information could be used by hostile elements to target the VIP.

For routine trips, government departments often give journalists draft travel schedules on the understanding that they are 'for operational use only and not for broadcast'. They are important in allowing media organisations to plan their coverage and ensure they have the right resources in the right places.

When a senior politician visits a war zone, however, security is far tighter for obvious reasons. The 'pool' of journalists accompanying a prime minister or a president, often agreeing to share their material with other media outlets, is given necessary details in advance. For the rest of us, however, the first we often hear of it is when the wires suddenly report that David Cameron, President Obama or Hillary Clinton has made a 'surprise' - or more accurately 'unannounced' - visit to Afghanistan, Iraq or Somalia.

This week, however, that 'need to know' system of information control almost broke down.

The White House published a false daily schedule to hide the fact that President Obama was travelling to Afghanistan. According to the Associated Press, an Afghan news organisation got wind of the visit and put it out on Twitter, although it got some details wrong.

Needless to say, once the very mention of a presidential visit to Afghanistan was in the Twittersphere, the cat was well and truly out of the bag and operational security was compromised.

It's not the first time that White House travel plans to hostile environments have trickled out before they should have.

In 2008, Senator John McCain hinted at a visit by President Obama to Iraq ahead of time.

I remember receiving an email from the US military's in-house image agency, DVIDS, in 2010 offering live TV coverage of an Obama visit to Afghanistan an hour before journalists were supposed to know he was there.

Thankfully those trips passed off without incident.

Today, social media has the power to disrupt the traditional models of news management used by the military.

In a small number of unfortunate cases it has meant that the families of servicemen and women have found out about the death of a loved one via Facebook rather than a knock on the door or a phone call from a casualty notification team.

According to Army Times, the US Army will address the issue of casualty notification in the next edition of its Social Media Handbook.

The Chinese general Sun Tzu recognised the importance of operational security as far back as the 6th century BC. He noted that, "If I am able to determine the enemy's dispositions while at the same time I conceal my own, then I can concentrate and he must divide."

In the age of social media - where sensitive information can be reported, retweeted and spread around the globe in a matter of seconds - concealing one's dispositions has never been harder.

Stuart Hughes is a BBC World Affairs producer.

Two Talk: Children from SOS Children's Village Kolkata - Caroline from SOS Children's Village Lilongwe in Malawi

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:26:58 +0000

I have visited India many times as a tourist and find myself totally bewitched by the spectacle of the culture and customs of this magical land.

Feld Thoughts (Brad Feld): Should Your Board Members Be On The all@company.com Email List?

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:00:25 +0000

tl;dr – Yes.

I’m on the all@company.com list for a number of the companies I’m on the board of. CEOs and entrepreneurs who practice TAGFEE welcome this. I haven’t universally asked for inclusion on this list mostly because I hadn’t really thought hard about it until recently. But I will now and going forward, although I’ll leave it up to the CEO as to whether or not to include me.

In an effort to better figure out the startup board dynamic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of continual communication with board members. The companies I feel most involved in are ones in which I have continual communication and involvement with the company. This isn’t just limited to the CEO, but to all members of the management team and often many other people in the company. Working relationships as well as friendships develop through the interactions.

Instead of being a board member with his arms crossed who shows up at a board meeting every four to eight weeks to ask a bunch on knuckleheaded questions in reaction to what is being presented, I generally know a wide range of what is going on in the companies I’m on the board of. Sure – there are lots of pockets of information I don’t know, but because I’m in the flow of communication, I can easily engage in any topic going on in the company. In addition to being up to speed (or getting up to speed on any issue faster), I have much deeper functional context, as well as emotional context, about what is going on, who is impacted, and what the core issue is.

Every company I’m involved in has a unique culture. Aspects of the culture get played out every day on the all@company.com email list. Sometimes the list is filled with the mundane rhythms of a company (“I’m sick today – not coming in”; “Please don’t forget to put the dishes in the dishwasher.”) Other times it’s filled with celebration (“GONG: Just Closed A Deal With Customer Name.”) Occasionally it’s filled with heartbreak (“Person X just was diagnosed with cancer.”) Yet other times it is a coordination mechanism (“Lunch is at 12:30 at Hapa Sushi.”) And, of course, it’s often filled with substance about a new customer, new product, issue on tech support, competitive threat, or whatever is currently on the CEO’s mind.

As a board member, being on this list makes me feel much more like part of the team. I strongly believe that board members of early stage companies should be active – and supportive – participants. My deep personal philosophy is that as long as I support the CEO, my job is to do whatever the CEO wants me to do to help the company succeed. Having more context, being part of the team, and being in the flow of the all@company.com communication helps immensely with that.

There are three resistance points I commonly hear to this:

1. “I don’t want to overwhelm my board members with emails.” That’s my problem, not yours, and the reason filters were created for people who can’t handle a steady volume of email. If you are a Gmail user, or have conversation view turned on in Outlook, it’s totally mangeable since all the messages thread up into a single conversation. So – don’t worry about me. If your board member says “too much info, please don’t include me”, ponder what he’s really saying and how to best engage him in continuous communication.

2.”I don’t want my board members to see all the things going on in the company.” That’s not very TAGFEE so the next time you say “I try to be transparent and open with my investors”, do a reality check on what you actually mean. Remember, the simplest way not to get tangled up in communication is just to be blunt, open, and honest all the time – that way you never have to figure out what you said. If you don’t believe your board members are mature enough to engage in this level of interaction on a continual basis, reconsider whether they should be on your board.

3. “I’m afraid it will stifle communication within the company.” If this is the case, reconsider your relationship between your board members and your company. Are you anthropomorphizing your board? Are you shifting blame, or responsibility to them (as in “the board made me do this?”) Are you creating, or do you have, a contentious relationship between your team and the board? All of these things are problems and lead to ineffective board / company / CEO interactions so use that as a signal that something is wrong in relationship.

Notice that I didn’t say “all investors” – I explicitly said board members. As in my post recently about board observers, I believe that board members have a very specific responsibility to the company that is unique and not shared by “board observers” or other investors. There are plenty of other communication mechanisms for these folks. But, for board members, add them to you all@company.com list today.

mathbabe: Who wants Jamie Dimon’s job?

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:58:53 +0000

It’s Jamie Dimon day for me today, I’ve offered to write a first draft of a Alternative Banking piece on the JP Morgan $2,000,000,000 “hedging loss” that he announced last week and which resulted in a 12% stock price loss in the past 5 trading days. There are many sordid details to wade through to prepare, [...]

P2P Foundation: Chapter One. The Stigmergic Revolution (Second Excerpt)

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:45:30 +0000

[This is the second of a series of excerpts from my book-in-progress, Desktop Regulatory State (free online version of manuscript to date at the link)]

V. Stigmergy

Networked organization is based on a principle known as stigmergy. “Stigmergy” is a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which termites coordinate their activity. Social insects like termites and ants coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any need for a central coordinating authority.

Applied by way of analogy to human society, stigmergy refers primarily to the kinds of networked organization associated with wikis, group blogs, and “leaderless” organizations configured along the lines of networked cells.

Mark Elliott, whose doctoral dissertation is probably the most thorough and comprehensive treatment of stigmergy to date, contrasts stigmergic coordination with social negotiation. Social negotiation is the traditional method of organizing collaborative group efforts, through agreements and compromise mediated by discussions between individuals. The exponential growth in the number of communications with the size of the group, obviously, imposes constraints on the feasible size of a collaborative group, before coordination must be achieved by hierarchy and top-down authority. Stigmergy, on the other hand, permits collaboration on an unlimited scale by individuals acting independently. This distinction between social negotiation and stigmergy is illustrated, in particular, by the contrast between traditional models of co-authoring and collaboration in a wiki. Individuals communicate indirectly, “via the stigmergic medium.”

The distinction between social negotiation and stigmergic coordination parallels Elliott’s distinction, elsewhere, between “discursive collaboration” and “stigmergic collaboration.” The “discursive elaboration of shared representations (ideas)” is replaced by “the annotation of material and digital artefacts as embodiments of these representations.” “Additionally, when stigmergic collaboration is extended by computing and digital networks, a considerable augmentation of processing capacity takes place which allows for the bridging of the spatial and temporal limitations of discursive collaboration, while subtly shifting points of negotiation and interaction away from the social and towards the cultural.” [Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration. Doctoral Dissertation, Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (October 2007) , pp. 9-10]

David de Ugarte quotes the Rand theorists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, in “Swarming and the Future of Conflict.” “[N]etwar,” they say,

is a privateers’ war in which many small units “already know what they must do”, and are aware that “they must communicate with each other not in order to prepare for action, but only as a consequence of action, and, above all, through action.” [The Power of Networks (pdf)]

Critics of “digital communism” like Jaron Lanier and Mark Helprin, who condemn network culture for submerging “individual authorial voice” in the “collective,” couldn’t be more clueless if they tried. Stigmergy synthesizes the highest realizations of both individualism and collectivism, and represents each of them in its most completely actualized form, without qualifying or impairing either in any way.

Stigmergy is not “collectivist” in the traditional sense, as it was understood in the days when a common effort on any significant scale required a large organization to represent the collective, and the administrative coordination of individual efforts through a hierarchy. But it is the ultimate realization of collectivism, in that it removes the transaction cost of concerted action by many individuals.

It is the ultimate in individualism because all actions are the free actions of individuals, and the “collective” is simply the sum total of individual actions. Every individual is free to formulate any innovation she sees fit, without any need for permission from the collective. Every individual or voluntary association of individuals is free to adopt the innovation, or not, as they see fit. The extent to which any innovation is adopted results entirely from the unanimous consent of every voluntary grouping that adopts it. Each innovation is modular (meaning the project “can be broken down into smaller components… that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole”) [Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks], and may be adopted into any number of larger projects where it is found useful. Any grouping where there is disagreement over adoption may fork and replicate their project with or without the innovation.

In this regard it attains the radical democratic ideal of unanimous consent of the governed, which is never completely possible under any representative or majoritarian system. Consent—the extent of the individual’s partcipation in the decisions that affected her—was the central value of Jeffersonian democracy. The smaller the unit of governance, and the closer it was to the individual, the closer it approached the ideal of unanimous consent to all acts of government. Hence Jefferson’s ward republics, whose chief virtue was the increased role of each individual in influencing the outcome of policy. But this ideal can only be fully attained when the unit of governance is the individual. So majority rule was the lesser evil, a way to approximate as closely as possible to the spirit of unanimous consent when an entire group of people had to be bound by a single decision. Stigmergy removes the need for any individual to be bound by the group will. When all group actions reflect the unanimous will of the participants, as permitted by stigmergic organization, the ideal of unanimous consent is finally achieved in its fullness.

