Dennis Jordan

From the Sky Down

2011-09-12T23:21:00.000-05:00

From the Sky Down is no starmaker machinery, but the naked intelligence of four North Dubliners who earned billions and altered world events because they decided reinvention must keep happening. The construction of the song, One, is depicted over 12 concurrent minutes from a failed bridge in Mysterious Ways. The unadorned lead singer told TIFF, "No one wants to see how they make sausages," and it's perhaps untrue in this case because the audience understands that, at TIFF, stardom is identical to prices at Wal Mart and odour at KFC; it is a metal-desk trade show of film editors and screenwriters and other ugly, methodical, and disciplined people who shake like a wet dog when pixie dust is applied. He, the lead singer, said that Sid Viscious and all the others were products of art school. I don't know if I understand what that means -- Paul Hewson and company are products of places like Cedarwood Park, Ballymun. I spent my third birthday on that street. U2 was not art at all, but the musical version of Lance Armstrong's annual cycle of test mountains.

For some reason, Brian Mulroney worked the room.

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An ode to Mr. Lonely

2011-05-24T09:29:00.001-05:00

A blonde, bushy ponytail pulls his mop straight, revealing a pale forehead – a billboard endorsement for white-bread. His round glasses belong on the nose of a pre-Confederation country doctor. His hillbilly sideburns do not.

His name is Mr. Lonely and he plays a tinny piano for northern Ontario's most accomplished glam rock-star – an organist in a canuck-cabaret.

When he plays, it is as two parts.

His head is all-stoic. Far from the bawdy majesty centre stage, it sways and nods softly, channelling the two-dimensional spirit of Schroeder. But his concentration is no cartoon; his eardrums, his eyes, his throat – all go together as though joined with copper.

That part of him is as spiritually solid as a maple; as a tree whose crooked twigs skip and quiver with every rising wind.

Ten crooked twigs: tapping and sliding, stabbing and soaring. Their little frenzy powers the outward spectacle.

And then, when the encores are over and the bathrooms get busy, Mr. Lonely is often found near the door, fingers, hands, head, hair – all hopelessly lost amongst the glittery groupies.

-- Mr. Lonely, aka, Todd Lumley, is a Canadian pianist best known for his work with Hawksley Workman. In December 2001, I passed him on a street in Paris, but did not introduce myself. I wrote this in 2006.

Why haven't digital watches kept up with digital computers?

2011-05-04T09:03:00.000-05:00

My 2009 Timex Ironman watch has two features that my 1988 version did not: an "Indiglo" back-light and something called an "occasion" tracker. What it does not have is a music player, Bluetooth/wifi/USB, a high resolution display, memory or apps. The price was about the same.

Over the same period, portable music advanced from the cassette-playing Walkman to the iPod Nano. I appreciate that one company might stick with its strong brand, but how can no competitor emerge over the same era?

I wrote several years ago my affinity for what I called "fridge books" -- tablets. I think watches offer an opportunity for innovation -- an unexploited piece of real estate on human flesh. As a micro-dashboard, these smart watches will connect to and complement smart phones, conveying information at a glance; when it takes a tenth of a second to look at something, withdrawing and unlocking your phone does actually add up. A smart watch may show:

The song you're listening to on your phone (and let you skip it)
Who is calling you
Which cardinal direction is your mapped destination
The next step in your route
The temperature
How far you have jogged
Who and what from your circle is close to you (4Square, Geodelic/Around me, etc.)
A pro sports score
News headlines
Where your phone is

It just seems silly that we don't have high-rez colour touch interfaces just to tell us the time; at least not on our wrist. Add in a new category of micro-push content, and demand for innovative new watches will be there.

New Globe and Mail print look. B- overall.

2010-10-08T13:51:00.002-05:00

[Re-printed from an email I just sent]

Not too dramatic inside.

Thinner must be a reaction to the iPad and Kindle/Kobo -- commuters will prefer less fuss.

Glossy magazine-style photo above the fold differentiates from the ugly Kindle visuals.

Quick bites on the cover reflect how we read news online (140 characters?).

Odd thing: the Life section alone has the glossy treatment throughout. Wonder why. Facts & Arguments and Lives Lived on the back cannot be flagship sections -- this is community paper content. I would have used glossy on sports, cars or real estate -- anything where one salivates over a stolen base or aspires to a high priced BMW or home/cottage renovation. Given the decision to go glossy, they pushed it with a funky graphic on L2 -- but why? It supported only a psychologist's opinion on child rearing? Doesn't make sense. Maybe the double page RBC ad in the middle sold them on a glossy Life?

B- overall. But glad they're not dinosaurs. I'm excited to get an iPad one day and see what G&M does there. A nice template would retain the relevance of the masthead; otherwise, you just google individual journalists not publications.

Canada to spend up to $16B for F35 flighter jets -- Liberals to get in a tizzy

2010-07-16T15:32:00.000-05:00

I still consider myself a Liberal, but the moral is weakening. We haven't had a leader for a while who has figured out how to do well at his job. All he needs to do is to win. Win a debate; win at competing photo ops; win on principle ... just win something. Winning a lot of things wins you an election.

Our Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is spending $9B to replace our fleet of F18 fighters, which will not be usable in ten years. The decision was made by cabinet without a competitive bid process.

Predictably, the Liberals smell a chance for a win. In a difficult economy with a soaring debt, how could the government throw billions of taxpayer dollars at such a thing; I mean, do we even face attack by air? Whom do we typically attack by air? Aren't we more of a search-and-rescue nation, than Top Guns?

Well, this is exactly why Mr. Harper will come out ahead on this issue. Perhaps he's even baiting Mr. Ignatieff, whose brilliance at studying human rights and history has not translated to triangulation and political sword fights. Here's why Harper and his Defence Minister, Peter MacKay, will win:

We are at war, The Afghanistan mission has galvanized support for the armed forces and, though we are nothing like the Americans, there is a sense of providing soldiers with the right equipment to do their job well. The fact that this war is scheduled to end for us far before these planes would be delivered is not too relevant; the war is based on a threat that is not ending.
Our military was not well funded for many years. In particular, some of the rescue of Canada's fiscal solvency in 1995 came at the expense of the military's budget. Canadians recognize that we have a poorly funded military; they accepted that during our transition from an imperial/colonial power supporting mother Britain to a liberal nation of peace-keepers. But pendulums swing back and this one is now.
Given our military's central place in our history, stretching from Vimy Ridge to Normandy, Desert Storm and Bosnia, the public will support a leader who takes actions to strengthen the Forces.
Canadians are broadly supportive of Harper's aggressive defence of our arctic sovereignty. That clearly takes more than snowmobiles and rifles; yes, it takes a strong Navy with icebreakers, but world class fighter jets making periodic passes over remote sovereign regions is arguably the height of patriotism. Opposing that is the visceral image of limpness.
The Liberals would have done roughly the same thing; perhaps they would have had the illusion of multiple tenders, or perhaps they would have postponed the announcement to coincide with the release of a deficit reduction statistic, but I think people recognize that a Liberal government is unlikely to end the fighter capability of our Air Force.
If the Liberals did meddle in such a need (not necessarily a strategic defence need, but a requirement for maintaining an air attack capability), it would repeat the foolish 1993 kept campaign promise to cancel the replacement of an outdated helicopter force. Our helicopters became a joke following that; but they didn't make a Tom Cruise movie about SAR helicopters; to have a fighter jets that break when they try to fight would be tragic.
As I wrote recently, voters like strong leaders. Unfortunately, this principle has been abused by at least one draft-dodging U.S. President who landed on an Aircraft Carrier within sight of San Francisco during a war. However, Harper has never come across as a war monger, and woe is the politician who favours a weakened military.

The Prime Minister who does not get his ass kicked

2010-07-01T07:46:00.003-05:00

I was at a University of Toronto panel discussion on 9/11 the day Dalton Camp died. Evan Solomon, the moderator, spoke of his legacy. His friends will remember him for many things, but the sieve of history will likely note next to his name the aphorism: elections are not won, but lost.

It's a short, powerful message. Implicit, for me anyway, is that modern democracies are not relevant to the people who own them; the candidate seeking to govern us, and who comes to our door to discuss why and how, is an annoyance lumped in with electricity contract salespeople. Political leaders, who in Canada usually rise through the narrow career of legislator to become nearly de-facto heads of state, find themselves in power most often through the voters' rejection of their opponent, not through any superlative qualities of their own. Voters, at least in Canada, rarely select the superstar; they reject the leader who becomes a looser.

But it's my view that, particularly for generations that followed those who witnessed the mass adoption of television in the 1950's, politicians are judged as much on how good they are at politics as how good they are, or would be, at governing. In other words, voters form opinions first based on who would best do what they want, and second -- focusing on character -- on who is best equipped to not get his or her ass kicked.

Jean Chretien openly talks about how his anti-separatism Clarity legislation was proposed in the winter, because -- to paraphrase -- it is very hard to protest in Montreal in the winter. In a sense, he was doing the ass-kicking to people trying to destroy his country. We loved it.

Paul Martin, on the other hand, approached governing with a sense of fairness -- he himself called the inquiry into the Chretien era sponsorship spending and the inquiry ended his career. He was fair, but I think voters don't care. As the head of all of us we didn't want somebody who would kneel down before others. He got his ass kicked as the head of our country and the country rejected him.

Brian Mulroney swept to power by sweeping out almost two decades of Liberal rule. He conquered Canada and Canada loved him. In my view, his undoing was less related to the legislative successes of the GST and NAFTA than to the series of Ministerial resignations (fairness) and the defeat of Meech Lake (getting his ass kicked at the finish line). When Brian Mulroney could no longer hold his arms high is the winner of bout after bout, his career was done. Charlottetown was the knockout blow.

Despite the passion voters had for Barack Obama, he was largely elected on the rejection of the Bush legacy, piqued in the credit crisis. To succeed, he needs to continue to kick ass -- and he did not on health care. Had he lost that legislative skirmish his stature as a head of state would have been severely impaired; it's worth noting that none of this has anything to do with health care policy, which is both hardened socialism and a wet napkin, depending on who you ask.

In present times, Stephen Harper has demonstrated time and again that he is a better pugilist than his opponents. He scores punch after punch against Paul Martin, Stephane Dion and -- surprisingly -- Michael Ignatieff. Yes, Canadians care about policy. But they are smart enough to care about subtext as well, and Harper's subtext is that he -- the man we most see as the current head of not just our legislature but the 144 year-old thing called Canada -- is a very good boxer.

Many Canadians despise him. But in my view they secretly prefer the guy who kicks ass to the guy whose ass is kicked.

Arrow in the sky

2010-06-22T21:35:00.001-05:00

Discovered this incredible Irish band via a Jango feed built on Camera Obscura. Their web presence is minimal, so here is their MySpace page. Three 20-something guys, they remind me of Tegan & Sarah's harmonization and folk-inspired tunes that soar but are grounded.

By far, my favourite song is Half Glass, which speaks to lute-like sounds and commiseration in a salt-water misty Doolin pub -- at least to me. Verbal Waltz echoes REM when they were good at music. Both songs are available on their MySpace page.

This is the Irish music I want; not Westlife (sorry kids). And as much as I like the Coors, there's a darkness and seriousness to Arrow in the Sky that takes me somewhere good.

What strikes me most though is that they're not even close to being big -- no Wikipedia page, 600 or so song hits. The band is definitely in the alt-folk/hipster channel of music, and is unlikely to meet Ryan Seacrest -- but I think they should easily be touring festivals and hopefully headlining 5000-person gigs across North America in a few years. I hope.