Group action is facilitated with greater ease and lower transaction costs than ever before, but all “group actions” are the unanimous actions of the participating individuals. A good example is Raymond’s “Bazaar” model of open-source development, as illustrated in a hypothetical case by Benkler:

Imagine that one person, or a small group of friends, wants a utility. It could be a text editor, photo-retouching software, or an operating system. The person or small group starts by developing a part of this project, up to a point where the whole utility—if it is simple enough—or some important part of it, is functional, though it might have much room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program freely available to others, with its source code—instructions in a human-readable language that explains how the software does whatever it does when compiled into a machine-readable language. When others begin to use it, they may find bugs, or related utilities that they want to add (e.g., the photo-retouching software only increases size and sharpness, and one of its users wants it to allow changing colors as well). The person who has found the bug or is interested in how to add functions to the software may or may not be the best person in the world to actually write the software fix. Nevertheless, he reports the bug or the new need in an Internet forum of users of the software. That person, or someone else, then thinks that they have a way of tweaking the software to fix the bug or add the new utility. They then do so, just as the first person did, and release a new version of the software with the fix or the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three people—the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it. This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but is instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum and using the same software, which is released under an open, rather than proprietary, license. This enables some of its users to identify problems without asking anyone’s permission and without engaging in any transactions.

This has had revolutionary implications for the balance of power between networks and hierarchies, and almost unimaginably empowered individuals and small groups against large organizations.

In a hierarchy, all communications between members or between local nodes must pass through a limited number of central nodes. The only communications which are allowed to pass from one member or local node to another are those which meet the standards for distribution of those who control the central nodes. Only a few nodes within a hierarchy have the power to transmit; hence the use of the phrase “one-to-many” to describe its topology. The version of local news that appears in the local newspaper under the byline of a local journalist may be far superior in relevant detail and analysis, but it is the wire service version—even if far inferior in quality—which appears in local newspapers all around the world. It is only the communications approved by the Party Secretariat that are heard by all local cells of a party. [de Ugarte, The Power of Networks]

In a distributed network, on the other hand, every node has the power to transmit, and any two nodes can communicate directly with each other without passing through a central node or obtaining the approval of whoever controls that node. A network is “plurarchical,” in de Ugarte’s terminology, rather than democratic. Instead of the individual members simply selecting who controls the central nodes, “[s]omeone makes a proposal and everyone who wishes to join in can do so. The range of the action in question will depend on the degree to which the proposal is accepted. This system is called a pluriarchy….” Democracy is a “scarcity system” in which decision-making power is rivalrous: “the collective must face an either/or choice, between one filter and another, between one representative and another.” In a distributed network, on the other hand, decision-making power is non-rivalrous. Each individual’s decision affects only herself, and does not impede the ability of others to do likewise. “Even if the majority not only disagreed with a proposal, but also acted against it, it wouldn’t be able to prevent the proposal from being carried out.” “[I]n the blogosphere,” de Ugarte writes elsewhere,

a space where the social cost of an extra post is zero, any blogger’s publishing his or her information does not decrease anyone else’s publication possibilities. The marginal cost is zero. The need to collectively decide what is published and what is not simply disappears. As opposed to scarcity logic, which generates the need for democratic decision, abundant logic opens the door to pluriarchy.

In such a universe, every collective or hierarchical decision on what to publish or not can only be conceived as an artificial generation of scarcity, a decrease in diversity, and an impoverishment for all. [de Ugarte, Phyles (pdf)]

P2P Foundation: Towards a European Charter of the Commons

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:41:53 +0000

Responding to the current wave of privatisations, European Alternatives together with the International University College and its Institute for the Study of Political Economy and Law together with the Municipality of Naples, and the Institut international D’etudes et recherches sur les biens communsare launching a process of forums and metings throughout Europe to draft a European Charter of the Commons.

In May/June meetings will take place in Zagreb, Cluj-Napoca, Sofia, Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome. More information coming soon!

Why?

The dichotomy of private property and the state has proven incapable of resisting the distortions produced by more than 20 years of neoliberal order. The outcome has been a global and severe imbalance, favouring the private sector and specifically corporate interests at the expense of the people.

Massive transfers of common resources from the public to the private sphere are occurring throughout the world, with total disregard of any constitutional guarantees of the public interest, due process, and just compensation. Our democracies are increasingly being jeopardized by collusive state and market actors; government representatives that put the short term profits of individuals and corporations ahead of the interests of the common people.

From Greece to Spain, from Tunisia to Egypt, from Italy to Bolivia, Ecuador, rural India and China, the people are increasingly aware of the need for a different model of globalisation. These activists are currently engaged in acts of reclaiming commons all around the world. From those resisting the privatisation of resources (for example in Italy with the water referendum or in Romania with the attempts at health care privatisation) to the recent occupations of public spaces against neoliberalism (for example the Indignados in Spain and the people of Greece). In solidarity with these movements, we initiate a campaign for the European Charter of the Commons.

What are Commons?

Our approach to the commons is both about reclaiming access to fundamental resources as well as guaranteeing the democratic process that governs their distribution. Resources that are fundamental to human life include both natural commons such as water, food, energy and the atmosphere, as well as man made commons, like technology, health, the internet and culture. Reclaiming the commons also requires a reshaping of the democratic process as it stands today, offering an alternative to the model that has prevailed under state and market models. Governing the commons demands a shift of power from the centraliaed state and free market to local communities, placing the power to satisfy the long term needs of these communities as well as those of future generations back into the hands of community membera through bottom up, local and direct democracy.

The Draft European Charter of the Commons

Here you will find a draft of the European Charter of the Commons you can freely comment on, thanks to a special participatory software. We aim to produce an updated version of the Charter by early Summer taking into account all inputs received.

AVC - musings of a VC in NYC (Fred Wilson): MBA Mondays Series: People

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:31:04 +0000

Based on the feedback I got on this topic last week, I've revised the title of the series and the topics we are going to cover.

The series will be called People. Human Capital is a turnoff. Businesses are all about people. And people aren't capital.

I've added posts on retention and asking someone to leave the company.

So here is the schedule of posts:

- The importance of culture and fit when hiring

- Where to find strong talent

- Optimal headcount at various stages

- Best hiring practices

- Retention

- Asking somone to leave your company

- How to leverage your partners (including your investors) in building and managing a team.

We also have lined up guest posts from Donna White, Dr Dana, Angela Baldonero, Susan Loh, and Chad Dickerson.

Should be a great series. I am looking forward to writing and reading it. It will go on for the next three months.

Matt Webb: Science questions

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:26:00 +0000

SCIENCE QUESTIONS

Is it true the human ear never stops growing?
If the universe is infinite then why is so much of the night sky black?
How come the biggest corn flakes are on the top of the pack and don't sink?
Why do people imitate birds by whistling when birds don't have lips?
Is it true that dogs see in black and white?
Is it true that dogs die from eating chocolate?
Is it true that dogs can see ghosts?
Was there a dog jesus?
If there wasn't a dog jesus, if a dog dies from eating chocolate, does a dog go to heaven?
Or does the dead dog become a dog ghost?
Is this why dogs can see ghosts?
Because ghosts are dogs?
And dogs are ghosts?
Mountains, are they small or far away?

Fred Wilson VC: Handwriting - BIGKRIT my son turned me onto BIGKRIT and...

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:13:57 +0000

Handwriting - BIGKRIT

my son turned me onto BIGKRIT and he’s good

i love the guitar that winds its way through this song

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Markets in Everything: Fashion Like

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:05:39 +0000

These hangers in a São Paulo store show in real-time the number of “likes” an outfit has received on the Facebook page of Brazilian fashion retailer C&A. I shudder to think how many likes my typical outfit would receive.

The internet of things is approaching rapidly.

Forum for the Future: From coca to cocoa to carbon: future livelihoods for jungle communities

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:40:55 +0000

I definitely wasn't expecting to find PowerPoint in the Peruvian jungle. But when I arrived at a community meeting in the village of Pucallpillo a few weeks ago, everyone was busy agreeing which photos to include and who would present the official slides to any visitors. Pucallpillo wants to tell the world its story, starting with anyone who cares to stop by there.

It's just one of many places along the Alto Huayabamba river that emerged relatively recently from intensive illegal coca production, and whose inhabitants now grow organic cocoa instead. Earning enough from that to keep coca out for good, repairing damaged soils and protecting their cocoa trees from climate change are all big concerns for the residents.

Harvesting cocoa

Fred Wilson VC: in five years, i bet there will be a lot of red from astoria to...

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:35:19 +0000

in five years, i bet there will be a lot of red from astoria to red hook. the next big growth sector for tech is the other side of the east river

Rob Fitzpatrick: When business books are not a waste of time

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:34:25 +0000

Business books are a huge waste of time when reading them is the result of browsing “for something interesting.”

But they’re a lifesaver if you have a specific question you need answered.

Reading a book is always a good use of time when you’re missing a learnable bit of knowledge. The types of questions you should be answering with books are:

How does big sales work?
What are the business models at play in the travel industry?
How does cashflow work and why am I permanently victimised by it?
What is fair equity compensation for our first hire?
What did Gary V do differently to succeed at making money from video blogging?
When has an idea like this been tried before?
What am I really asking for (and offering) when I make a “partnership proposal”?
How do I respectfully fire someone?
What has to happen within a big company for them to want to acquire a startup?

The list goes on. When you run into one of these types of questions, and when it’s important for your business, then you should leave work early, run to the bookstore, and head home to sit in a bubble bath with a pitcher of mojitos and your newly printed knowledge.

You have a question. Books have the answer.

The wasteful type of business-book reading, on the other hand, is exemplified by airport bookstores. They are the gateway drug. You trawl the shelves for one with big white words and a bright, solidly coloured cover, and figure it’s better than staring at the in-flight magazine for 3 hours. Then, it’s sort of work-y, so maybe you take an hour in the morning at your desk to finish it off.

Business books are a lot of fun. They feel like work. Spend the time to enjoy them if you enjoy them. Just keep clear in your head whether they are work or play. Building up a mental warchest of experimental research results is probably not the most critical task for your startup’s future.

If you didn’t go to the bookstore to answer a specific question, it’s just play. If you have a specific, fact-based question and don’t go to the bookstore, you’re wasting time.

feeling listless: About half three.

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:19:43 +0000

Theatre I'm sure I've posted this before but Matthew's post about fire drills reminded me of this short play I wrote in the late 90s about a false alarm in a student hall.

It uses some of the characters from a television series I failed to make sense of at the time because it attempted to make an hour's worth of drama without supporting players. Or something.