Maybe all the good bands, which seem to emerge from the British Isles now, can form a new kind of Lilith Fair and invade. Less Lilith, more introspective lads.

Good luck to ya!

Avatar and what we know

2010-03-16T17:30:00.000-05:00

I received an award this week for being the last person on Earth to see Avatar. Not true. But it's hard to write a blog post about an event that really occurred one spectacular Olympics and a New Year's ago.

Sure, I was shocked by the immersive power of the Avatar technology, and by the sheer beauty dreamed up by the people that made the "set" -- though a better phrase may be "virtual world." I was emotionally hit after walking out -- Zoe Saldana is an extraordinary actress and her character was one of the real charms of the film. And I suppose the love story was heightened by the FX. Absolutely, filmaking has changed forever, and this technology in the hands of a brilliant storyteller would be more potent.

It's not that the story was terrible; it was just basic. But if the acting was heightened by the conveyed beauty of the imaginary land, so too was the film's message -- a pro-nature agenda drawing on aboriginal customs (which begs the racist question, why are aboriginals "nature"?).

I was reflective at times during the 160-minute film on the implication of its meaning, and this draws me back to capitalism and economics. In a sense, the attack on nature depicted on the film in an extension of Adam Smith's pin factory, in which human activity is broken down into severe specialization to realize efficiency in making pins; i.e., to make lots of pins more cheaply. What is the psychic effect of specialization? Though I don't like the word "holistic," I kind of have to use it here -- what is the human difference between having holistic understanding of a trade or profession and simply being given a routine task? Shoe-makers perhaps use a broad array of intellect to hand-make shoes -- and to innovate during the process. To apply human creativity. Shoe-factory workers do not do this; they perform mindless tasks that, if anything, reduce their intellectual potency through neglect.

My grandfather was very Irish -- born in 1916 on St, Patrick's Day in Dublin and named Paddy. He was an electrician employed by the state, but I recall that he, a blue collar worker, had an enormous range of capabilities. Like a good Irishman, he could tell a story -- he was really good at it. He could tell stories that took an hour to tell, and he would tell them from heart. He also memorized ballads and would chant or recite them from heart, in many cases entertaining us for half an hour at a time. Ireland was poor until the 1990s, and perhaps he grew up with an almost 19th century level of technology; with no TV (even in my childhood, Ireland had three stations, and two were British!) or similar electronic entertainment available. Despite not being a professional class, or intellectual class man, he had an intellect. He used many parts of his brain.

I wonder if we don't use these parts now. Certainly, I don't have any peers who can tell a one-hour story, or who have memorized 30-minute ballads (not true; I know one person, but he is a freak of a genius.) My point is this: has the arc of industrial and information-technology progress increased specialization and focus on abstract knowledge to such a degree that true intellectual activity is -- at the least -- absent from those who are not knowledge workers; and perhaps quite limited among even the "creative class?" My grandfather could tell great stories; but perhaps going backward there was knowledge about nature that is since lost -- even as someone who loves the outdoors, I really know little or nothing about what food or what medicine grows naturally where I hike or canoe.

Economics provides another example -- another angle to this issue. It is the problem of making a ball-point pen from raw materials. I have since lost the link to the article, but I assure you one existed describing the effort of a person to make a ball-point pen entirely from things he could gather at a primitive level. I.e., wearing almost a loincloth and venturing into Algonquin Park, or something like this. Of course, it is impossible to achieve -- or at the least it would take months or years to find and refine all of the materials (ink, steel bearings, steel receptacles, etc.) required. The lesson is this: humans have access to tremendous technology, but to a large degree we have simply inherited it, or borrowed it from our peers -- if we cannot make a pen from scratch, we certainly cannot make a car or an airplane. We go faster and higher and further than our ancestors, but there is not necessarily any correlation between this and our intelligence. Perhaps the challenge required to survive in a tribal environment off of nature does test the mind more than being cradled in a car, a house, and with packaged food cooked on a stove, etc. Perhaps we're getting dumber as we get more stuff -- increasingly specialized but lacking true knowledge.

For me, this is the ironic message of Avatar -- that each increase in technology removes the requirement of a degree of intuition or other aspect of intelligence. Social genius, and reactivity to the chaos and complexity of nature are far more testing than traffic patterns, cook books and, perhaps, even work.

Boss temporarily reassigns employee for giving a stranger a severe beating while at work

2010-01-26T20:02:00.000-05:00

It's important to remember that, if you beat the crap out of someone at work, depending on your boss, you may be excused from the justice system and given demeaning work from a while.

Of course, you cannot be a doctor or scientist or Olympic athlete for this to work; you really need to be an out-of-uniform police officer.

I'm posting on a new blog

2009-12-10T15:04:00.002-05:00

All tech and media posts will be to Kindred Crowd, including one today on "saving the music album."

RCMP officer escapes charge for drunk driving death

2009-12-02T13:19:00.001-05:00

I'm troubled by this story. Occasionally, police organizations take the view that a work-related punishment -- such as a suspension, demotion, or firing -- is to be equated with a civil or criminal punishment, such as a fine or prison sentence, etc.

This is not the same thing. Police departments that have human resources functions cannot view those functions as part of the criminal or civil justice system. It is an abuse of position for the justice system (in this case, the Attorney General's office) to argue that an officer has suffered enough by his or her diminished career prospects (that is not made explicit in the case linked to above)

Certainly, a drunk driver who kills an innocent person would always argue against prison time and in favour of being demoted at their non-police job as, e.g., a sales clerk, a movie-ticket taker, a lawyer, a senior executive of a company ... a Captain in the military. But that option is never available, of course, to drunk drivers whose actions cause death and who are not police officers; and it should not be for police officers either.

Vulcans are New Growth theorists

2009-11-23T12:22:00.001-05:00

I saw the 2009 Star Trek last night. There's a scene where young Vulcans are having knowledge fed into their brains at high speed; a montage, if you will. Some math formulas flash by, but then (as I recall), the words "Non-rival" and "excludable" flash on the screen.

If you look closely at Paul Romer, you will note the almost imperceptible pointy ears.

EDIT -- I deliberately wrote that without Googling whether what I saw was right, but Salon covered it as well.

Capitalism: applied discovery

2009-10-20T15:44:00.009-05:00

Eight years ago, Paul Romer was quoted:

The Soviet Union had very strong science in some fields, but it wasn't coupled with strong institutions in the market. The upshot was that the benefits of discovery were very limited for people living there. The wonder of the United States is that we've created institutions of science and institutions of the market [emphasis mine]. They're very different, but together they've generated fantastic benefits.

The Centre for Innovation Studies is an economic think tank in Western Canada that appears to operate in the gap between operational business issues and Romer's theories.

As a teenager and an economics undergraduate, I always had an uneasy feeling about the right-wing nature of economics and business. We would study how the growth of a cookie company could create jobs and make the GDP larger, but it seemed so pointless to me; can't people just bake cookies, or buy dates? If, instead of a cookie company, we were analyzing a company that threw computers off a cliff because there was a paying audience for such an activity, would this be an example of economic growth?

I think it's simplistic to equate all profitable business activity with economic growth; or to equate non-business activity with the opposite (economic cost). Health care is a good example; in Canada, depending on your ideology, you could view health care as a cost to society, and cookies as an example of society's productive output. But this framing is illusory; healthcare is a major fraction of Canada's GDP (10% -- retrieved today).

But much more valuable than either the cost frame or the GDP frame is to analyze the innovation within the healthcare system. How much science takes place? How much learning-by-doing? How much of this is distributed across the system, making the entire system more efficient? This is quite apart from both the utility of healthcare -- that of maintaining an able workforce -- and even further removed from the moral essence of a healthcare system.

But consider a GDP-specific examination of the computer sector that ignores any change in transistor speeds: factories are built to make computers; engineers are employed to design computers; logistics and marketing/merchandising professionals are engaged to bring the computers to market, etc. Clearly, all of this misses the point that a single, $200 computer today is more productive by a factor of millions than its 1980s counterpart; that virtually all other economic activity on Earth can exploit this improvement to become itself more productive.

Look at the centre for innovation studies; they link Moore's Law, so-named by the technology sector, with "creep capacity", so named by the chemical sector. Are the underlying mechanics of these phenomena the same or similar? Consider their "Sailing Ship" anecdote; after the invention of steam-powered ships, sailing innovation radically accelerated.

Studying innovation is kind of meta-meta. But I remember that Arthur Lydiard didn't actually earn much of a living from turning kids from his block in New Zealand into Olympic champions; he earned a living by teaching coaches.

Liberals have themselves to blame

2009-10-15T20:59:00.001-05:00

The Globe and Mail headline describes a "surge in popularity" for Harper's Conservatives. It's true; the chess master of politics has managed once again to turn adversity -- recession and an initially dismal record thereof; standing to the right of everyone -- to achievement.

Or has he? In fact, two factors have brought our nation within reach of a "Reform" majority, and both were engineered by the loyal opposition itself.

Back in 2004, the Martin Liberals painted Harper as a scary neo-con -- which he may in fact be. Martin won that election, and lost the next playing the same card. And Ignatieff Dion lost the next playing the same card, all the while Harper governed almost like a Liberal. I believe the 1993 Tory ads poking fun at Jean Chretien's facial disfigurement -- and Chretien's historic speech following -- defined Chretien through three mandates. It reinforced his "little guy" image and endeared at least enough Canadians to the "untested" future Prime Minister. In a similar vein, while not many people feel endeared to Harper, the smart people that make up this country know when they've been told a story; and they hate being fooled twice, three times or even a fourth time?

This feeds directly into what happened this late summer and early fall, when Ignatieff decided Canadians would go the polls (and then decided not). In simple terms, Ignatieff had nothing to sell. Again, the smart people that make up this country know that we've had an easier recession than countries we care about, like the U.S. and those in Western Europe. So what was the election to be fought over -- a technical matter concerning employment insurance reform.

In fact, the Conservatives had succeeded brilliantly in striking at Ignatieff's weakness -- his presumed ugly ambition; his desire to be Prime Minister as a personal feather in the cap, not as a continuation of a lifelong pursuit of ... some policy goal.

Ignatieff was not sincere. Sure, he's new on the national stage, but he's also an experienced TV broadcaster, and, like Reagan or our most recent two Governors General, his charisma should be dancing on the television screens. It does not.

For Ignatieff to have a hope, he must follow this approach:

though you came late to the party, recognize that last-fall's near two-for-one election campaign taught Canadians to seek a resolution to the string of minority governments. the reasons for not choosing Harper have diminished since 2004, and amendments to EI reform are not going to overturn everything since. be a real policy alternative.
stop thinking you're smart. you are in close quarters and on typewriters, but -- perhaps unlike the U.S. -- Canadians en masse tend to act more intelligently than their average IQ. We can smell a lie, so tell it to us straight.
attack Harper on his systemic failures. Most critically, you should take credit for Canada's relatively light recession, given Harper's abysmal blindness and inaction on the issue just 12 months ago. He had to be led to the policy he now takes credit for. Exploit that.
take a charisma pill; we'll excuse you for being smooth. We won't excuse you for handing the charisma crown to Stephen Harper.

Taglocity -- making MSOutlook more like Gmail

2009-10-02T18:14:00.000-05:00

I prefer Gmail because it's quicker and less bloated. But Outlook will definitely be with us for some time, and while it is, Taglocity offers a product that closes the gap a little.

I'm running Taglocity 3.0 professional edition (free trial; soon to revert to standard edition), after using the 2.0 for about eight months.

In a nutshell, Taglocity radically enhances an existing Outlook feature called "Categories." (Categories = tags). For some time, Outlook has allowed you to categorize emails, but it was clunky.