The idea was to create a piece which could be used by a drama group with loads of actors which gave them all something to do, as part of a variety night or some such.

Parts of it, like the Beckettian repetitions and the lack of scenery I'm pleased with. Other parts, like the gender politics, are a bit embarrassing, but here it is all unvarnished:

ABOUT HALF THREE.

BY

STUART IAN BURNS

Bare stage. From stage left, a man appears in a dressing gown. Her looks around the stage, then simply stands there nervously. This is Mitch Clarke. From stage right, a second man appears; slightly older, in another dressing gown. This is Alex Richards.

He yawns.

ALEX: What time is it?

MITCH: (slightly uneasy) About half three.

ALEX: Fuck me.

Mitch smiles nervously.

A girl in purple jeans and a tie die blouse strays on from stage left. This is Clara Miller.

ALEX: You’re dressed?

CLARA: I stayed up. I saw it coming.

ALEX: Of course you did.

Mitch sneezes. He gets out a handkerchief, his eyes streaming.

CLARA: Are you all right, Mitch?

MITCH: Allergies.

Alex, Mitch and Clara turn and look as three more people stray on, Michael Mitchell, Shelley Lawrence and David Gerard. All are fully clothed as well. Michael and David are carrying hands of cards. Alex hits the palm of his hand against his forehead. Mitch sneezes. Clara smiles. Michael and David are bickering with each other forcibly but Soto Voce; Shelley wears the expression of a tolerant mother.

ALEX: You’re dressed as well?

SHELLEY: Late night poker.

Above the general hum of an argument we hear . . .

MICHAEL: My two Kings beat your pair of Aces.

DAVID: This is poker not pontoon. Aces are essentially eleven. Higher than a king which are essentially ten. (he turns to Shelley) Whose idea was it to teach him poker?

SHELLEY: Yours.

DAVID: We should have stuck with chess. We were making progress with chess.

Clara smiles. Pause.

CLARA: I like chess.

DAVID: Clara? I mean, hello Clara.

CLARA: Hi David. You look tired.

DAVID: I feel tired.

All turn again, as Carol Henrik and Fiona Smith appear. Carol is in her dressing gown and Fiona seems to be wearing nothing but a long t-shirt. Alex is obviously impressed. Mitch sneezes. Clara smiles at them. Shelley is trying to help Michael work out his poker hand. He is moving the cards around his hand. David is smiling at Clara.

ALEX: Finally someone else in a dressing gown.

CAROL: (German accent) Of all people.

ALEX: I didn’t mean anything.

FIONA: Of course you didn’t.

Everyone turns and stops what they are doing as Pete Armstrong and Sarah Leopold arrive from stage left. Pete is dressed in a jumper and jeans and carrying a clipboard. Sarah is in a nightie.

FIONA: What is it that people say at a time like this? (holding herself) Brrr.

Sarah goes to reply, but Pete cuts in.

PETE: Stop complaining. It’s not that cold.

Both Sarah and Fiona glare at him.

PETE: Let’s do it then. (irritated) I think we all know what to do by now. (pause) I call your name you tell me what you’ve been up to. Anyone want to own up to anything?

Everyone stands silently. Pause.

PETE: I was afraid of that.

SARAH: Just hold on a sec. Where is everyone?

PETE: They’ve all gone home for the weekend.

SARAH: Everyone?

PETE: ‘Cept the French group. Party.

ALEX: Party? And I wasn’t invited?

CLARA: You’re a Eurosceptic.

ALEX: But – party?

SARAH: Why aren’t you there, Carol?

ALEX: She’s not French . . .

CAROL: Long story. Tell you later.

Fiona smiles knowingly. Everyone turns to look at her. Intimidated she stops and forces seriousness.

PETE: (sighing) Let's start. Randomly for a change. Alex Richards.

ALEX: Sleeping. Missing a party.

PETE: Mitch Clarke.

Mitch sneezes.

MITCH: Sorry.

PETE: That’s all right. What have you been doing?

MITCH: Insomnia. Listening to the radio.

PETE: Ok. Clara?

CLARA: I was trying a new meditation technique.

DAVID: What was that?

CLARA: Sleeping alone.

PETE: So it didn’t involve pushing things around like last time?

CLARA: No. No telekinesis. I got banned remember?

PETE: Just checking. Erm . . . Michael, David and Shelley?

MICHAEL: Being cheated in poker.

DAVID: Winning at poker.

SHELLEY: Beginning to hate the idea of poker.

PETE: Carol?

CAROL: I’m taking the Fifth Amendment.

PETE: This is Britain. We don’t have a “Fifth Amendment”.

CAROL: Well you should have.

PETE: What were you doing?

CAROL: I whisper.

Pete steps forward.

CAROL: Sarah.

Pete steps back. Carol approaches Sarah and whispers in her ear. Sarah gives the same knowing smile as Fiona did. Pete stares at her.

SARAH: She didn’t do it.

Mitch sneezes.

PETE: Who’s left? Fiona?

FIONA: Err . . . I was sleeping.

PETE: Oh god. Is there anyone we haven’t accounted for?

No one says anything. Mitch shrugs nervously.

PETE: Look. Someone has to own up to this. The fire engines will be here in (he looks at his watch) four minutes. If no one says ‘yes its me’ in the next three minutes fifty five seconds we all lose what’s left of our deposits. If someone owns up. They’ll get the warning and we all go back to bed. Three minutes 45.

ALEX: Can’t someone just own up even if they didn’t do it? Mitch?

Mitch sneezes.

CLARA: Stop picking on Mitch. Why don’t you do it?

ALEX: I’ve already got a warning. The glass door?
I get another one and I’m out.

CLARA: And that would be tragedy.

Pete cuts in.

PETE: No one is going to own up to something they didn’t do. This isn’t school. It doesn’t work that way.

SARAH: I know it’s tricky. But - one of you has to have done it.

FIONA: It could be a fault. You know in the system.

DAVID: That’s possible. It’s quite an old system. There might have been a pulse or something.

MICHAEL: Very scientific.

PETE: Nice idea, but no. They installed a new system last week with all kinds of safe guards. I just never got round to telling everyone.

ALEX: Hold on. How do we know it wasn’t you? You’re dressed.

PETE: I was doing course work when I heard the alarm.

ALEX: Course work? At half three in the morning?

SARAH: It’s his way.

ALEX: And what about you?

SARAH: I was dreaming thank you very much. Who appointed you Inspector Morse?

ALEX: Just making sure.

PETE: (urgently) Three minutes. Come on people. Explanations.

Mitch sneezes.

ALEX: Will you shush. You’re driving me up the wall.

CLARA: Will you leave him alone?

ALEX: And what are you going to do Miss ‘oh I can’t get a decent shag since everyone realised I was a wierdo.’ We didn’t exactly get a satisfactory explanation from you.

CLARA: I told you. I was meditating.

ALEX: Why couldn’t I get into Dickens Hall with me mates. Why did I end up here with the cast of ‘Friends’ crossed with fucking ‘Woodstock’. Shit.

MICHAEL: Calm down. What is wrong with you tonight?

ALEX: I’m nervous. We’ve got an exam tomorrow.

CAROL: It’s true. In Running.

MICHAEL: Running?

ALEX: (shrugging) It’s the stride patterns.

MICHAEL: Stride patterns?

CAROL: I know. (she turns to Alex) What are you worried about? Tripping?

ALEX: Why did you tell them?

CAROL: You started it.

PETE: (sighing) Two minutes thirty.

Mitch sneezes.

ALEX: So what have you been doing?

CAROL: It’s none of your business.

ALEX: It is if it means we all get fined.

CAROL: It’s private!

ALEX: So private that we’re all standing here?

CAROL: It’s not my fault!

ALEX: THEN WHAT WERE YOU DOING?

CAROL: I WAS MASTURBATING!

ALEX: What?

Carol glances looks towards Clara.

ALEX: You’re? You’re a . . .hhhrr . . .

CAROL: Not that it’s any of your business.

CLARA: (to Alex) Where the hell have you been?

ALEX: YOU ALL KNOW?

There is dead silence. A pin drops. Everyone, especially Alex is faintly embarrassed. Everyone but Clara is smiling. Mitch sneezes.

MICHAEL: I didn’t.

Shelley hits him playfully.

MICHAEL: I never know.

CLARA: (to Carol) You fancy me?

Carol shrugs and throws her hands open.

CLARA: I mean it explains a lot. I have been off men lately . . .

David looks a bit hurt.

CLARA: . . . I suppose if . . .

She looks around and realises that there are about ten people listening. Plus the audience.

CLARA: (to Carol) . . . we’ll talk tomorrow.

ALEX: Look, Carol. I’m sorry. I . . .

FIONA: So you should be. And yes, before anyone asks I did knock at the wrong moment. When she was . . .

PETE: (resignedly) Two minutes to go. Bye-bye house deposit.

DAVID: Perhaps at this moment I should bring to everyone’s attention what Sherlock Holmes said.

MICHAEL: Oh no.

DAVID: I’m paraphrasing . . . erm . . . when all evidence has been rejected, anything which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I think that’s it.

MICHAEL: Oh god.

SARAH: And that means?

DAVID: I know who did it.

PETE: What?!?

DAVID: I’ve actually known since we got down here.

FIONA: Then why didn’t you tell us?

DAVID: I liked watching you all trying to work it out. I’m a student of human nature.

MICHAEL: I thought you were a student of Electrical Engineering.

PETE: Were straying from the point. One minute.

ALEX: Shouldn’t the hall have burnt down by now?

DAVID: Who’s missing?

PETE: No one.

DAVID: None of the students no.

PETE: So who else is there?

SARAH: (realising) Liam.

DAVID: (agreeing) Liam.

PETE: The Hall Master?

DAVID: Who else has access to fire alarms which can be set off accidentally. Who is probably too embarrassed to come out here?

ALEX: You mean he’d let us all lose our deposits so that he could save face.

DAVID: It’s not that simple. Is it (turning) FIONA?

All eyes and heads turn to Fiona.

FIONA: What?

DAVID: Tell them. We have thirty seconds.

FIONA: I can’t say anything.

SARAH: FIONA!

FIONA: It was me! It was me.

DAVID: Thank you.

Mitch sneezes.

SARAH: How was it you?

DAVID: I flicked the button when I sat on it.

CLARA: Sat on it?

DAVID: I noticed Fiona slipping into Liam’s room earlier.

Everyone is looking at Fiona now.

FIONA: Sorry.

ALEX: You. And Liam?!?

FIONA: He’s nice if you get to know him.

CLARA: FIONA!

ALEX: Is there anyone else?