Here's how I set up and use Taglocity, after installing it:

Assuming you currently store your Outlook email in folders, open a folder and select all emails. Now, use the Taglocity Pane (atop your main Outlook page) to assign a tag to all items in this folder. You can just use the name of the folder, but I believe in following these conventions:

a) don't pluralize ("report" not "reports") or capitalize, except
b) capitalize acronyms ("PR", not "pr"), and
c) add a hypen after tags that would otherwise form words or parts of words; e.g., "PR-" and "Toronto-". This will pay off later if you run a search for "professional". [Granted, it will fail if your email includes something like, "Toronto-based accountant"].
Go through all your folders and repeat this
Open your Tag Bar window (click "Tag Bar") clean up your tags. Through right-clicking you can consolidate similar tags.
Now, within your Tag Bar window, move the tags around into groups and then assign a colour to each group (e.g., industries are blue; administration is green; personal is yellow)
Still within the Tag Bar window, add a half dozen of your most popular tags to the actual Tag Bar. This bar sits atop Outlook's main page, and makes it easier to assign tags to emails.
Now, go back and see where you can assign more than one existing tag to an email. E.g., you have an email about a flight on Air Canada and another about consulting services to Air Canada. Tag both "air-canada" but tag one "flight" and another "consulting" or something.
When you've done all this, put all of your email in an "archive" folder and delete your other folders. One caveat, for repetitive projects, I prefer to use folders to tags. E.g., I write a monthly newsletter and I store material for it throughout each month; I will tag this material with the name of the newsletter, but I also store it in a folder called "May 2009" or whatever.

Yes, all of this takes some time. You may not follow all these steps for the email you received in the past. But the process demonstrates how to use Taglocity for email as you receive it. When an email arrives, once it's dealt with as a work task, you can click twice and deal with it as clutter.

Finding anything is simply about narrowing down the options -- triangulating. If, in six months, you need details about that Air Canada flight, you can use Outlook's search box to run a keyword search "category:air-canada, category:flight". Even if this produces 100 emails, you can easily scroll to the rough period of the flight. And you can combine the search with "from:dave"-type commands.

If the size of your company permits it, you can benefit from a network effect by making all of your tags public; i.e., the tags you assign to an email will travel with the email when an email is forwarded or replied to. If you invest the time to create a taxonomy for your firm, email conversations will only have to be tagged once, rather than by each recipient.

Sounds complicated, but in fact the top benefits I've experienced from using this are:

if you equate a tag to a folder, you can put one email in two or more "folders" at the same time, so it's easier to find regardless of how your brain is working when you need the email. E.g., you might spend a year storing email first by industry (or client) and then by service performed, and then decide you want to store by service performed first and then by industry/client within those folders. With tags, you just do both.
it's ridiculously quick to tag and drag emails to a single folder than to drag up and down Outlook and through nested folders.
though command-line searches are not popular, in fact we have all become used to them through Google; they're quite quick when you get used to them. have you ever watched someone painfully spend two or three minutes trying to find a simple email? if you can narrow the problem down by two or three tags (and perhaps a rough date), it shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen seconds to find a needle in a 10,000 email haystack.

In time, people will no doubt have personal taxonomies. You'll add 100 tags to Gmail and you'll use them for all work documents, personal documents, calendar items, emails, photos and videos, and basically any discrete piece of content you store.

On wine

2009-09-29T16:54:00.009-05:00

I find wine absurd. That's not to say I don't like drinking it. I'd drink it at work if I could! But how do you choose one? Seriously ... by what criteria does one purchase wine?

This was well summed up by a friend of mine who, at 19, entered a liquor store in our hometown of North York and suggested, "we're looking for a good bottle of wine." Following this, we went to a hardware store and asked for "a good thing."

Fifteen years later, I have added a bit to my knowledge of wine, but I'm not sure if any of the knowledge is useful; I know that Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are grapes, that Napa Vally and Bordeaux are regions (and that you could probably spend weeks in Bordeaux and come away describing it as an indecipherable taxonomy of applied geography). But still, is it useful? Useful means that I can predict pretty well what tastes good.

Well, a few nights ago I drank a bottle of Jip Jip Rocks Shiraz 2007. And it tasted very good. I think it was the best wine I can remember drinking, and I remember at least the first two thirds of it.

I think it was $15 at the LCBO; not a big price. I took a different approach to finding it; I think, a logical approach. I had come across the name Robert Parker Jr.; an American wine reviewer who is both an anti-elite in his bucolic homestead and unrefined upbringing, and, relative to folks like Billy Munnelly, confidently snobbish about really good wine. Unlike many anti-snobs, Parker doesn't balk at drinking a $60 wine or calling it as better than a lot of $12 wine.

There's some backlash against Parker: who is this nobody from nowhere-USA? Even if he is somebody, he's destroying wine by favouring certain rich, heavy types and forcing small and large vintners to comply.

Perhaps, but I don't care. Like I said, I want to drink wine that tastes good. And Jip Jip Rocks Shiraz 2007, bought on Parker's recommendation, tasted great.

So, my approach was simple. I discovered that some of Parker's ratings can be accessed at Wine.com -- specifically, with a click from the homepage, they lay out the wines that are highly rated and that cost under $20. The rating system is a bit odd, but it's enough to know that a rating of 80 is good, 90 is excellent and 95+ is very excellent. So, I just cross-referenced what RP (as Robert Parker's ratings are symbolized with) rated highly with what the LCBO sells (it turns out, correlation is poor).

Now, I learned very little about earth or limestone or breezes or rivers or Chateaus or grafting or anything to find a nice wine. I just learned Robert Parker's name and did what he said. He seems to correlate with my taste.

My point is not that people should be sheeple. Rather, it's that I cannot access wine with the approach commonly presented by the greater wine industry. Even Billy Munnelly's 3-type breakdown failed me; they all tasted not that great.

In my view, drinking wine should be a journey (I cannot but hear Adam Clayton's "A musical journey!"). I mean, if you go to Ireland, you don't go first to the geography and then to the people and then to the food. You do it all at once; you mash it all up, and how you make sense of it is through experience (sensuous). A hamburger in Doolin while chatting with young hitchhikers and listening to traditional Irish music is sensuous; it's a discrete moment and memory. As a moment, it can be used to understand other things; is this music like that music? Is a hamburger considered Irish food or foreign food? What's common and what's different between the generations?

I'd love to find a book, perhaps an annual book, written as a wine journey for the uninitiated. Why not! You start with something bold, then learn one thing about it and why it's bold. Then you go to an Ontario Merlot, and try to understand what's different about them. And so on.

I think I could understand one or two bottles a week; but I cannot understand 75 of anything, at least not all at once. I need to work my way through them, experientially, creating context using useful, common criteria.

So, wine! Get your act together. Write something useful, you stained, fruity lallygag.

PS -- next up:
MAIPE MALBEC 2008 Argentina | Proviva
VINTAGES 93823 | 750 mL | $ 12.95

Diversity, discovery, and economic growth

2009-08-24T12:12:00.013-05:00

Paul Romer is an economist who is at the vanguard of the most exciting school in the science today: New Growth Theory. Some history: until the 1960s, economists believed that economic growth resulted from two things:

investing today's surplus (mostly profits) in more equipment, like factories and/or more civil infrastructure, like highways and canals
adding more workers through social policy -- immigration, the baby bonus, etc. -- to accomplish more economic activity at lower cost

In the 1950s, Robert Solow amended that formula by adding technology to the mix. In Solow's view, most economic growth results from technological change -- discovery -- while some still results from the things mentioned above. As an economist, Solow didn't seek to understand why technological change occurred, but he could measure it and this came to be called the Solow Residual. The Solow Residual measures the pace of discovery: things like more viscous motor oils, more durable highway pavement, more efficient light bulbs. Imagine for a moment that in World War II you were asked by your government to build a computer with eight billion vacuum tubes; in fact, winning the war would be easier than building such a device, though today you can buy 8.56 billion transistors at Wal Mart for $10 in a 2 gig flash key.

In Solow's view, this technological change occurs exogenously -- outside of the economic system. Perhaps discoveries happen in universities, or in government labs.

Romer's contribution in the 1980s, as a young economist moving between Chicago, MIT and, for a year, Queen's University in Kingston, was to place technological change within the economy. For Romer, transistors don't become smaller because the government makes this a priority, but because every man woman and child in North America may have bought 1000 transistors in 1985 annually, via their TV remote controls, Walkmans and home computers. Today, we perhaps buy 25 billion transistors annually -- all the while directing investment to transistor development and research, while innocently playing X-box or using a remote control or answering a cell phone.

In fact, the Soviets developed the system of centralized discovery; that regime was an impressive force in science and technology, but this was never linked to the market system and so advances never went beyond the moon -- which in fact is not a good thing. The Soviet model could not benefit from compounding returns from discovery, from the X-box market funding the development of faster computers that design better transistors to make faster computers. Romer boldly projects increasing returns for humanity in perpetuity.

Richard Florida and Jane Jacobs comprise the Yin and Yang of urban theory. Jacobs prized diversity and density as necessities for a thriving city; Florida looks for thriving cities to find pools spawning the ideas that are changing the world. Famously, Florida uses a "gay index" to rate cities; though predominance of overt homosexuality in a city is unlikely to cause genius, it tends to be correlated with tolerance and openness to new ideas; while Pride Week doesn't spawn transistor development in any direct way, Florida believes that a city that can handle Pride Week is more likely to discover new things. To Florida, this diversity is exogenous; Jacobs situates it in an urban planning policy that, thankfully, Toronto has to a large degree adopted. So has New York and many other leading cities.

So, to this point in my post you have Jane Jacobs telling us how to arrange cities, Richard Florida telling us how good cities produce discovery, and Paul Romer telling us that discovery matters more than anything else when describing economic growth.

But take this interesting article by a U.S. academic, Vivek Wadhwa. Titled, America's Perilous Anti-Immigrant Protectionism, Wadhwa delves into recession-fueled Xenophobia in America -- blaming foreigners for taking "American jobs"; Wadhwa claims he himself is not excepted, receiving hate mail and threats for pointing out roughly what I have just written -- that America's immigrants are not taking "commodity jobs"; rather, they are growing the U.S. economy through discovery linked with the uniquely pervasive American market system. In simple terms, non-white people are inventing things and then employing lots of white people, all the while keeping America at the leading edge of economic growth and technology.

Wadhwa astutely notes that these immigrants, facing hate and anti-immigrant policies, may be taking their ideas elsewhere; just as many smart Jewish Germans did in the mid to late 1930s, in large part enabling the U.S. and not German to invent the atom bomb.

Much has been written about global neoliberalism and the "race to the bottom" of corporate tax rates -- certainly, states like Ireland have benefited by agreeing to charge multinationals much less tax. Horrible poverty has been wiped out in a generation by this.

But what about the race to attract the next Sergey Brin, the next Vivek Wadhwa, the next Albert Einstein? A cleavage is occurring in employment between the highly skilled and those who can only sell their labour as a commodity; the market is global for both, creating horrible pain for the unskilled and incredible opportunity for the skilled.

Growth in the global economy is from knowledge. People who are smart enough to contribute to that are smart enough, open enough to migrate globally. India and China must produce smart kids at the same rate as the U.S., or Britain -- just look at the competition in our universities at a point when the majority of people in these countries do not have access to proper education or opportunities to showcase their inheritance. In time, the cities with the right planning -- structural change -- and the states with the right policies to attract these people will quickly become better than the other ones.