Carol raises her hand slightly.

ALEX: I’m tired. I’m going back to bed.

Alex goes to walk off stage.

SHELLEY: Since no one else has mentioned it. Where are the fire engines?

Everyone looks around.

PETE: There aren’t any.

Everyone looks at Pete.

PETE: (swallowing) That’s why we were late down. I thought it was a fault and rang the station to cancel. They aren’t coming.

SHELLEY: So the last five minutes didn’t mean anything?

PETE: I had to go through the motions. It’s my job.

Michael shakes his head.

ALEX: Well fuck you all and good night.

Alex leaves the stage. A nervous silence infests the group.

SHELLEY: So is Liam going to be putting in an appearance?

FIONA: He wouldn’t come out. He cut himself on a vase he knocked off the desk in shock when the alarm went off. I’d better go in and check on him. Sorry. Sorry Carol.

Carol shrugs.

CAROL: I’m going back up too. I’ve still got to clean up after myself.

There are a few reactions to this, but everyone seems to accept it as an aspect of the evening, and Shelley and Fiona leave.

CLARA: Mitch. You’ve stopped sneezing.

Mitch smiles.

MITCH: I’m calmer.

CLARA: You sneeze when you’re nervous.

MITCH: I hate confrontations.

CLARA: Oh that’s so sweet.

Clara gestures off the stage and she leaves with Mitch. David shoots a worried glance after them.

SHELLEY: I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. She’s just being nice.

DAVID: Hmmm.

MICHAEL: I’m going up and collecting my pennies.

DAVID: Your pennies?

Shelley shakes her head in disbelief, as she David and Michael leave the stage. Pete yawns.

PETE: Thank god for that.

SARAH: What?

PETE: No one asked us what we were doing . . .

Sarah approaches him, spin him around and after kissing him full on the forehead, they embrace.

THE END

feeling listless: Czech singer Pavel Novak

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:36:24 +0000

Music Recently uploaded to Spotify is this compilation of cover versions from Czech singer Pavel Novak. A quick check about online finds little background on the singer, at least through an English search but given the position the country was in during the 60s, can we assume perhaps this was one of the only ways music fans accessed the music of Bob Dylan, The Monkees and Mr Tom Jones?

His back catalogue is expansive. I'd welcome input as to who he was and what this was about.

Green Futures: Social media prompts a clean energy shift

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:15:00 +0000

Summary

Summary text:

Our virtual lives have massive energy demands, but a two-year Greenpeace campaign has prompted Facebook to ‘like’ renewable sources.

Facebook is making the switch to more renewable energy sources. The change comes after Greenpeace's 'Unfriend Coal' campaign, a two-year push to get the social media giant to use less electricity from fossil fuels. The campaign broke the world record for the most comments posted on a single Facebook page in 24 hours, with over 80,000 on 13 April 2011 – largely in protest against the company's 28MW coal-powered data centre, opened that month in Primeville, Oregan.

feeling listless: "Must See Entertainment"

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:46:08 +0000

Film HMV's advertising slogan is "must-see entertainment" but just sometimes it doesn't quite fit the products it's trying to sell ...

Three Quarks Daily: Video roundup: Japan (plus one from China)

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:27:20 +0000

by Dave Maier

I am a big fan of Japanese cinema, and in the past year I've seen some really great stuff. These are neither the most famous nor the most obscure films out there, just some I saw and liked. I generally try to avoid spoilers, plus my memory of a couple of these films is a ltttle foggy, so I will be light on plot details here. Many of these films are available through the Criterion Collection, and there are trailers there, so check 'em out.

Let's start with the horror. Not "J-Horror", exactly, which term I associate more with films like Ringu (Ring) and Ju-on (The Grudge) and their descendants. First we have:

House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

I expected this one to be weird, and it certainly is, but not in the way I thought. According to Chuck Stephens,

What Toho Studios was hoping for when it hired Obayashi [who had been in advertising for several years at the time] was a homegrown Jaws: a locally produced summer movie roller coaster sufficiently thrill-chocked to at least partially deflect the ongoing onslaught of Tokyo-box-office-topping New Hollywood hits from Messrs. Spielberg and Lucas—something fast and loud, with tons of fun packed between screams.

What they got was "a modern masterpiece of le cinéma du WTF?! [...] a film that must be seen to be believed, and then seen again to believe that you really did see what you think you saw." It's too dizzying to be as fun as it relentlessly presents itself as being, but for some of you (you know who you are), a must-see, if only for the scene where Melody, the musician among the seven appropriately named teen houseguests, is devoured by a grand piano.

Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

Jigoku means "Hell", and here the term is meant literally (unlike in films like L'Enfer or, I don't know, Tarnation). In fact a good deal of the action takes place there. I saw this at about the same time as House, and the goofiness of that makes a striking contrast with the darkness of this. It's unrelentingly condemning – unlike in House, all of its characters richly deserve their horrible fates – but also unrelentingly watchable. Here's Chuck Stephens again:

Fusing the goriest details of thirteenth-century jigoku-zoshi (hell scroll paintings) with Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s nineteenth-century ukiyo-e illustrations of innocence disemboweled—and climaxing in a centrifugal final blast of berserk, quasi-Butoh theatrics that seems to anticipate the lysergic gyrations of the 1960s’ Living Theatre as much as the flesh-hungry flailings of Night of the Living Dead—Jigoku’s dazzlingly art-directed and emotionally devastating evocation of unstaunchable dread continues to leave even the most stoic of modern moviegoers in a state of stunned dismay.

It's not actually as headache-inducing as that sounds, and is even quite beautiful in spots. Still, it is hell all right, so be warned.

Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)

"Kuroneko" means "black cat," and in Japan that means pretty much what it does here: bad news. Luckily (after those other two) this film is gorgeously lyrical, shot, as was the director's equally chilling Onibaba (1964), by cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda in sumptuous black-and-white. Here too the victims – arrogant, murderous samurai – deserve what they get, as the film's graphic opening makes clear. But will our hero suffer the same fate?

Next, the yakuza film.

Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963)

Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

The Wolves (Hideo Gosha, 1971)

The first two of these are very new wave, as their dates suggest, but are very different otherwise. Youth of the Beast explodes off the screen in manic bursts of color-saturated violence. Commentator Howard Hampton:

Two qualities stand out: the sense of a director hitting his stride, full of devil-may-care assurance and try-anything imagination, coupled with an uneasy, palpable boredom with the stale trappings (in the most literal sense of the term) of the cops’n’yakuza form. [...] [one shot] suggests Ozu if an action imp spiked his green tea with acid.

Pale Flower is as cool and brooding as Youth is hot and bothered. Here we have more sleek black-and-white cinematography, in support of an enigmatic tale of a gangster newly released from prison and unsure what to make of this unfamiliar state. He spends a lot of time gambling with the pale flower of the film's title, a stylish but unreadable new wave chicklet, and is inevitably drawn into – well, I won't spoil it for you. As our man Stephens says of an earlier Shinoda film: "roll over, Ozu, tell Mizoguchi the news."

The Gosha film is more of a traditional gangster epic, with an overstuffed plot which is sometimes hard to follow. The ubiquitious Tatsuya Nakadai stars as yet another yakuza fresh out of prison, whose divided loyalties and middle-aged world-weariness are naturally reminiscent of our first two mobsters, but the tone is of another type still. Here we have much more of the gang-as-not-even-that-abnormally-dysfunctional-family thing. Good stuff though, definitely in line with Youth, and Nakadai sells it well.

Only two samurai films this time – I ran through most of the readily available ones a few years ago.

13 Assassins (Eiichi Kudo, 1963)

13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2010)

This is a gripping tale of honor, bravery, and taking one for the team: a suicide mission to assassinate the entirely unworthy heir to the shogunate while on his way home for (or from, I can't remember) the summer. The remake is surprisingly faithful, especially in the first half (shot for shot in stretches), and Koji Yakusho is the perfect choice for Shinzaemon, the leader of the assassin gang. He even looks like the original actor, and he has attained gravitas while retaining most of his leading-man looks – he was in everything under the sun a while back, from Cure (my fave J-horror film, truly creepy) to Shall We Dance?. Unfortunately the last third of the film, when the trap is sprung, works less well. It's not that it's too graphic and bloody – although it is that, not surprisingly given the director's other output, e.g. Ichi the Killer – but instead that it's a confusing blur where the original was seemingly more carefully choreographed (if also somewhat hard to follow).

Similarly, the remake's climactic showdown disappoints, as the conflict seems merely tactical rather than the settling of moral and philosophical accounts we witness in the earlier film. So, start with that one, but if you like Koji as much as I do you will want to check out the remake too.

Bullet Ballet (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)

A Snake of June (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002)

Shinya Tsukamoto is one weird dude, and both of these films are intensely over-the-top in a characteristically Japanese way. I expected Bullet Ballet to be a John Woo-style shoot-em-up, but it's not that at all. As I understand it, handguns are very hard to come by in Japan – unless you're a mobster, I suppose, which our hero is not. Tsukamoto, who plays the gun-obsessed lead, is as unnerving an actor as he is a visual stylist, and while quite disturbing and intense, I don't remember it as being that violent (although, yes, some people do get shot). A Snake of June, whose title remains obscure to me, is a seriously kinky tale of exhibitionism, voyeurism, and high-tech stalking. Here Tsukamoto plays the stalker, who manipulates his not-exactly-unwilling victim into higher and higher heights of what I guess we should call depravity. I make this sound all too common and tawdry, but as with the preceding film, the execution is riveting, with a unique visual style.

Assembly (Feng Xiaogang, 2007)

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Kazuo Hara, 1987)

Here's an oddly appropriate pairing which justifies a departure from the home islands. Assembly is a Chinese (HK) film in the stirring Spielberg mode, a biopic of Captain Gu Zidi, the sole survivor of a particularly bloody battle in the Chinese Civil War in 1948. The story moves back and forth from the battle and the heroic deeds of Gu and his men to the equally demanding struggle Gu faces in trying to win official recognition for their sacrifice after the war is over. A Chinese reviewer at imdb tells us, "By the end of the story, when 47 heroes finally received the medals and salute that belong to them, tears break out from the eyes of every audience. That is the real glory of a Chinese soldier, the real spirit of Chinese people!" Even if this doesn't sound like your cup of orange pekoe, you may still want to check it out for the unforgettable performance of the terrific lead actor.

In stark contrast, the documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On evokes not Spielberg but Michael Moore (a blurb from whom adorns the DVD cover). Like Gu, Kenzo Okuzaki is an emotionally scarred veteran of a brutal war, obsessed with the past and determined to win justice for his fallen comrades. But the chilling details make all the difference, and the implacable Okuzaki makes no effort to win us over, instead continuously impressing on his helpless adversaries his refusal to shut up and go away. Remarkable and bizarre, but ultimately moving despite itself.

Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

Bizarrely, among the six films listed under imdb's "People who liked this also liked ..." feature for Love Exposure are The Graduate, Love Actually, and I'm a Cyborg But That's OK. More to the point, I would have to say, is a user-created list of 137 films called Depraved Movies You Shouldn't Be Watching. I can't really claim that you will either love or hate this film; it's more like you will either hate it or find it amusing enough to watch all four hours (which I did). imdb users rated it at 8.0, which is very good, but among the comment threads on the first page are two headed "This film is RUBBISH" and "worst movie ever".

I feel your pain, haters, really I do. At first it seems as if the director thinks that simply going over the top – which this film does, in spades – suffices for the right to our attention (as opposed to, say, nuance or technique). But I was won over by its unflagging energy and desire to be liked – and, yes, the brazen use of the near entirety of Ravel's Bolero in a long sequence dedicated to the celebration of innovative and acrobatic techniques for (supposedly) surreptitious up-the-skirt photography. I really can't say anything more about this film.

Twenty-Four Eyes (Kinosuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Finally something wholesome! Although relatively unknown here, this film is a revered classic in Japan. The eyes in question belong to the twelve students of the beloved Miss Pebble, a schoolteacher in jaw-droppingly scenic Shodoshima, an island in the Inland Sea. Unbearably moving in spots, leavened with just the right amount of wry humor, the film was "consciously" modeled after Renoir's The River, which Kinoshita "was convinced […] was the pinnacle of moviemaking: 'A good director has to regard everything in a coldly detached way, but I still can't shake my tendency to lapse into sentimentality [that is, occasionally, as in the case sparking this observation, the shot of the wave in the boat scene, which he regretted later for this reason]. Yet if I tried to counter that by designing a tighter script, my films would lose some of their emotional flavor, and the audience might no longer be able to feel the spontaneous flashes of inspiration. That's the kind of film I love, where those flashes are still visible but where all artifice has been strictly eliminated. I want to make exactly that sort of film, but it's harder than it looks!'" [interview from the Criterion DVD booklet]

The Book of the Dead (Kihachiro Kawamoto, 2005)

Heaven's Lost Property (TV series)

B Gata H Kei (TV series)

The Japanese are of course also well known for their love of animation. I haven't seen the latest Studio Ghibli release, so these will have to do. The first is of the stop-motion variety, and it is amazing how the animator conveys so many different expressions with dolls whose seemingly single expression is after all simply painted on. (There's a lesson there somewhere.) The story is a bit obscure, but the film is absolutely stunning.

The other two are, ahem, somewhat different. They are ecchi anime, most assuredly not to be confused with hentai (a place we will not be going today, or ever – even this Wikipedia link on the subject is decidedly NSFW). According to this informative and much more SFW entry, ecchi is Japanese for the English letter H, which stands for the same Japanese word ("pervert") that now, i.e. somewhat later than at first, denotes that place where I just indicated we will not be going. In fact, although indeed dirty-minded, ecchi anime is surprisingly tame, not even as smutty as prime-time sitcoms on American TV (as I remember them).

It sounds totally stupid when you describe it: plots often revolve around the visibility of panties and/or the humongousness of cartoon boobs. And I bet most of it is indeed stupid, making me rather lucky that the only two series I've seen (most of) are so charming. Heaven's Lost Property has a fantasy element, as the main humongously-boobed character is an alien robot or something, designed, for reasons yet unknown, to cater to its master's desires. As its master is a horny teen, these desires often involve panties, and that sure does sound stupid; yet after one wild adventure in this vein, the episode ends with a gorgeous, lovingly detailed sequence showing a flock of magically obtained panties flying around the world, in formation, like migrating geese.

B Gata H Kei skips the alien robots and centers directly on the horny teens. Here, possibly unusually, not that I would know, it is the horny girl teen who is the primum mobile for the action. Yamada, who according to anime convention is prototypically Japanese in everything but her looks – she mostly resembles the freckly Irish/Italian redhead I had a crush on in 9th grade – is determined, she tells us early on, to amass as soon as possible a troop of no less than 100 f*ckbuddies (or, as the subtitles occasionally call them, "sex friends"). To that end, she decides to warm up, as it were, with the low-hanging fruit (the virginal Kosuda, our male hero). However, as you can imagine, she messes up the seduction each time, sending the poor Kosuda wildly mixed messages about her intent, and even more inconveniently, develops feelings for him as well. It's all very sweet, and Sue – I mean, Yamada! – is adorably single-minded and seriously cute. And, except for the conventionally huge anime eyes, appropriately drawn: the B in the title refers at least obliquely, and possibly literally, to her cup size – a fact of no small concern to her, as she often reminds us. Warning: the impossibly catchy theme song, like that of Heaven's Lost Property, will get stuck in your head.

That should keep you all busy for a while. See you at the movies!

Three Quarks Daily: Rethinking Lawns

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:26:23 +0000

by Kevin S. Baldwin

Spring has arrived, Summer is just around the corner and once again I must deal with the enigma that is my yard. As I look around town, there is a wide range of lawns spanning from, what Michael Pollan (2001) would call, Apollonian control to Dionysian abandon. Mine is towards the Dionysian end of the spectrum.

This is by choice. I have never understood lawns. What exactly is the point? A uniform swath of green grass seems so contrived and unnatural. As practiced in much of 21st century North America, that monoculture is a triumph of technology. It takes a lot of inputs to maintain such a beast: Regular mowing, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizer, and in some areas, water. Perhaps that is the point.

I remember growing up in upstate New York, helping to fertilize the yard, mowing its weekly growth, and then putting the clippings in bags to be taken to the dump. It just seemed wasteful at the time (not to mention that as a fifth or sixth grader, it really cut into my playtime). Now I would probably mulch the grass in place and skip the fertilizer. Later, as a teen in southern California, I had to religiously apply water, herbicide and fungicide to maintain our lawn. Again, it seemed colossally wasteful. I tried to convince my parents to switch to more drought friendly vegetation, but they weren't that enthusiastic about it. As it turns out, I now happen to live in one of the few areas in the country where it is possible to grow lawns without irrigation or fertilization. I mow it when it gets shaggy, and that's about it. I'd rather spend time gardening than trying to achieve a "perfect" lawn.

A few square feet of my lawn resemble the chemlawn ideal (an example of modern Platonic essentialism?), but it is mostly a patchwork of grass, clover, creeping charley, dandelions, and many other species that I have not identified. In the heat of summer, with little rain, the grass will retreat as it is displaced by crabgrass, which is a hot-dry specialist. If the rains return, the grass fights its way back. I enjoy witnessing this tug-of-war. My lawn is diverse and dynamic.

My chemlawn neighbors have these amazingly uniform lawns that look like they would feel nice on bare feet. But, when I walk by after the service has sprayed the lawn, there is that sweet-sour smell that is highlighted by little signs that say to stay off the grass for a few days. The mixed message is curious. I suppose chemicals create new business opportunities: Pet owners can buy booties for their dogs to protect their sensitive paws from lawn chemicals. But there is little encouragement to consider whether the risks of herbicide and pesticide application outweigh the benefits.

I gave up on trying to control dandelions after spending quite a bit of time and effort manually weeding them, tossing them on the compost pile, and then watching over the next few days as the yellow flowers still transformed into fluffy seed bearing heads that dispersed their contents with the slightest puff of wind. Such chutzpah in the face of death was admirable and filled me with wonder. Those so-called weeds are really good at what they do! Who am I to interfere with such an amazingly resourceful species? Eliminating them chemically doesn't seem to be worth the risks to me or my family.

The absurdity of lawns is taken to the limit in drier parts of the west. I hope this is no longer the case, but 25 years ago, lawns in Phoenix were slightly concave and filled with water in the morning and allowed to soak in and evaporate during the day. Las Vegas was also a particularly egregious offender. I don't know if more recent development in these areas has been more sensible, but the reckless use of water is part of the reason why the Colorado River no longer empties into the Gulf of California.

Something like 20% of California's electricity production is used for moving water around the state. Much of this water is used for agriculture, but a substantial fraction is used to maintain lawns in arid and semi-arid regions that really have no business trying to host Kentucky bluegrass. Local conditions are starting to be taken into account with some new developments specifying xeriscaping, but there is a lot of legacy landscaping that demands huge inputs of water.

This is more than simply an academic exercise. Multiply a quarter-acre lot by tens of millions and you are talking about some serious acreage. Lawns collectively comprise the largest irrigated crop in the U.S., covering about 163,800 square kilometers, plus or minus 35,850 square kilometers; Milesi et al. 2005), an area larger than Ohio. Another estimate puts lawn area at more than twice that of cotton (Steinberg 2006).

Given this acreage, it is not surprising that about one fourth to one third of all herbicides are used on lawns (the exact percentage depends on the herbicide). Fertilizer application also tends to heavier than needed, creating nitrate runoff that contaminates drinking water aquifers. Compared to agricultural applications, lawns tend to suffer over-application. Lawns represent a huge contribution to non-point source pollution. Point sources are relatively easy to identify, regulate, and clean up. Non-point sources are by their very nature difficult to do anything about. Simply electing not to use certain products could have a huge impact.

We need to reimagine the entire lawn aesthetic. Variation, diversity, and dynamism need to become acceptable possibilities for lawns (Robbins 2007, Appendix A). More locally appropriate vegetation, greater biodiversity, fewer applications of harmful chemicals and fertilizers make this a win-win opportunity.

References

Lindsey, R. 2005. Looking for Lawns. NASA Earth Observatory: Features. 8 November. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Lawn/lawn.php

Milesi, C., S.W. Running, C.D. Elvidge, J.B. Dietz, B.T. Tuttle, R.R. Nemani. 2005. Mapping and modeling the biogeochemical cycling of turf grasses in the United States. Environmental Management 36(3), 426-438.

Pollan, M. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World. Random House, Inc. New York.

Robbins, P. 2007. Lawn People. How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Temple University Press.

Steinberg, T. 2006. American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. New York.

Three Quarks Daily: Perceptions

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:22:33 +0000

Nanna Bisp Buchert. Untitled from the series "Withered Leaves". 2005.

More here and here.