[Note: this post was called Xenophobia, discovery, and economic growth; Richard Florida linked to it under the current title, which I thought was a good one, so I changed it.]

The snowball

2009-08-24T09:21:00.004-05:00

Until last week, I was taking a night course in political science -- pre-graduate type of thing. I handed in my final essay at the last class last Thursday. It was a cool essay, looking into issues of law and democracy; whether it is democratic for the judiciary to overrule the majority (parliament) in Canada.

Metaphorically for me, the content was pretty interesting but the process sucked -- I crammed it out in little more than a week of late nights, staying up till 4:00 am the night before I submitted it. But after I handed it in, I didn't actually feel exhausted. I felt refreshed; in the wake of a week of little sleep and long hours reading dense legal theory, (on top of a day job and parenthood), I felt as relaxed as I might after a week of vacation. Creative new ideas are popping into my head that have nothing to do with legal theory. I slept 6 hours last night so I could watch a move and don't feel the least tired.

This got me thinking. I saw Reservation Road last night -- ho hum. But a plot premise is that a bored, under-employed suburban father about my age believes to some degree that he could find his true calling in life by spending six months or more unemployed and promenading or journaling in Paris (family in tow). I used to do this very thing (sans famille) for this very reason.

So which is it? If you really wanted a sense of "otherness" -- a separation from monotony -- a new, vital clarity, creativity and sureness about yourself, should you do a lot of nothing or a lot of something? Should you bake, or break, your brain?

Let me be clear, forgetting my exhaustion Thursday night (and subsequent debilitating neck spasm ;-), I felt about as good from Friday till now as I would after resting totally on a dock by a lake for five days. Normal life feels easy after hard thinking.

Of course, I worked really hard on this essay, and learned a lot of new things; I was passionate about the subject and about getting the argument right. Work is rarely like that. So then the issue becomes: is it more "living" to -- take an easy job that permits you to travel or write or play sports or do whatever feels like real life to you; or, to find a passionate vocation and work exceptionally hard with brief breaks.

I remember the economic theory I read years ago describing the trade-off between work and leisure; economics made a moral assumption that all people prefer unpaid leisure to paid work, and that they trade some leisure for some income; economics assumes "work to live." Common Sense today talks about not working too hard and smelling the roses. But maybe it's more tangled than that.

I called this post The Snowball because I think that's a nice label for the effect of working hard; you don't get tired, you get bigger. You know a little more, have a little more experience, and have a little less to do -- everything else should be a bit easier, and so on. A snowball rolling along gets bigger.

The psychology of capitalism

2009-08-04T15:10:00.007-05:00

What motivates a personal trainer? Some people love the culture of gyms. But I think personal trainers are often motivated by helping people. For 30 or 60 minutes at a time, they're physically close to a person who, in many cases, wants to feel better about themselves; trainers have the ability to help them get there. You could say that there's no irony between them -- the trainer isn't using a bait-and-switch technique, or attending sessions on how to "sucker in" more clients.

Usually, they're not just acting like, but are being a real person. Pretty simple, really.

Notwithstanding all that, training is normally capitalistic. My friend trains in her clients' homes and drums up work herself. She's an independent business person -- she uses her own capital to buy equipment and promote her company.

The free market is competitive. Though Adam Smith anticipates many features of capitalism -- the minute division of labour chief among them -- the pitting of opponents against one another to produce the best offer (product, price or marketing/placement) for consumers is central to how we view the positive side of the system today.

But within this system is a central irony -- that companies want to profit from their relationship with customers -- certainly from the consumer relationship (the B2B relationship is a bit harder to fudge). Most of the ads I take in make me feel like I'm being lied to; in fact, I think most people of my generation automatically handicap anything they receive via mass distribution, or that doesn't carry a label of authenticity with it.

What is the larger effect of this? I try not to consume media much anymore; just radio and Internet mainly, but few movies or magazines and no TV. But if I, like many people, took in hours of media daily, and if it was all funded by explicit and implicit (embedded) advertising messages, would that not affect how I see the world? The level of trust I generally have.

And would that carry over to my trust of political leaders, or in fact of policies that were genuinely developed in an objective and fair way -- the governance of our nation. Or of personal relationships, or of how I might relate socially in public places, like malls or sidewalks, or while driving in traffic.

I think there's something big about closeness -- I think physical trainers are more likely to develop friendships with clients than to lie to them and use them. What about mid-sized private companies? Are they more authentic than multinationals? And, if so, what is it about multi-nationals that makes then inauthentic? Can a multinational consumer chain be built that cultivates genuine and honest relationships in all points of business (relationships with suppliers and other vendors, creditors, employees/owners, and customers)? What if a group of local, authentic businesses formed a federation -- would it change things? What if that federation adopted a form of central authority -- what then?

I've written before that authenticity is big -- in PR and in business as well as of course in life. But for people who don't perform personal training or public school teaching etc. as a career, it can be difficult to not creep over that line. But that line really, in the long run, is vital personally and in society.

Should the birther movement die?

2009-07-25T15:51:00.004-05:00

I get a kick out of watching stupid people get angry. Is that wrong?

The U.S."Birther" movement believes that Obama was born in Kenya because of a mis-translation in a single phone interview between a street preacher, a translator with a poor grasp of English, and Obama's Kenyan grandfather's second wife. Or, more specifically, it is because they hate black people, or Kenyans, and have a loose view of facts.

The Birther movement has the power to ensure Obama wins four more years. It's clearly insane, and supported by a small minority who would never vote for Obama anyway. On the other hand, this insane racist minority is now frothing at the mouth and one hopes they don't froth too much.

Hopefully, websites like this will pour some water on them.

Huxley vs Orwell

2009-07-15T11:43:00.002-05:00

Interesting comic comparing the two: http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/1736/200905amusingourselvest.png

But why is it always, "they are trying to control us;" if the comic correctly shows Huxley's nightmare as our reality, it's not a result of a mid-century plan to control the population. This media universe arose within a free market system where mid-managers were incented to make slightly more appealing content, ads and media to capture market share. The net net after 50 years may very well be Huxley, but as a side effect, not an end.

Are you moving to the front of the train?

2009-07-11T09:18:00.014-05:00

I like France's TGV trains because you can cross the country in a few hours and, if you're travelling between city centres, it often takes less time to travel from a train seat to your destination building than it would from a plane's touchdown to arrive at baggage collection. While these trains cross the French countryside at close to 200 kph, passengers are able to roam the length of them reasonably freely, and can have a hot lunch or sit in a bar stool and read a newspaper. Though many are driven by the desire to arrive quickly at their destination, few are so obsessed that they move to the front of the train to achieve this. In fact, almost anyone on a TGV train would find it irrational for a passenger to deem forward motion within the train as progress toward their destination.

If anything, on a train moving to Lyon from Paris, it may be beneficial to walk toward Paris while being hurtled toward Lyon, because the train station exits may be close to the back of the train in Lyon. It's not really necessary to point this out; most people get it.

But I wonder if in other contexts progress is measured more in terms of moving up and down a train that is otherwise hurtling toward something else at an immeasurably higher vitesse.

General Motors is bankrupt and shedding decades-old brand icons -- not to mention 1/3 of managers -- as it tries to recover from something terrible that happened.

But what exactly happened? Did cars end? How could such a terrible outcome affect an otherwise blessed corporation?

Perhaps the answer can be seen in how progress was measured at GM. Manufactured Obsolescence is one business strategy aimed at stimulating demand by deliberately making your products worse. Stimulated demand could give the appearance of progress, while in fact, anyone who thinks clearly and independently could see that deliberately making your products worse for 40 years would probably not make your company better.

The finance industry -- capital for capital's sake -- similarly engineered highly complex new products that created an illusion of progress. Much of the mortgage industry stepped onto a train clearly marked "Going over a Cliff" and then began to, not just walk but run along the length of this train in a direction marked progress. Funnily enough, this blind march did not stop the train from going over the cliff.

I've written many times about Jane Jacobs. I think the lesson of her life is that an intelligent person who is exceptionally independent of mind or contrarian will find it easy to see that trains marked "Going over a Cliff" will in fact go over a cliff. But, as Warren Buffet says, the elite management class spends much more time looking left and right to see what they should do than thinking for themselves.

The science of traffic jams

2009-06-10T09:13:00.003-05:00

Neat video: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/traffic-0609.html

No doubt they form passively and no individual in them has an incentive to take action to un-form them, but I think this article misses a key factor. Driver training would have a huge effect on preventing traffic jams.

Though drivers usually seek to undertake trips in the least time possible, a driver can take many kinds of action; I'd group these as: irrational; short-sighted; far-sighted; and, altruistic.

An irrational act would be tailgating to prevent a driver on an on-ramp from merging in front of one's car. Short-sighted would be driving to the very end of an on-ramp to obtain a slightly better position in the lane of traffic. Far-sighted would be changing lanes well in advance of an on-ramp because one can foresee congestion. Altruistic would be allowing a large gap to form in front of one's car when traffic is merging into one's lane.

If most drivers acted with more foresight or altruism, highways would go faster and all drivers would benefit. However, people are irrational and, perhaps, when a small number of drivers are altruistic, a number at least equal to that can take advantage of them and believe they are benefiting personally, while also causing the entire system to be less efficient.

For this reason, I think a culture shift would have a large effect on the entire system's efficiency.

Pedestrians rarely walk with pure selfishness; they commonly smile and engage others as people, make room on the sidewalk, hold the door, stand on the right side of the escalator, let people of the subway before entering, etc. Not everyone does this, but the majority do and it's part of the culture to do these things. People have been pedestrians for millennia, and it seems obvious that norms would exist governing something as common as walking in public.

Such norms were never brought about formally for drivers.

I think a more intensive driver training focused on shifting drivers to have more foresight and to adopt some of the norms of pedestrian life (seeing others as people not vehicles) would achieve a lot. Perhaps it begins with new drivers and the benefits would gradually take hold.

Agglomeration or explosion?

2009-04-22T14:21:00.010-05:00

"In finance, 'there is a huge network and agglomeration effect,'" Richard Florida quotes former assistant U.S. Treasury secretary Edwin Truman in Florida's recent Atlantic article "How the crash will re-shape America.

The network effect concept -- best illustrated by how much more useful fax machines become when you're not the only person in the world who owns one -- is closely related to positive feedback loops, an idea I have written about before. Agglomeration is studied in geography, and is the essence of both cities and Richard Florida's take on their vital role in society.

Like Jane Jacobs, Florida is passionate about urban diversity. Jacobs would view a diverse neighbourhood as one with several uses, so that it has foot traffic at almost all hours: commuters in the early morning, stroller-moms during the day, yuppie diners in the evening and clubbers in the late night -- all of them, agglomerated, provide themselves and the neighbourhood with security, reducing crime and making it more livable.

But can Florida reasonable extend this idea to the agglomeration of financial centres, as his Atlantic article does? Certainly the historic role of financial centres -- that of connected custodians of capital working in close quarter to distribute society's surplus toward what is hoped to be the most productive purpose -- demanded a Manhattan or Amsterdam or "The City" in London.

Today, however, these distributions are made with computers and telephones, so why New York? Why anything? Why cannot the agglomerated financial core of the world be geographically distributed, linked with electronic access at a premium.

Perhaps people still do deals in restaurants and golf courses. Perhaps, also, the people who do this business will generally only live in a few places on Earth -- London and New York being among them. This is Florida's thesis from earlier writings.

Urban theory is interesting, but far more powerful than either urban theory or even the core of capitalism itself is the destabilization effect of digital communication technologies, which are wiping out entire industries as knowledge and content become instant and free.