Three Quarks Daily: Pitying the Nation

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:21:42 +0000

by Hasan Altaf

One of the few reliable characteristics of the institutions of the government of Pakistan is that they will only rarely stick to their mandates, that they will only occasionally consider themselves bound to fulfill their theoretical functions - the idea of the "public servant," for example, seems to have passed ours by entirely. Given that the results of this tendency are so frequently destructive, or at best neutral, we should look kindly on Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa's recent bout of poetic inspiration at the conviction of Prime Minister Gilani for contempt of court. It's easy to say, as the prime minister's lawyer did, that judges should refrain from adding poetry to their judgments ("especially" their own; maybe Iqbal would have been acceptable?) and just make their decisions and let that be that, but in a country where that is so rarely that, a little bit of riffing off Khalil Gibran is hardly the end of the world.

"Pity the Nation," Justice Khosa's addendum to the court's decision, has struck quite a chord. It has earned slaps on the wrist not only from the Prime Minister's counsel, but also from a former ambassador (who would like to shift the conversation entirely - "cit[ing] poetry instead of law while sentencing an elected leader on questionable charges reflects Pakistan's deep state of denial about its true national priorities" - as if the accountability of leaders were not a hallmark of a functioning democracy; as if in focusing on extremism and terrorism we should ignore all the other injustices of the country; as most of what happens in the government of Pakistan is not "questionable") and an Express Tribune columnist who saw Khosa's Gibran and raised him a Byron. It has also become a Twitter catchphrase that within a few days has been used across the political spectrum (PML, PPP, PTI, P-ick your own), for matters personal ("…where children of judges get admission in aitchison college even after failing the entry test") and national (loadshedding), for criticism of literature ("…where bad poetry is appreciated") and tradition ("…where political parties are transferred over a will like family property"), and even the requisite clever meta-tweets invoking pity for the nation that pities itself on Twitter.

Justice Khosa's cri de coeur led me to feel pity mostly for Justice Khosa - and, by extension, the rest of our "public servants." Being a Pakistani has become hard enough; seeing what has become of the country (what has been done to it, what has been done to us, what we have done to ourselves and to our country and to each other and to others) is hard enough; caring about Pakistan has become, in a time when every day brings bad news, hard enough. Imagine being one of those who truly does make it what it is, who truly has the power to shape and control some portion of the country's destiny; it must be impossible to sleep at night. Considering the bizarre situation in which the Court has been placed and has placed itself (the chain of causes and effects here, the schematic of who is scratching whose back and how and why and when, is so ridiculous that to talk about is pointless), the justice's poem seems to me an entirely understandable response, the breaking of the camel's back by a particularly absurd straw. And sometimes, as any self-respecting angst-ridden teenager will tell you, there really is nothing to do but write a poem and put it online.

One may question his style, but it's hard to argue with most of Khosa's ideas: "Pity the nation that elects a redeemer/but expects him to bend every law"; "Pity the nation that punishes its weak and poor/but is shy of bringing its high and mighty to book"; "Pity the nation whose servants treat their solemn oaths/as nothing more than a formality." All this could be said, of course, of many countries, but somehow the theater of Pakistan - the NROs and NGOs, the party-hopping and the dynasty-building, the fiddlers competing furiously while around them Rome burns - is particularly absurd. It's hard, when thinking of Pakistan, to not feel an automatic, stomach-tightening pity.

The thing about pity, though, is that while basically harmless it is also essentially useless; pity leads nowhere; pity is the last stop, the final resort. Pity is what you feel for those for whom there is no hope. Pity is what you feel when all you can do is watch those you love destroy themselves, applaud the swagger with which they walk the plank. What pity leads to is washing your hands, watching the show, and trying to make the end as easy and comfortable as possible. And in that sense I think one has to disagree with Justice Khosa, as some of the responses to his poem show. Pakistan may be in a pitiable state, but it is not quite time for us to pity the nation. This is the time to be angry at the nation, to rail at the nation, to criticize and comment and expose, to tear down and rebuild. With apologies to those who feel poetry has no place here, what I keep hearing in my head these days is a line from "They Feed They Lion," by Philip Levine: "'From 'Bow Down,'" he writes, "come 'Rise Up'":

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

(If anyone is looking for a response to Khosa's poem, may I recommend Levine's?)

But there is a place here for pity. Pakistan does not need pity yet, but its leaders - elected and self-appointed, dictators and "democrats," kings and princelings, in the halls of power and just waiting their turn - they do. They might not necessarily deserve it, but they are least the logical recipients of our pity. For them, however many the stripes on their uniforms and whatever the particular alphabet soup of their party, there does not seem to be any hope. It is only if we continue to expect to be saved by them, if we continue to hope for a redeemer to emerge from this lineup - which is to say if we continue to hope for someone to lead us into safe waters rather than taking control of the tiller on our own - that we ourselves will need pity.

Three Quarks Daily: Socks and Holes

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:12:50 +0000

by Maniza Naqvi

In the country of Southern Diebeidiya a multi-fold problem had arisen. The people had been found out to be cheating, lying, ungrateful wretches. Not playing by the rules. Scheming and conniving to thwart our best intentions, breaking our trust at every turn. We had tried to make them pull themselves up by their socks, but what else was to be expected in a place where socks are not worn? So we procured appropriate technology, brought in technicians and experts and even sociologists to tell us the most historically, culturally, respectful way to introduce and produce socks. They told us to add in to our good intentions, beneficial lessons on self development that could be taught while the people produced the socks. So we procured and placed radios and public address systems to broadcast useful lessons and where this wasn’t possible we trained trainers to train people who could read out lessons to the workers while they made socks. This raised many more questions and so we procured more experts. We taught the people how to weave the socks and of course we provided the handlooms and the yarns. All we asked in return was that they made the socks and then brought them to us so that we could in return provide them with daily wages. Was this too much to ask? The people at first complained that weaving socks took them away from their tasks of earning a living, cooking, cleaning, milling, harvesting and herding. Took them away from weaving all the other things, they wove. But we knew that these people were poor and it was so because they did not know how not to be poor. And we would teach them. They needed to learn how to pull themselves up by their socks so we persevered in teaching them. We were exhilarated and thought they had learned when suddenly piles of socks began to arrive at the encampment where the experts lived alongside us. We gladly took in all the socks at first in exchange for the cash we had promised. Everything was going well, so well that we organized a film crew to arrive and make what would be a wonderfully moving documentary of our good works showing many examples of people pulling themselves up by their socks. It was going to be about people counting on us to make their dreams come true. It was to be full of hope and promises.

But the rulers of Southern Diebeidiya were not fond of films or documentaries. They barred the film crew from entering Southern Diebeidiya. We found this regrettable but understandable, as the rulers are our friends and allow us to encamp here and partake of resources that they find useless for themselves. Then there was the perennial problem with the cash that we were dispensing. The rulers insisted that they themselves would hand it out instead of us. But when we asked for receipts and record keeping, the rulers seemed insulted by this insinuation cast on their ancient civilization and legendary sense of pride, honor and honesty. We apologized. When it seemed that our encampment might be in question we apologized profusely. We agreed to make up for our insolence by paying a higher rent on our growing and thriving encampment, what with all the experts we now entertained. But then when the piles of socks too began to grow and grow we thought something didn’t seem right, how could the people make so many handmade socks in such a short time? We decided to conduct a few studies on this very question. Valuable studies, the consultants were the best we were told and so of course they cost us. And so we investigated. Sure enough, we uncovered that the people had banded together and procured several Chinese knitting machines with which they met our stipulation for socks. This as you can imagine, we considered, per our procedures, as deceit: a breach of public trust and more egregiously, our tax payer money. In despair, and in need of continuing to help and aid, we turned our attention to another group of people of whom we asked only that these people dig up ditches and make holes and then fill them back up. For this we followed the same formula, wages per individual for individual work completed. Here too the people proved to be deceitful. We learned that the quota of holes to be dug up per village that we had authorized was again being exceeded beyond our forecasts and expectations. We investigated. And we learned that the people had ganged up and organized themselves to hire an owner of an earth moving machine to dig up the holes—while they went off to do their usual work in the market or in their fields. Fortunately, we found a loophole by which we stopped the payments: the holes had been dug but not filled. We were torn, some of us were regretful but emphasized that a principle was a principle, a lesson must be learned, such deceit, defeated our purpose. Others felt, and reminded us that we must hold the line for the greater purpose and therefore hold our noses if we must, concessions had to be made. Socks and holes, they felt were our best defense, it kept the poor fed and occupied, kept them from harming us. But everyone agreed, these were, indeed, deceitful people in need of constant monitoring.

Other Writings by Maniza Naqvi:

“Baby Where’s My Cash”

The Middle Way, the Difficult Way—Sharper than a Sword and Narrower than a Hair

A Matter of Detail: The Masonry of Graffiti and Symbols

Red Moon Rising

Mother

Impossible Shade of Home Brew

The Kreutzer Sonata in Addis Ababa

Permit Me to Protest

Battle Songs: These Children Can’t Be Bought

Notes On Zuccotti Park

Hitched In History to Crimes Against Humanity

Cracking

The Great Land Grab: Beyla

The Kiss

Amber

Rahima's War

Imagining Lyari Through Akhtar Soomro

The Boxer

Abatabad

Divining Water

Rimbaud and Insider Information on Disasters Foretold

Expressing Fidelity Through Sorrow's Hope

Jijiga Nights

Fanaa

Moharram and Me

Genetics of Blueberries

At the End of a Match

Who in Hell is Imam Feisal

Tomyris

Static Kill

The Trappers and the Trapped

Hosed

A Hit at the Bambino

Interview with Tariq Ali

Shame on Us

Losing the Plot: Habits of the Heart (Complete Novel)

The Art of Resistance: Under Siege

A Brief Acquaintance

The DMV

That Sara Aziz (A Play)

The Leftist And The Leader (A Play

renaissance chambara (Ged Carroll): Getting out from under the monopoly of Google Reader with the help of Newsblur

Mon, 14 May 2012 06:01:50 +0000

Over the past few years the number of web-based RSS readers has dwindled as Google used it’s search property to build out into other areas (including RSS readers) rather like the way Microsoft used its Windows and Office franchises to build out its monopoly. Admittedly, Google doesn’t have the reputation for sharp elbows that Microsoft [...]

Daily interesting photos - Flickr: Interesting photos - 12 May 2012 - Flickr

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:49:19 +0000

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Genoeconomics

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:31:58 +0000

Here is one paragraph of an interesting-but-treads-quite-lightly story about what is possibly a new field of economics:

To talk to the genoeconomists about their vision for the field is to listen to people acutely reluctant to overpromise, or to come off as naive. Much of their forthcoming paper in the Annual Review of Economics, in fact, describes how the vast majority of studies that appeared to link individual genes to specific outcomes—the amount of education people receive, whether or not they are self-employed, how they invest their money—have turned out to be impossible to replicate. Their hope lies in a new approach to data-gathering that is only just getting underway, wherein researchers look for patterns among thousands, and even millions of people—numbers that are only just becoming possible thanks to massive collaborations linking gene studies being conducted all over the world.