New York has a big harbour, so it's not all about red suspenders. But will it still be a city of red suspenders, or are the dock hands waiting to rule?

3-second film review -- The Secret of the Grain

2009-04-14T07:36:00.004-05:00

A mule needs and is loved by his broad, lively mediterranian family. Long scences. French.

Hafsia Herzi is amazing.

Trailor.

The worst phonetic alphabet

2009-04-05T15:53:00.004-05:00

When you spell something in the army or as a pilot, it's common to use words like: yankee, zulu and foxtrot. Some people make up their own, like december, empire, november, november, insidious, summer.

Very few people use these:

Asterisk
Back-slash
Colon
Dot
Eight
Four
Gene
Hyphen
Illicit
Jean
Knows
Louder
Minus
Nine
One
Period
Qu’orn
Repeat
Seven
Three
Underscore
Vowels
Won
X-mas
Yiddish
Zero

(Bonus points: I dare you to come up with a more worse one.)

3-second film review -- Boy A

2009-03-24T13:19:00.004-05:00

The boys who killed James Bulger were released years ago.

Fictional projection of one who was rehabilitated. Are ten year olds innately evil? Or is the blame broader?

Warm warm up with inevitable third act.

Trailer.

How to apologize

2009-03-24T09:39:00.007-05:00

We're presently in an uproar over comments made on a late-night Fox TV program disparaging Canada's military and indirectly slagging our war on terror. Beside the argument that Canada has done a lot of good by staying focused on the ball after 9/11, these 2-am, middle-aged frat boys need to apologize.

So, how did they say sorry for hating on a military that has lost 120 soldiers in some of the fiercest Taliban fights over seven years? Their corporate PR department issued a press release in the name of Greg Gutfeld, one of several people implicated:

I realize that my words may have been misunderstood. It was not my intent to disrespect the brave men, women and families of the Canadian military, and for that I apologize. [The TV show] is a satirical take on the news, in which all topics are addressed in a lighthearted, humorous and ridiculous manner.

Clearly, this is not a heartfelt or spontaneous reply, but a statement that dodges responsibility for what cannot be denied, and then calls it satire. Satire, by the way, is when you tell a lie while winking; there was nothing satirical in the five minute episode.

Contrast this with what Peter MacKay's PR spokesperson Dan Dugas counselled Gutfeld to say:

I think that so-called comedian should stare in the camera at his first opportunity and apologize to all of the families of people he's hurt with these despicable comments. And he's got to say, 'I was misinformed. I was ignorant of the truth and the contribution of the Canadian Forces to the war on terror, and I want to take it back. I know as a comedian that I can fail sometimes; I failed miserably at this so-called comedy.' And his panellists should say the same.

This imagined statement, coming not from Gutfeld but from those he disparaged, would have been much more honest than Gutfeld's own clinical wording. Fox's PR people could learn a few lessons in projecting honesty and sincerity from the spokesman of Canada's Defence Minister:

Make your apology personally and directly.
Actually apologize; don't say you were misunderstood when you were not.
Take responsibility.

3-second film review -- Happy-Go-Lucky

2009-03-22T20:04:00.004-05:00

Raw, effortless and affirming scenes of a good person who adds to a world inhabited by several people who do not.

A serious world perhaps needs grounded lightness.

Trailer.

(London accents of some kind; no English subtitles.)

What is terrorism?

2009-03-22T19:17:00.006-05:00

For nearly a decade, I've been very clear about how I define this word: terrorism is the use of violence against civilians for political leverage.

Examples: bombs in mailboxes blowing up innocent men and women in London and Montreal to bring international media and political attention to the IRA and FLQ, respectively. If you care not about innocent human life, these methods were actually efficient in the short run. Of course, they are evil, perpetrated by evil men, and I believe in the long run they fail because it is hard to gather friends and supporters when your heart is pus and bile and your mind is cracked with hatred.

The PLO has engaged in terror. By my definition, the Oct. 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole was not a terror attack -- I would term that a guerrilla attack. While suicide bombings of a Tel Aviv restaurant is terror.

This definition I feel is important, much more so than in the USS Cole case. The definition should not be molested or forgotten. On Jan. 30, 1972, British Para's in Ulster shot 27 civil rights protesters, killing thirteen, including two teenagers and a priest. All who were shot were unarmed; five were hit in the back. No one has been charged.

My definition has two tests: that the act is against civilians and it is for political leverage. Clearly, Bloody Sunday meets the first test; on the second, it is unclear whether it was murder or terrorism.

But the result of Bloody Sunday is key: a two-decade long, bloody and unnecessary terror campaign by the IRA. If we call it terror only when fighters are not uniformed, we leave an ethical vacuum that is filled with death.

I think my definition gels with a more general sense of justice; while Brits sick of IRA terrorism may have irrationally supported their Paras in 1972, an emotionally sober, disinterested party could only find it disgusting. Irrationally supporting terrorism carried out by men with uniforms and very long, clear chains of command is extending the evil into the population. It cannot stand long. A civilian population that accepts this is bending the bar too far and it must return to centre or snap. I believe that large civilian populations are usually good.

Justice is a difficult, difficult subject -- always being trampled on by heated emotions, inflamed by propaganda. Rational thought -- as Pierre Trudeau might say -- must trump emotional nationalism and the cult of victimhood.

What is intellectualsm?

2009-03-20T13:30:00.008-05:00

I think that women will probably soon be competing head to head with men in the marathon and in Ironman Triathlons. It's about as complicated and unscientific to explain as "the right way to catch fish," but the trends seem to show this, and Brits Paula Radcliff in the 26 miler and Chrissie Wellington in the 140.6 miler are both breaking through the glass pack (sorry).

Radcliff was a bit of an idol to me -- a guy -- when I got into running in 2002. Female athletics is interesting because the Michael-Jordan esq success is more definite. We don't know how fast the men's marathoner could potentially run, or at the time we didn't know the limit of MJ's brilliance, but we can measure exactly the fewer and fewer men who are better than Radcliff and Wellington.

This has nothing to do with the following.

I got into the summer Olympics sometime in the late 1990s or so and I noticed there was an area of sport called "athletics." This seemed odd, because the entire Olympic movement seems to have a lot to do with athleticism, and all of the competitors are called athletes. Why call some sports athletics and not call others athletics?

Well, English is weird. But this term "athletics" is reserved for a more narrow definition of Olympic sport: track, field and marathon. It's arbitrary, but I think it works.

Athletics is a weird term. And so is "intellectual."

What exactly is an intellectual. Are corporate CEOs not very smart? And doctors and lawyers? What about world class musicians, or engineers? Or very smart high school teachers. All of these professions attract mostly smart people; why not call these people intellectuals?

Well, the word appears to be reserved for one of two things. Broadly, you could call anythone who thinks creatively and expresses this verbally or in writing as an intellectual; certainly a world-class architect or say Albert Einstein would fit this. More narrowly, an intellectual (or, perhaps a social-sciences or public intellectual) may be someone who speaks or writes intelligently about important public issues. David Frum or Christopher Hitchens -- who don't appear to do anything but engage in a life-long dialectic -- may be under this narrow definition. They undertake no experiments and produce virtually zero original evidence. This isn't physics. They simply talk or write about society.

So, I wondered for a long time why have a word to describe these people who don't do anything but write or talk to each other? Why not call them writers?

Here's my point. One day -- I think it was the summer of 2004 -- I thought of an idea I called the Simple Moral Imperative. If I wrote down a definition, I cannot find it, but as I recall it goes like this: when tackling an issue, focus only on the indisputable moral issues and achieve understanding and agreement there. Avoid unending debate by converting the unresolvable argument into one of certainties. So, if you're arguing a political issue, start with asking if genocide is occurring. If it is, you don't really need to argue any more. (Maybe you need to send guys with guns.)

So, what are David Frum and Christopher Hitchens? Perhaps they undertake a version of this. Perhaps theirs is a large, public, contribution to a centuries-old conversation in which difficult and "messy" issues are attacked by first identifying the Simple Moral Imperatives associated with each, thus converting a social science debate into a scientific one; converting messy issues of opinion into ones of unambiguous and universal morality. At least in this way they would be advancing intellectual knowledge and not chatting with big words.

AIG bonuses

2009-03-17T08:59:00.004-05:00

No issue has united the left and right like this. A company whose leadership has done nothing but fail for two years; a company whose management is so incompetent that the business -- the world's largest financial institution in 2008 -- would evaporate from the planet if it were not for a $150 billion handout from American taxpayers.

AIG is an epic icon of failure and immorality, responsible to a serious degree for the greatest economic disaster to affect the world in nearly 80 years.

And yet, the leadership is rewarding itself with $150 million in bonuses.

I think this illustrates a problem with how public markets have altered capitalism. We have ceased to think of AIG's management as "the help," when in fact they are an educated form of just that. Because large public companies usually have no clear owner -- just millions of stockholders -- a vacuum forms at the top and is filled by people who work at the company, but own little or none of it. But we have to remember that capitalism is based on ownership, not management. If it was based on management it would be called something like gilded socialism.

In the realm of private, closely held companies, management is just a more skilled form of a company's labour. Owners of private companies hire people with good track records and perhaps education and demonstrated skills, to achieve certain results using the owner's capital. If they are successful, they will usually be paid well, and may be rewarded with some of the profits or perhaps even with a sliver of the owner's capital itself.

But these private company managers know their place -- they know the owner is not an irrelevant abstraction. The owner is often someone they see in the halls and in meetings every day; or at least is someone who visits the office. They cannot fire the owner but the owner can dismiss them.

Public companies should be the same. But this vacuum has allowed management to take the role of owner.

Obama's challenge is to change this perception; to ensure that managers manage and owners decide, among other things, how much managers are to be paid. I fail to understand why this is so difficult in the case of AIG, as Obama's government owns 80 per cent of the firm. Why does Obama not remove AIG's board and appoint a committee representing taxpayers to evaluate the past achievements of AIG's top managers and make decisions about their future ability to create value for the firm. Instead of the loosers controlling the purse strings, they will be purged Once AIG has competent managers and is stabilized, it should be returned to the private sector under a new regime of regulation.

Apart from AIG, we need to understand how this ascension of management occurs, and we need to prevent it. Unless a CEO is like Bill Gates, where s/he owns a large part of the company (ideally a controlling share), all CEOs, CFOs, or SVPs should act as though their "owner" is someone who walks the halls and asks questions about $1,200 trash bins and other things that are difficult to sneak by a private company owner. We need a mechanism to make public companies operate with the kind of attention and passion private company owners bring.

The Democratic party

2009-03-15T22:52:00.006-05:00

Short post: after the Civil War, the Republican Party was despised in the U.S. South and white racists gravitated to the Democratic Party, where they stayed until the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was a major shift: Democrats handed more power (a incremental increase in power) to Southern blacks and white racists and those who just lean that way shifted to the Republicans. The Republican party enjoyed substantial success in elections following this, but America's demographic shift may suggest this was a poor bet. Yes, non-whites are increasing as a fraction of U.S. voters, but it is simplistic to think this is the only effect.

Non-whites are also increasing as a fraction of the population. Even if they do not vote, their very existence -- the fact that many white families have only become friends with an Indian, Chinese, black or Latino family in the last generation -- shifts the thinking of moderates. Moderates who only knew white people could support an all-white, for whites, party in the U.S. Today, it's hard to find people so isolated.

The Democrats have the moral lead in this because they lead the Civil Rights campaign. Obama of course is a Democrat. So this party stands to benefit from the unstoppable spirit of multiculturalism enveloping the United States.

Perhaps this also illustrates the value of moral leadership. Where Dick Cheney's geopolitical view is that power is something to employ to achieve goals -- invade a country to acquire its oil because no one can stop you -- I think History will show that a failure to have moral leadership can be very very expensive.

Is CostCo like a casino?

2009-03-11T22:30:00.008-05:00

Check out this quote from Costco's plain spoken CEO, Jim Sinegal:

At Costco, one of Mr. Sinegal’s cardinal rules is that no branded item can be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.

“They could probably get more money for a lot of items they sell,” said Ed Weller, a retailing analyst at ThinkEquity.

But Mr. Sinegal warned that if Costco increased markups to 16 or 18 percent, the company might slip down a dangerous slope and lose discipline in minimizing costs and prices.

Although there's more to Costco than its prices (the "treasure hunt" it engineers), having a firm limit on retail margins is part of its relationship with consumers. Consumers sometimes win big in this relationship. Where demand is extraordinarily high, Costco could break its 15 per cent rule and both raise profits and reduce out-of-stocks. This is commonly referred to as "good business".

But the unflappable Sinegal stands firm, in a sense allowing consumers to occasionally win a "shopping jackpot," further fulfilling its treasure hunt experience.

For casinos, their stream of revenue requires that they frequently hand over bags of money to random strangers. Any eight year old knows that this is their essential element (that and unnecessary sequins). Stop the jackpots and a casino wouldn't last a day.

Seems obvious. And it is obvious to Jim Sinegal. So why do other businesses subordinate their essential element to bottom line cost control?

3-second film review -- Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

2009-03-11T09:40:00.003-05:00

Brilliant title and exciting soundtrack, but I think they forgot to hire a screenwriter. Nothing real happens to the characters. Good for kids and/or people who like NYC at night. (Michael Cera may have overdone the under-acting).

Trailor.

OneLook -- better than Dictionary.com

2009-03-10T12:55:00.003-05:00

I was reading a book about Google last night; though their success seems inevitable now, there was a point where Yahoo was monetizing their page much more than Google and I could imagine a reasonable person wondering if Google had the right strategy?

Of course, the right strategy was to subordinate monetization to the "product"; offering the fastest and best search results is Google's essential element.

Dictionary.com has a lot of ads and a lot of street cred. Perhaps for this reason I kept it as my standard dictionary for years after discovering the superior OneLook. But today I switched.

OneLook is a writer's dictionary. It's clean and uses a simple command box with instructions right beneath the box. Its best feature, however, is the reverse dictionary: you type a few words and it usually produces hundreds of words or phrases in a sort of semantic triangulation.

Just 'cause I'm at it, I also use these writing tools:

www.rhymezone.com
Jack Lynch Guide to Grammar and Style
Unofficial Canadian Dictionary
Catalysts of creativity: googlism, Google Sets and the full text of Ulysses (not sure why, but 10 minutes of reading this always refreshes my mind)
The best web-based mind-mapping tool I can find: http://bubbl.us/
How to edit copy.

Reform vehicular homicide laws

2009-03-09T15:05:00.003-05:00

Some guy named Caleb Harrison just received an 18-month prison sentence for killing a 44-year old taxi driver named Michael while driving drunk in 2005.

I continually feel these sentences don't reflect the crime. For me, driving drunk and causing injury/death, or racing and causing the same, is akin to throwing hatchets off buildings. We know -- we all know -- that people can die because of this behaviour. So why is it treated more as an accident than as a pre-meditated crime against an unknown victim?

In sentencing him, Justice Michael Tulloch told Harrison that he seemed to be "a decent man" with many positives but he was lucky he didn't receive a prison sentence.

Someone who kills an innocent person with a 2000 lb weapon ceases to be a "decent man." He is a horrible human being; more horrible than virtually all Canadians. He should not be among us non-killers for a decade because he he drove his Mercedes into a taxi and killed a 44-year old man.

Furthermore, he is not allowed to drive for two years, following his release, just as he was not allowed to drink prior to his killing.

Driving drunk, or racing a car, and subsequently injuring or killing someone, should be treated like the crime compounding a crime that it is; in fact, Harrison was a criminal twice just when he got in his car that night -- as a drunk driver and as a violator of his probation.

If a known drug dealer on probation sells rat poison to an innocent person, killing him, he'd be looking at a decade in prison. A drunk driver knows, or should know, that he is doing much the same thing.

Michael Bryant reformed racing laws; perhaps it's easier to do that because the target appears to be outside of "normal" society -- young punks. Well, a young punk who stays under 120 on the highway is a thousand or a million times more decent and responsible as a Canadian than this killer.

Expensive cars -- Chronicle of a Death Foretold

2009-03-09T13:53:00.010-05:00

Tata Motors and Renault have both pioneered very cheap cars; the business strategy is initially based on Eastern European and South Asian economics, a constraint that is disciplining these car-makers to be cost-obsessed. These cars are built to have some reliability and not be ugly, but otherwise be stripped down versions of what we today consider a car.

What is that exactly?

Cars have become sort of space ships; no casual mechanic can understand how they work in their entirety. But a car built from scratch to be simple -- to have far fewer parts and simpler parts -- is a spectacular game-changer for this market. It's as powerful and simple as Wal-Mart's supply chain.

To some degree, cars are status symbols, and middle-class professionals are more likely to buy diapers and CDs at Wal-Mart than to drive a car that screams "cheap." But this doesn't mean they won't. In today's economics, with failed business models for major automakers, reduced disposable income for consumers, and the knowledge that fuel economy will continue to become a priority, small, cheap, reliable, simple cars will come to dominate. To put a figure on it, I predict the $7000 car in Canada by 2014; it will have around 50 hp and hold four passengers and some cargo. It will be noisy on the highway and be devoid of anything digital. It will be repairable by people who can understand how lawnmowers work.

These cars will displace $30,000 and $50,000 cars just as netbooks displaced notebooks and Ryanair displaced BA. Why? It's about distinguishing between features and the essential element of a technology.

The essential element of a car (apart from the status symbol) is that it is used to take people or cargo places that are too far to walk. Perhaps that's so simple that we have forgotten it. But Ryanair understood that the essential element of airlines is that they deliver destinations; a plane ticket is not a gourmet sandwich, nor leather, nor pretty skirts nor stereo headsets, it is Greece, Barcelona or Paris. Equally, netbooks provide the essential elements of surfing the web, writing prose, creating presentations and storing numerical data.

A BMW is a method of getting people or cargo further than one can walk ... PLUS, tens of thousands of dollars worth of surplus features. Certainly, in an era where compensatory consumption is vital, not just to egos but perhaps also to one's career and position among peers, these features were a true investment; like buying expensive season's tickets at the Air Canada Centre. But are we still in that era?

There are numerous supply and regulatory issues to be worked out; it could take five years before we see these cars in Canada. But when we do, I am certain it will form one of the most significant shifts in personal automobiles since the assembly line brought cars within reach of assembly line workers.

Good Business Week article (2007).

Duffy -- lungs that won't quit

2009-03-07T11:06:00.004-05:00

Born the year Mulrony was first elected, Reagan was re-elected and Orwell was deferred, Welsh singer Duffy (her last name, but a good moniker) is 1970s disco/soul reincarnated. It's amazing when young people express old souls; some things you can package, but this girl could carry a SkyDome of Boomers as well as any Rod Stewart.

Rockferry -- easily her strongest single. epic, soaring, fragile. Perhaps written reading Yeats?

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Warwick Avenue -- poppy tear fest

Mercy -- radio friendly with a video shot using Super 8 film preserved from the year her father started university.

Around 1997 everyone started dancing swing. I think Duffy's the vanguard of the new retro swing.

Brilliant Huff Post take on media complicity

2009-03-06T20:51:00.003-05:00

They should teach this blog post, and the much more brilliant Jon Stewart rant that gave rise to it, in journalism schools and frankly schools for citizens in democracies, for a generation.

Clearly, the world economic system failed society in some way. My view -- for a later post -- is that it has a lot to do with the cluster of people called Manhattan and that Rockefeller Plaza isn't in Pittsburgh.

So, not only is it odd that Stewart, though a New York-based show one that I think is outside of the mainstream, speaks truth to ... well, normal people ... but I think it's actually quite expected that the only clear thinking getting broadcast today comes from outside the mainstream.

Will Bunch -- not a fan of Reagan -- gives a few lessons "real" journalists could learn from Stewart's show:

research trumps access. Be smarter than everyone else.
stop pretending the media was not complicit
make it watchable by average people. average people have a mind and can make it up and think critically, but perhaps have little time in their busy lives for stuffy shirted faux gravitas.

Democrats Rush to celebrate

2009-03-04T16:57:00.007-05:00

I wish I could find the quote; Scott Reid, former communication director for PM Martin, once said (to paraphrase), don't look at what a politician says, look at what he wants.

Astutely, Obama's #2 Rahm Emanuel recently called Rush Limbaugh "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party." Of course Emanuel is not praising Limbaugh or the Republicans; he is trying to cement Limbaugh's status in the media as the spokesperson for the party.

This is astute for two reasons: Limbaugh is passionately obeyed by a fanatical core of Republican voters too small as a group to ever form a majority; he is also unappealing to moderates and extremely unpopular among young voters. In other words, he is a polarizing figure who could overwhelmingly win an election of old, white, Evangelical Christians, but is more cancerous than Bush 43 on the national stage. He is a large, loud wedge issue for the Republican party, just as immigration reform may be for the ethnic-friendly, union-friendly Democrats.

Secondly, Limbaugh is an ideologue who earns a living as an entertainer -- as Michael Steele put it -- so he is driven by controversy and the attention it brings. He wants to be outspoken and famous more so than deal with the mundane aspects of helping a party gain or hold power.

Strategically, Rush Limbaugh is a gift to the Democratic party, who should do all they can to maintain Rush's status as the leader of the Right. But as I said at the start, doing so is much more complex than saying, "It benefits me for Rush Limbaugh to be the leader of the Right."

Which begs the question, why are Democrats having fun with this? If you type www.imsorryrush.com into your browser you get an Onion-style satire of RNC leaders who have apologized like scolded children to Limbaugh. You also have this story revealing the coordination of Clinton-era strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, which perhaps shows who is responsible for Limbaugh's current eminence.

Eisenhower didn't reveal Overlord to Great Battles Monthly on June 5, 1944 for a reason -- because he wanted to win, not be adored.

After eight years of being losers, the Democrats finally figured out how to win last year. For their sake, I hope they exercise more control.

Bell Canada buys 750 "The Source" stores

2009-03-03T10:04:00.007-05:00

I have a Rogers Mobile plan and, frankly, I have no problems with it. I bought my phone in a former Rogers video store; perhaps seeing the writing for physical-media video rentals, the company leveraged its retail footprint to generate sales in other areas: TV, mobile, internet, VOIP, etc.

But when I was in that Rogers store, it felt empty. They had a few phone chargers on the wall and maybe some skins, but it was essentially a large empty space with a counter at the end. You don't need to physically browse "internet", "TV" or "VOIP", you just need to talk about it.

So, if Bell and Rogers are essentially in a coke and pepsi contest, where their products are not enormously distinct and they depend on sales rather than uniqueness to succeed, what will be the dynamic of selling Bell in Radio Shack?

It could be a little busy ... maybe people like to buy abstract products like internet and VOIP in a clean room with a counter, as opposed to at a counter with radio controlled wasps. On the other hand, if Bell even breaks even on the radio controlled wasps, they can't help but do better by having the "push-through-tubes" services pushed through 750 shops. And maybe people who walk in for a battery walk out the VOIP, which cannot happen in the Rogers stores.