Jeff, the source, offers some discussion here.

Addendum: I now see in the blogging software panel that Alex has a post on the way, covering this same article, it should be up later today and maybe his take is different than mine.

John Redwood MP: City bonuses collapse

Mon, 14 May 2012 05:04:53 +0000

The Centre for Economics and Business Research forecasts that this year City bonuses will be down to £2.3 billion. This contrasts with their peak of £11.5 billion in 2007-8, and with £7.3 billion in the last Labour year.

The Coalition can show that on their watch the problem of City bonuses has been well and truly tamed. The UK is in this way now a more equal society. As CEBR point out, it also means a big reduction in tax revenue, (more than £4 billion) so we can now afford less public service.

So I would like to know, are people today much happier because City bonuses are likely to be down by 80% on peak levels? What benefits should we now expect from this development? How should we replace the lost tax revenue? Should the government now claim victory and move on, or should we expect them to remove more of these bonuses?

I do think the government should offer a lead on linking pay for top executives clearly to performance. Rewards should go for returning a bank in receipt of state shareholdings and subsidy in whole or parts to the private sector, getting taxpayers money back and generating susbstial cash profits to reward shareholders. Shareholders have been without dividends now for a long time, and should have priority.

Copenhagen Cycle Chic: Choo Choo Cycling

Mon, 14 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

In the late 1980's the Danish railways were at last forced to accept cycles in the trains. It...

For the full photographic glory and the rest of the text, you know where to go. The Original Cycle Chic awaits.

xkcd: Kickstarter

Mon, 14 May 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Geekcycle (Liverpool): Comment on Easy statistics for AdWords A/B testing, and hamsters by A/B测试终极指南 | Taylor Zhao

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:17:30 +0000

[...] Easy Statistics for AdWords A/B Testing, and Hamsters [...]

P2P Foundation: Book of the Day: Misunderstanding the Internet

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:00:00 +0000

Misunderstanding the Internet. James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman. Routledge. 2012

Overview

The growth of the internet has been spectacular. There are now more 1.5 billion internet users across the globe, about one quarter of the world’s population. This is certainly a new phenomenon that is of enormous significance for the economic, political and social life of contemporary societies.

However, much popular and academic writing about the internet takes a technologically deterministic view, assuming that the internet’s potential will be realised in essentially transformative ways. This was especially true in the euphoric moment of the mid-1990s, when many commentators wrote about the internet with awe and wonderment. While this moment may be over, its underlying technocentrism – the belief that technology determines outcomes – lingers on, and with it, a failure to understand the internet in its social, economic and political context.

Misunderstanding the Internet is a short introduction, encompassing the history, sociology, politics and economics of the internet and its impact on society. The book has a simple three part structure:

Part 1 looks at the history of the internet, and offers an overview of the internet’s place in society
Part 2 focuses on the control and economics of the internet
Part 3 examines the internet’s political and cultural influence

Misunderstanding the Internet is a polemical, sociologically and historically informed textbook that aims to challenge both popular myths and existing academic orthodoxies around the internet.

IdeaTransplant: iPad "books"

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:30:00 +0000

Whenever there is an innovation in visual communication, people initially struggle how to use it best. Hand-written text scrolls did not have page numbers, spaces between words, or sentences. The first ads were either paintings or primitive, poorly designed pamphlets. Color and photography took some time to be used properly. It took 10 years or so after the arrival of PowerPoint before Garr Reynolds had his insight and write Presentation Zen, and he is still busy convincing the world to kill the bullet points as I am writing this.

So here we have this iPad and the iBooks writing platform that enables anyone to create apps that incorporate touch and can be read away from the office chair. I have started to write an app on this platform myself and am constantly changing my approach. I started with the concept of a book in my mind (pages of text with images), but then discovered all this other things you can do: Prezi-like zooming diagrams, embedded slideshows, videos, Keynote presentations, questions. This is not a book writing tool, it is a software development tool. All these visual tools were available before on the web: zooming images, videos, data visualization. But somehow they never made it as the basis for the development of visual stories. I think the fact that an iPad can be used away from the office chair/screen will change that.

Nancy Duarte recently ported her book Resonate over to the iBook platform and the result is beautiful. And it gives some good examples of how new visual techniques are more than just making content prettier or more spectacular. Many of the effects in the Wired magazine iPad edition are just like poorly used animations in PowerPoint or Keynote: interesting, but they do not add to the story. When Nancy analyzes a speech by Ronald Reagan, it is just very useful to be able to watch the actual thing alongside.

This app development platform has great potential beyond books. I can see uses in combined investor presentations and business plans, on-premise sales applications, product demos. But still I feel that I have the text scroll perspective, and the real innovative application will be discovered sometime in the near future.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): tur-nr: That’s how its done!! always reblog

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:18:04 +0000

tur-nr:

That’s how its done!!

always reblog

Infotropism (Skud): My mostly-mobile Internet workflow

Mon, 14 May 2012 01:30:45 +0000

One of the biggest changes to my Internet use over the last year is that I no longer spend all day in the office sitting in front of a computer. It used to be that if something interesting caught my attention, I’d open it in a browser tab and in the next slow patch — perhaps over lunch, or during that long dark teatime of the soul that happens around 4:30pm when you’re watching the clock, or the far more pleasant beer-time of the soul that happens when you stay at the office after everyone’s gone and actually get some productive stuff done — somewhere in one of those times, if I felt the urge, I could easily whack out a blog post if I felt the urge.

These days, I mostly check Twitter on my phone, and just reading links that get posted there turns out to be a bit fraught, let alone actually doing anything with them. All too often, when I click on a Twitter link, I wind up on a page that’s been “helpfully” (please visualise my sarcastic airquotes) “optimised” for mobile users, which means I have to click through a suggestion that I install their special app (no thanks!) before winding up on a dumbed-down version of the site’s front page. Any link to the actual article I wanted to read in the first place is, of course, absent.

Assuming I can get to the article, what I can do with it is more limited, too. My Twitter client of choice includes a cut-down browser which is great for quickly checking out ephemeral links, but opening in “real” Safari requires a couple of clicks. (You can do it by default, but that is overkill for most links, so I choose not to.) Once in Safari… well, a mobile browser is no place to get real work done. Nevertheless, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to bash my newly-mobile-centric Internet workflow into shape, and since I’m rather proud of it, I thought I’d post it here.

The key parts are:

Pinboard — a bookmarking service which I started using as replacement for Delicious, and which has the feel that Delicious did back in the good old days, before anyone invented the term “folksonomy”.
Instapaper — one of several “read later” apps (the main other contenders are Pocket and Readability); one of the features that endears it is that it integrates well with Pinboard and with other apps I use.
WordPress — this blog runs on it, and I’ve got a bunch of handy plugins installed (and wow, sometime when I wasn’t looking, WordPress plugins got really useful).
ifttt — “If this, then that”, a glue application that connects various online services based on triggers.

Bookmarklets everywhere

So, I’ve now set myself up with these three bookmarklets everywhere, including on my mobile devices:

Pinboard bookmark
Read later (Instapaper)
Press This (i.e. Create a blog post here)

Installing bookmarklets on mobile browsers is a bit fiddly. Instapaper has a setup wizard that takes you through the steps, but most other bookmarklets don’t. Luckily, as you may have seen in a recent link post, there’s this bookmarklet viewer which makes it easy to grab the Javascript for any bookmarklet and add it as a bookmark on your iPhone or iPad (and probably on other mobile devices, though I’m not quite sure how their bookmarking works).

Read later with Instapaper

I use Instapaper for things I want to read later (obviously). I can add webpages to Instapaper via the bookmarklet, via the Instapaper link that’s native to my Twitter client, via the integration with Longreads (whose app I’ve recently installed), or, through the magic of ifttt, by bookmarking something on Pinboard and tagging it “instapaper”. (You’d think that Pinboard’s “read later” checkbox would do this, but it doesn’t; the Pinboard/Instapaper integration, from Pinboard’s point of view, consists only of automatically adding items from an Instapaper folder to your bookmarks. Anyone got any other insight on this?)

Instapaper, of course, has apps for my phone and tablet, as well as the website when I’m at my computer. I always have something interesting to read. The question is what I do with it after that.

Recommending interesting links

From my experiences over at GF I’ve found that most links I want to do something with come down to either “this is interesting, and I want to point it out to people” or “this is fascinating and/or enraging and I want to respond in detail”. So, I have workflows for both of those.

For the first category, I bookmark them on Pinboard and tag them “rec” (short for “recommended”). Through ifttt, these get posted immediately on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. But on WordPress, I’m using the Postalicious plugin, which supports Pinboard and lets you collate a number of links into one post. I post this under the user “autoposter” and in the category “Autoposted”, which makes it easy for people who don’t want to see them to skip them through clever RSS feed selection or whatever other filtering means appeal to them. (I use this myself later, as you’ll see.)

Writing about the really good stuff

For something that’s fascinating or enraging enough that it deserves its own blog post, I’ve got a “Press This” bookmarklet in all my browsers, including the mobile ones. While it doesn’t actually do much — just opens WordPress’s posting interface with a little bit of pre-filled text — the fact that it saves me several clicks and some copy-pasting (especially tedious on mobile) is enough, I hope, to get me at least starting a rough draft or placeholder for things I mean to write about.

Normally I’d write on my laptop, not on my mobile devices, because of the keyboard crappiness. I learnt to touch type for a reason, dammit! But I’ve got the iOS WordPress app installed (it’s really slick, by the way) and once I’ve saved a placeholder draft via Press This, I can open it in the app and write, if I am so inclined. (Whether I will or not remains to be seen, but I can see it being workable for short posts at least.)

The WordPress app is also great for comment moderation and other admin tasks, and since I really want to encourage commenting/discussion here going forward, this is going to be pretty handy for staying on top of things.

Pushing blog posts out

I’ve recently realised that I really ought to make a bit more of an effort with Facebook since most people outside the tech industry don’t use Twitter, but I don’t like it, and I certainly don’t want it to be a central point in my online life or the primary host for my updates/writing. So, my plan is to push out updates to Facebook when I post here on my blog, and I’ll also post links on Twitter and Tumblr at the same time. I do all this via ifttt. (I previously used Twitterfeed, but it’s far more limited, so I’ve shut that down and standardised on ifttt for now.)

ifttt supports triggers from WordPress (either wordpress.com, or self-hosted if you use version 3-point-mumble or above) and also from RSS feeds. However, the WordPress triggers are limited to “any new post” or “any new post with tag or category”. If you want more flexibility, WordPress’s wide selection of RSS feeds can be handy. For instance, I’m using my author RSS feed to catch everything that I personally write here and post it to various places. This skips things posted by “autoposter” which generally aren’t content original to this blog and which I don’t want to propagate from here (I’d rather propagate them from their original source). Of course, I could have done this using the “Everything Else” category, which currently includes all non-autoposted material; either would be fine, really, except that I can foresee myself messing with categories in future and breaking stuff by accident.