It will be interesting. Bell faces a lot of challenges both fixing the Radio Shack/Source model and integrating it with consumer communication platforms. But I think there's a lot of upside.

Who knows, maybe Rogers will respond by selling clock radios and printers next to VOIP.

The Go! Team -- everything all at once

2009-03-02T21:36:00.006-05:00

Hockey is a very non-linear game; football has discrete plays with small objectives -- moving the ball more than 3.3 yards per down. Baseball is even more controlled -- they count errors! -- with every motion governed by its own discrete moment of play: each pitch, hit, walk, or steal begins and ends with non-action. But hockey ... it's fluid and fast and violent. Errors are the rule, with incomplete passes, and violence is not part of the play, but part of a second tier of unpublished score-keeping.

Broken Social Scene is a Toronto band that channels latin orchestration into a white-as-folk hipster ensemble. BSS is everthing all at once, and where radio's formula is formulaic music, a band whose basic array of instruments are too complex to comprehend in real time -- nevermind all the other parts of music -- provides cool escapism, like being lost in a mosh pit and loving the ebb of sick sweaty bodies.

BSS is so tight at times ... so I'm not sure if you can classify them as polyphonic. Playing by Heart typifies the ensemble film style; at first you meet Jon Stewart, Sean Connery, Anthony Edwards and Angelena Jolie and some other people, then you get everything all at once. And it's satisfying, like cheese inside cake. Someone on wikipedia described or defined polyphonic literature in a similar way, as Ulysses with it's 18 chapters of differing style.

So, the Go Team -- from England in the Emsemble Kingdom -- makes some of the freshest music I've heard in years. Not since Kanye West in 2004 or Hawksley Workman and Sarah Slean in 2001 has music felt so not derrivative. Sometimes, I swear they sample Sesame Street and draw from whatever hip hop was in 1981. It's cool and retro and discordant, but most of all it feels like a polyphonic or ensemble-like wall of music ... everything all at once and not all of it tight. It's discordant and even the musicians' ethnicity looks like the band was assembled for a public school assembly on friendship. The band was actually assembled; it's the product of some guy named Ian Parton, but the lead singer, Ninja, and keyboardest/vocalist/guitarist Kaori Tsuchida, both stand out on stage.

Top picks:

the wrath of marcie, for sure, for that layered, ensemble sound, ninja's energy and and Kaori's backing vocals.
ladyflash is cool and easy to listen to; it's their only mainstream hit.
milk crisis could have the greatest video of the last decade.
grip like a vice -- i listened to this for about 5 months on web radio before figuring out it wasn't like Salt 'n Peppa from 1986.

New growth theory -- Paul Romer

2009-03-01T15:47:00.005-05:00

Paul Romer is just about the only economist whose ideas seem to be accepted by the "academy", and certainly can be accepted as common sense. In my view, all business/economics can be expressed as a form of New Growth Theory; you're either engaging in creative destruction, like RIM, Amazon or Wal-Mart's supply chain, or you are running a superior business that follows in the wake of creative destruction, such as Tim Hortons or Esso.

Romer doesn't write much pop science, but read this Reason interview. Some quotes:

New Growth Theory shows that economic growth doesn't arise just from adding more labor to more capital, but from new and better ideas expressed as technological progress. Along the way, it transforms economics from a "dismal science" that describes a world of scarcity and diminishing returns into a discipline that reveals a path toward constant improvement and unlimited potential. Ideas, in Romer's formulation, really do have consequences. Big ones.

And for the Marxists ...

One extremely important insight is that the process of technological discovery is supported by a unique set of institutions. Those are most productive when they're tightly coupled with the institutions of the market. The Soviet Union had very strong science in some fields, but it wasn't coupled with strong institutions in the market. The upshot was that the benefits of discovery were very limited for people living there. The wonder of the United States is that we've created institutions of science and institutions of the market. They're very different, but together they've generated fantastic benefits.

Everything's amazing; nobody's happy.

2009-03-01T08:16:00.003-05:00

Louis CK is amazing at sounding like a dumb guy who accidentally said something smart. But in four minutes he just about equals Irvine Welsh on materialism.

Blindness (film) -- 3 second review

2009-02-28T23:53:00.004-05:00

Roger Ebert is either dumb or saw Blindness right after seeing WALL-E.

What would you do if society crumbled? What if you were the world's only witness to it.

(Good film; read the book by Jose Saramago).

It doesn't fit with the over-exposed photographys style but I think the director (and/or Canuck Don McKellar) could have drawn more from Leonard Cohen:

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

Compensatory consumption

2009-02-25T11:16:00.004-05:00

Remember when irony died following 9/11?

Whether you call it compensatory consumption, Veblen goods or just maintaining pace with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, I wonder if Pierre Luigi Sacco's insights will apply after the contraction.

The hallmark of a post-industrial economy is that basically people think in terms of identity when they make their choices. What they actually do is think in terms of, 'if I buy this, how will other people perceive me?' or 'if I buy this, what kind of person I am for buying this?' Why this is becoming so relevant? Well, before answering to that, let's just look at how people in the marketing departments actually address you when they try to sell you those goods. Well, they address you exactly in this respect.

The product itself is somewhat disappearing from the centre stage. What's just coming up is the kind of person who buys this kind of goods or the symbolic representation of the good, rather than the good itself, to the point that actually, they don't even make promises about what exactly that product delivers. What they promise is how you'll feel about the good, which is totally different.

The economics of identity is a tricky field because it's entirely new. We don't know anything about it. Why should these problems be threatening? Well, consider this, if scarcity is the hallmark of the economics of survival, what does it mean thinking in terms of scarcity in the economics of identity? Basically, what becomes scarce in this context is not the availability of goods, there are plenty of them, is a sort of invasion, we simply can't just protect ourselves by this attack of goods I mean popping up everywhere.

But, what becomes scarce is 'who can you pretend to be'?

Feedback loops and inertial blindness

2009-02-24T11:32:00.030-05:00

In between reading about the decline of western civilization due to economic collapse, I like to lighten up and learn about the coming decline of global civilization due to environmental collapse.

Recently, it's become clear that common sense can go a long way toward understanding a complex world. Models and world leaders could not predict the current state of our economy, but if you think carefully about whether people can accumulate debt forever, some things become more clear. Jane Jacob s was a successful intellectual who observed and experienced reality and reported on it and theorized anew based upon it. She had little formal training, but she's been proven dead right on urban planning.

So, I'd like to offer two theories based not in math, but in observation of the economy and ecology.

Ecology and the economy are closely related. A hundred years ago, much of Canada's GDP was a measure of things that grow in dirt, livestock that eat those things, the harvest of trees and other organic material, and the mining of minerals and other deposits. In other words, our wealth closely approximated things we took from the Earth.

Today, we have a service economy, and this is underpinned by Paul Romer's theory of endogenous growth; ie. economies grow because they generate technological change, which makes things more efficient. Today, we take more corn, trees, deposits and livestock off of the land, but it's a fraction of our economy; in the large part, we design better fuels, improve the lay-out of cities, improve the rubber in tires, invent information technology and cure pot-holes. We incrementally improve the efficiency of society, all while freeing more people to spend more time thinking up more improvements.

This is called a positive feedback loop, where "positive" is not a moral phrase. In fact, dire ecological predictions are underpinned by positive feedback loops; in the podcast behind the Gwynn Dyer link above (and here), three such positive feedback loops are named around global climate change:

the melting of the polar ice caps, which has visibly started and cannot be disputed by people looking at them, removes an essential and quite big "Earth mirror" and replaces it with the Arctic equivalent of a black driveway.
the melting of glaciers will release ancient stores of methane gas, which is 10-times worse as a greenhouse gas than C02
as oceans warm, their capacity to absorb CO2 will decrease.

Each of these phenomena require a small trigger -- such as our global output of greenhouse gasses -- and they will then feed upon themselves, and each other, far beyond the capacity of our total economy to exert control. When you start to enter a black hole, you cannot get out.

Economically, the credit crisis was also a positive feedback loop, with the collapse in home prices starving consumers of their raison-de-spend, causing layoffs and further bank failures, accelerating the cycle. It really doesn't matter what the trigger is when you've been absent-mindedly storing pails of gasoline in your living room.

Tragically, the economic and ecological loops could trigger a third, political positive feedback loop. Should the ecological loop trigger migrations from equatorial areas, refugee issues arise just as the economic loop triggers civil unrest generally. Governments that should be tackling the first two feedback loops will be distracted trying to reverse the political loop. At just the moment when we need a belle epoque to create regulatory and technological solutions to these problems, we will have the least capacity to do so.

Now, in case you have a gun in your mouth, you may want to read a little further. I'm asking you to consider a second effect, which I'm calling inertial blindness.

Let's say that you want to build a party town somewhere in the Nevada desert. You require water, so you invest in technologies to draw the water from ancient sources deep underground and over time this water enables your manufactured city to generate billions of dollars in both private wealth and tax revenue. But as your city grows, your annual draw on the underground water supply becomes significant. Although your economic growth continues, you're creating an ecological deficit in doing so and the situation becomes absurd. That it continues can only be evidence of both blindness and inertia. No rational person would build a large city on top of a 10-year water supply, but inertial blindness allows this. No rational person would try to build the CN Tower 10,000 feet high, just because at 1800 feet things were going so well.

Borrowing to consume some goods is an interesting strategy, especially for a young person who needs a house and a car before s/he can pay for these things. But what if the inertia of this consumption continues into the realm of blindness, to where consumption-beyond-means occurs because not doing this is harder than doing it (also, see Sacco).

The oceans have absorbed roughly 30 per cent of CO2 emissions since the start of the industrial age. But we are inertially blind to the fact that they cannot absorb infinite CO2 emissions. At best, they will stop absorbing these emissions; at worst they will become emitters themselves. Inertial blindness may lead us to turn 70 per cent of the Earth's surface into a smoke stack.

When borrowing and consumption slackened in the early 1990s, quantitative minds who were financial experts engineered new financial products, capable of extending growth. Again, this was inertial blindness -- it was anything but real growth, but it allowed the real growth to transition into theatrical growth. Following 9/11, theatrical growth was accelerated with more creative mortgage products and low interest rates. (Note bene, we did get the Segway out of this decade).

I'm writing all of this because I think it is essential that we develop models -- more sophisticated than I'm capable of creating now -- which identify and isolate these two phenomena, allowing policy makers to kill their causes. It is important that the national conversation (again, what a terrible phrase) include terms that mean what I mean when I say positive feedback loop and inertial blindness. We need to know when we're cutting down the last tree on Easter Island and when we're switching from tree-based energy to alternative energy. We need to know when growth is real and when it is a stage play in a dark theatre.

It is just shocking that the top people in our society did not know these things.

Obamanomics

2009-02-19T10:15:00.003-05:00

It's waaaay to early to define if/what it is, but the word is hilarious.

I can't stop thinking of manamanah.

The Kitchen PC -- Asus

2009-02-19T10:08:00.003-05:00

It's not quite a fridgebook, but life is incremental.

Asus Kitchen PC.

(Does anyone else remember Commodore 64's being pushed for the capacity to organize recipes?)

Book review -- Harper's Team

2009-02-11T16:29:00.006-05:00

Tom Flanagan, whom I've described as a Calgary School teacher, was an intimately trusted advisor to PM Harper from their days at the University of Calgary and in forming policy for the reform party.

I'm not a Conservative, so I didn't read this book out of admiration for Harper. I do admire what he's accomplished, though. There's a line in the final few pages that suggests only four people have strung together Conservative governments of any meaning since John A, and that all of them did it in a way that inflamed the country and ultimately harmed Conservatism in Canada. We know that Brian Mulroney built the Quebec wing of his grand coalition by inflaming the nationalism that nearly cost us the country.