Other

The other important bit of workflow’s going to be actually doing it. My schedule’s full of classes, lately, and they’re pretty mind-numbing. Apart from that, I spend a lot of time at gigs and in the studio. I’ve taken up bike commuting again, so I don’t have much time on public transport. None of this is particularly good for engaging with the Interwebs. I’m hoping, though, that all this stuff I’ve set up will help me snatch moments for it in between other things, rather than feeling that I can’t possibly do anything now I’m not sitting at a desk for eight or more hours a day.

Global Voices (Georgia): Georgia: Five Dead in Flash Flood

Mon, 14 May 2012 01:07:15 +0000

The Young Georgians posts video of this weekend's flash flood in Tbilisi, Georgia. Five people, including two children, are reported dead.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): cote: Just in case you forgot. And: steak knives. Seems...

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:36:31 +0000

cote:

Just in case you forgot. And: steak knives.

Seems legit.

Three Quarks Daily: Two Hundred Years of Surgery

Sun, 13 May 2012 23:31:30 +0000

Atul Gawande in the New England Journal of Medicine (via brainiac):

The first volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science, published in 1812, gives a sense of the constraints faced by surgeons, and the mettle required of patients, in the era before anesthesia and antisepsis. In the April issue for that year, John Collins Warren, surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and son of one of the founders of Harvard Medical School, published a case report describing a new approach to the treatment of cataracts.1 Until that time, the prevalent method of cataract treatment was “couching,” a procedure that involved inserting a curved needle into the orbit and using it to push the clouded lens back and out of the line of sight.2 Warren's patient had undergone six such attempts without lasting success and was now blind. Warren undertook a more radical and invasive procedure — actual removal of the left cataract. He described the operation, performed before the students of Harvard Medical School, as follows:

The eye-lids were separated by the thumb and finger of the left hand, and then, a broad cornea knife was pushed through the cornea at the outer angle of the eye, till its point approached the opposite side of the cornea. The knife was then withdrawn, and the aqueous humour being discharged, was immediately followed by a protrusion of the iris.

Into the collapsed orbit of this unanesthetized man, Warren inserted forceps he had made especially for the event. However, he encountered difficulties that necessitated improvisation:

The opaque body eluding the grasp of the forceps, a fine hook was passed through the pupil, and fixed in the thickened capsule, which was immediately drawn out entire. This substance was quite firm, about half a line in thickness, a line in diameter, and had a pearly whiteness.

A bandage was applied, instructions on cleansing the eye were given, and the gentleman was sent home. Two months later, Warren noted, inflammation required “two or three bleedings,” but “the patient is now well, and sees to distinguish every object with the left eye.”

The implicit encouragement in Warren's article, and in others like it, was to be daring, even pitiless, in attacking problems of an anatomical nature. As the 18th-century surgeon William Hunter had told his students, “Anatomy is the Basis of Surgery, it informs the Head, guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity.”3 That first volume of the Journal provided descriptions of a remarkable range of surgical techniques, including those for removing kidney, bladder, and urethral stones; dilating the male urethra when strictured by the passage of stones; tying off aneurysms of the iliac artery and infrarenal aorta; treating burns; and using leeches for bloodletting. There were articles on the problem of “the ulcerated uterus” and on the management of gunshot and cannonball wounds, not to mention a spirited debate on whether the wind of a passing cannonball alone was sufficient to cause serious soft-tissue injury.

Surgery, nonetheless, remained a limited profession.

Three Quarks Daily: Could a Single Pill Save Your Marriage?

Sun, 13 May 2012 23:28:03 +0000

George Dvorsky in io9:

Your relationship is on the rocks. Begrudgingly, you and your significant other visit a marriage counselor in the hopes that there's still something left to salvage in your relationship. You both spill your guts and admit that the love is gone. The counselor listens attentively, nodding her head every now and then in complete understanding. At the end of the session she offers the two of you some practical words of advice and sees you on your way. Oh, but before you leave she fills out a prescription for the two of you. Your marriage, it would seem, has been placed on meds.

Now, as messed up as this scenario might seem, this could very well be the future of marriage counseling. At least that's what Oxford neuroethicists Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg believe. In their paper, "Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us," they argue that such a possibility awaits us in the not-too-distant future, and that a kind of ‘love potion' could eventually be developed to strengthen pair bonding. In fact, most of the compounds required to make such a concoction are already within our grasp. It's just a matter of doing it.

It's no secret that divorce rates are going up. Most people would agree that the end of a relationship is a tragic and undesirable thing. Modern couples tend to break-up between the five to nine year mark, a time when the initial honeymoon phase is long gone and the hard realities of managing a longterm relationship really start to kick in.

And while economic and social factors can often play a part in the disintegration of a marriage, neuroscience is increasingly showing that that love is in the brain.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): "Although women now make up the majority of college graduates, the number of female computer science..."

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:52:14 +0000

“Although women now make up the majority of college graduates, the number of female computer science grads has dropped precipitously over the past 25 years—from nearly 40 percent in the mid-1980s to 18 percent in 2009. As a result, only 2 in 10 programmers are women.”

- Attracting More Women to Computer Science Requires Shattering the ‘Brogrammer’ Culture - Education - GOOD (via infoneer-pulse)

I’m assuming that a big part of this shift is that the total number of computer science graduates grew explosively, and that the number of female entrants didn’t grow as fast as the overall growth rate of entrants into computer science programs.

Either way, this “brogrammer” bullshit has got to go.

See also: ”Gangbang Interviews and Bikini Shots: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem,” Tasneem Raja, Mother Jones

And if you either want to be really depressed (or if for some reason you think sexist attitudes in tech are rare and no big deal, go check out Programmers Being Dicks for the weekly incident report).

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): marcohamersmalikes: Light Table - a new IDE Light Table is a...

Sun, 13 May 2012 21:09:58 +0000

marcohamersmalikes:

Light Table - a new IDE

Light Table is a new kind of IDE built on principles of simplicity and based on the way engineers use drafting tables.

Very interesting approach, especially the live evaluation of functions and able to ‘solo out’ different methods in different files.

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Assorted links

Sun, 13 May 2012 21:04:22 +0000

1. Via Chris F. Masse, how large is the Chinese art market really?

2. The economics of HBO, and conditioning on a collider.

3. Good analysis of Spanish debt restructuring; “Should there be some form of Spanish sovereign bond restructuring, the amounts required to recapitalize the banks would be astronomical.”

4. Is the multi-year, multi-volume biography dead?

5. Banana battles, and how is America’s helium crisis developing?

Liverpool Daily Post - Dale Street Blues: Where now for Merseytravel after revelations over possible broken contract laws?

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:40:38 +0000

Governance is one of those words that when mentioned to most people makes their eyes glaze over. It does however happen to be incredibly important to the way companies and public bodies operate. Corportate governance are words that we have...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): DuckDuckHack

Sun, 13 May 2012 19:26:01 +0000

DuckDuckHack:

We think this is cool. (That’s the royal we, in case you were wondering.)

radian:

DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine. We’ve created a platform called DuckDuckHack that enables developers to write open source plugins on top of the search engine (like add-ons for Firefox). DuckDuckGo plugins react to search queries and provide useful instant answers above traditional links.

Infotropism (Skud): A whole lotta hoot, and just a little bit of nanny

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:50:26 +0000

I’ve recently had the misfortune of having had to sit through a series of classes on Western Music History that managed to make just about every form of music prior to 1900 seem deathly dull, irrelevant, and inaccessible. It amazes me how they can do this. I mean, it’s not hard to find some truly amazing stuff even within the confines of “Western Art Music”, and present it in a way that’s engaging. So why don’t they? Do they not know? Are they just teaching it out of a sense of obligation? Did they sit through dull music history classes back in the day and figure that we have to suck it up just like they did?

The Medieval period. What we learnt in class: there was Gregorian chant, which was basically monophonic vocals without much rhythm or melody to speak of, and then mumble mumble something happened and there was polyphony, SURPRISE! RENAISSANCE!

Yeah right. As if that’s all that was going on musically in the middle ages. We’re talking about an era that gave you St Vitus’ Dance, an uncontrollable urge to dance all over the place as if possessed by the devil. You think they did that to Gregorian chant? Of course not.

Here’s Corvus Corax with a little something to show you how it’s done:

Yeah, those dudes have a lightshow and moshpit. Their interpretive choices for this Saltarello (a 13th century number, if I recall correctly) are, ahem, somewhat non-standard, but no more ridiculous than the early music ensembles that play medieval dance tunes as if they were lullabies and dirges. No self-respecting medieval musician would’ve been able to earn his or her living unless they could get the village green jumping.

Corvus Corax use a range of medieval instruments including medieval-style bagpipes, ear-shattering shawms (clocked at 98dB!), and of course a buttload of percussion. But if you really want to appreciate the full ridiculous awesomeness of medieval instruments, you need to check out some of these Youtube videos:

The krumhorn, which is what you’d get if you crossed a kazoo with an old-fashioned walking stick turned upside down.

The hurdy-gurdy, which would be the medieval answer to the keytar, except you have to wind a handle to play it.

The portative organ, which is basically the bastard child of a pipe organ and bellows, giving you a kind of early accordion. There are quite a few home-made portative organs on the tubes — looks like they’re a great hacker project.

renaissance chambara (Ged Carroll): Consumer privacy

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:01:58 +0000

Comedian Bill Hicks accused marketers of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Consumers behaviour online could be accused of not knowing the price or the value of the implicit and explicit information that they give away. This is something to bear in mind when you use a mobile application or share [...]

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen): Sentences to ponder

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:52:40 +0000

Given the complete “credit isolation” of Greece’s banks and the private sector from the rest of the Eurozone, the ECB is powerless to improve liquidity conditions in that nation.

That is from Sober Look.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): Projects from students taking University of Oregon’s...

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:43:33 +0000

Projects from students taking University of Oregon’s “Programming for Artists” course.

Life and Code (Lisa Williams): evanfleischer: MIT students play Tetris on the side of the...

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:16:00 +0000

evanfleischer:

MIT students play Tetris on the side of the Green Building.

(Photos/more video.)