I read "Harper's Team" because I'm very impressed with Harper's strategic skill. The book appears to be a fantastically candid -- almost too candid -- peek into the backrooms of leadership races and general elections. Covering the late 1990s and 2000s, it also captures the changes in political campaigning, which reached an entirely new level last November, well after the book was published.

"Harper's Team" is a frank, detailed, un-objective but not unbalanced history of political campaigning in this era. It's of the nitty gritty -- how to telephone people and how to pay for those telephone calls. And it's framed around a narrative -- the rise of Harper -- which makes it far more readable than a textbook.

If there was substantial emphasis on issues of phone banks and postal drops, perhaps there was not enough emphasis on the strategy of triangulation. Flanagan relates that he gave Harper a copy of Dick Morris' "Power Plays", which as a history of several modern and ancient political campaigns provides as comprehensive description of triangulation as I've read. Harper reads the book on a solemn vacation following an election loss and returns re-invigorated.

Frankly, he has triangulated the entire national "conversation" (what an odd word that is). The Quebecois are a Nation -- and the Liberals are no longer inside that circle. Most recently, Harper triangulated himself out of the conservative sphere (the geometry is difficult, but the principles are sound) with a stimulus package bigger than Liberals could have imagined.

Triangulation, as I believe Dick Morris roughly put it, is to adopt in part the policies of your competitors, and make them your own. A divided opposition is no opposition.

Liberals in this country need to swallow a lot of pride, recognize that the Conservatives are not even close to being the B team; we need to all read this book.

Book Review -- What is America?

2009-02-05T22:40:00.006-05:00

I read this a month ago, so if America changed in some way in the meantime, forgive me.

What is America?

This is not a book about the present, per se. It's not a discussion of Nixon going to China or Obama rising from Chicago. It begins in 1492 and neatly describes the relationship between the Americas and the rise of Europe.

In 1492, I recall from a Lonely Planet book, Isabella and her husband completed the reconquest of Spain. Oh, and Columbus landed at a Breezes resort.

Ronald Wright makes an original argument that begins as follows:

Incan and Mayan societies were among the most advanced on Earth at 1492.
They compared well with China. Europe was a backwater.
Columbus' Spanish followers were inferior warriors, technologically speaking, to New World societies, and had they not indelicately sneezed while losing battle after battle, we would not get Telemundo today.
Yes, a few European airborne diseases all but wiped out several civilizations.

Much of that is well known by high school students. But where Wright gets pioneering is his two-fold argument that:

Europeans did not establish societies in the Americas so much as they inherited some of the world's most advanced cities from civilizations that had accidentally fallen to plagues. Key among this was the U.S.; the image of nomadic tribes being attacked by Kevin Costner bears little relationship to the large cities built along the east. There is no Machu Picchu because Atlanta ended up on top of it.
Newly enriched New Worlders shipped their wealth all mercantile-like back to Europe, which went on a 500-year nouveau-bling shopping spree and took over Earth. But Europe's rise at a time when Arab North Africa was more technologically advanced was a result of New World wealth, not larger foreheads or something.

Very easy read. Very mind-changing.

Online, half a second delay is death

2009-02-04T16:40:00.000-05:00

Link.

Howard Dean & Barack Obama

2009-01-21T23:21:00.011-05:00

How Howard Dean revived the Democratic party

Boston Herald "The pioneering that Dean and aide Joe Trippi did on Internet fund-raising served as a model for Obama’s greatly expanded operation which raised more than $100 million."
Speech. We raised more money than the RNC, and we did so by attracting thousands of new small donors ... We trained tens of thousands of new activists ... Now we need to build on our successes while transforming the Democratic Party into a grassroots organization that can win in 50 states.
Conservative view. "Part of what made Obama's vaunted online operation succeed where Howard Dean's fizzled—and this is something his online people themselves always stress—was that it was an organic component of the broader brick-and-mortar campaign."

Why Obama won

Politico. "The campaign’s early decision to play on a more ambitious map than other Democratic nominees was the source of his mandate"
Washington Post, Feb. 2007. "The gathering of several thousand students at George Mason University in Fairfax underscored the potential power of online communities in the 2008 campaign. Its genesis was a group created last summer on Facebook.com, a Web site frequented by college students who post profiles and assemble virtually." "Another Facebook group, Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack), was started less than three weeks ago and has already recruited 200,000 members."
Advertising chess at the LA Times. "Obama has “stretched the playing field,” said Edward Carmines, who teaches political science at Indiana University. “Now, in the last month of the campaign, Sen. McCain is having to make very tough decisions where to spend his money.”"
The $5 philanthopist @ givemeaning.com, Feb 2008. According to Barack Obama's official website, more than 280,000 people have created accounts on BarackObama.com. From those online accounts, 6,500 grassroots volunteer groups have been created and more than 13,000 off-line events have been organized through the site. Over 370,000 individual online donations have been made, more than half of which are less than $25 donations .And most interesting to me, personal fundraising pages (individual fundraising pages where you proactively recruit your social network to donate through your personal fundraising page) have raised over $1.5m.
The Atlantic -- mid-campaign. Thoughtful. "Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, [emphasis mine] veteran activists and first-time contributors ... If the most that any one person could write a check for was $2,000 [it was said] then the important people suddenly became those who would put their hand up and say, ‘I’ll raise $50,000 or $100,000.’ ... North and Gorenberg borrowed the subscription model for their “Win Back the House” project. Instead of asking for a big check up front, as they would for a presidential candidate, they invited each of their House candidates to the Bay Area over the course of the year, so that supporters could give recurrent, but smaller, donations ... As before, the emphasis was not on writing big checks but on building raiser networks, including people who couldn’t contribute much themselves." "The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don’t know and trust ... When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one (which Spinner found) that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry “Yes we can!” and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too ... It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize ... The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” Rospars says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.” The organizing principle behind Obama’s Web site, in other words, is the approach Mark Gorenberg used with such success—only scaled to such a degree that it has created an army of more than a million donors and raisers ... The most striking thing about all this was that the headquarters is entirely self-sufficient—not a dime has come from the Obama campaign. Instead, everything from the computers to the telephones to the doughnuts and coffee—even the building’s rent and utilities—is user-generated, arranged and paid for by local volunteers. It is one of several such examples across the country, and no other campaign has put together anything that can match this level of self-sufficiency ... In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year. [emphasis mine] “If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,” Gorenberg told me, “and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online ... It’s possible to track the network effects [emphasis mine] in the growing fund-raising numbers that seem to arrive in ever larger denominations: $25 million … $30 million … $35 million … in February, the staggering $55 million—nearly $2 million a day.

Good PR v. bad PR

2008-12-20T15:23:00.002-05:00

Bad PR: This killer pop song's popularity is exploding!

Good PR: Here's a clip of Rick Astley singing "Never gonna give you up"

Wine is fine. For a good time.

2008-12-17T01:23:00.002-05:00

Billy Munnelly writes about wine in Toronto; my dad subscribes to his newsletter and even had him over to entertain some friends. It was a solid night.

He's got a wine guide out and as I began reading through it, I found it interesting.

I saw Sideways, and liked it. But I have no use for detecting notes of chocolate in fermented, foot-stamped grapes.

For me, the LCBO (ie. the only place one can buy liquor in Ontario) is big and confusing. There are a lot of wines, and I think I'm in the majority when I say that I usually look for ones with cool labels, and that are Merlot or Pinot Noir. I did a tour of Jackson Trigg's once, and I drank Beaujolais Nouveaux in France for 3 weeks straight, so I have two points of reference. Other than that, it's a collage of neat labels. One picks one.

Now I pick two. Billy divides wine into three types: simple, medium or rich, and then white or red. He takes what the LCBO offers and selects only "good" wines, then categorizes them: simple, medium or rich.

This makes wine much more comprehensible. So now, I always buy two bottles; usually a simple and a rich one. And I drink both in the same night. Alternating glasses. You learn a lot about a simple wine in the context of a rich wine.

So, if you drink a lot of wine, and don't know what the hell it's all about (and don't want to detect notes of gooseberry), try Billy.

The Prime Minister is

2008-12-03T15:27:00.003-05:00

I read another good quote today, which perhaps helps to clarify how we are governed. It read: "The prime minister is the person who can retain the confidence of the house."

Due to issues of marketing and branding, the spectacle of elections concerns party leaders. And, in fact, U.S. presidential elections really are about party nominees. But government is not marketing and the U.S. president is not the Canadian prime minister.

On the Governor General's desk when she gets home

2008-12-03T11:23:00.006-05:00

The flight back from Prague today will not be relaxing for our GG. The role is almost entirely ceremonial, but if in fact it were completely ceremonial, I think we would by now have replaced the GG with a piece of nicely carved wood, or something gilded and inurt.

David Frum makes a silly argument that it is unconstitutional (or practically so) for a parliament to chose a prime minister. Perhaps we (and by "we" I mean more than one Canadian) are confusing our system with the U.S.'s, in which the Presidency is an institution apart from the parliament. After all, Canadians seemed to follow the U.S. presidential election more than our own.

But Canada is different, and as long as we are not the U.S., we should perhaps see the prime minister's role for what it is. The PM is not elected by the people generally, and has no mandate independent of parliament. He is instead chosen by parliament; if that parliament wants to organize into parties and vote as blocks, the constitution could really care less.

So it is perfectly reasonable and normal in Canada for a parliament to change who is the prime minister. In fact, Kim Campbell and Paul Martin both became Prime Ministers without an election. If this parliamentry power doesn't feel correct, that suggests we have been influenced by the U.S. We can change the constitutionm but we cannot ignore the constitution.

I feel that, because it would be very easy for three opposition parties to merge into one party, it is also legitimate for them to temporarily form a coalition. A super-Liberal-NDP-Bloc party received about two-thirds of the votes in the last election; the Conservatives, about one third. So it is not wrong for them to control parliament, from where our PM springs.

At any rate, I think it's important to not attack the legality of the situation we're facing. Let's discuss the other implications for a Liberal PM leading a coalition government before Christmas.

Of most importance is the effect on Western alienation. Stephen Harper is a product of the rise of the West, and decades of anger at feeling outside the centre of power were somewhat alieved when a Reform-heavy Conservative party took power in Ottawa. The re-election of that party affirms that Canada does not reject the West.

So, for left-leaving, French-speaking, Liberal-appointed Governor General to take the country's leadership away from the West and hand it to a French-speaking, failed leader who is rejected by his own party, and who requires separatists to stay in power ... this will not play well out west. I think this would inflame Western anger more than any previous policy or slight. The optics are not entirely of Harper's failure, as perhaps they should be, but of a system stacked against the West.

I am not opposed to Rae or Ignatieff being crowned Liberal leader and PM. Both have considerably more government experience than Brian Mulroney did when he ascended to the highest office. Frankly, although Harper was a policy wonk, he had never really run anything more substantial than an SME before running the country.

But a Rae or Ignatieff appointment as PM again smacks of elitism.

All this said, I feel that a coalition government is a reasonable path for Canada. More than 300 MPs represent Canadians' interests in parliament; a group of about two-thirds of them came together and said that Canada requires a fiscal stimulus package, given the state of the global economy. I think they're right about that. And I think our system is right to allow them to remove from power a government that fails to deliver this.

Creative web searching

2008-11-29T08:19:00.008-05:00

For a brief period, just knowing what google was, and how to do a keyword search, made you a magic ambassador of factology.

But the value in web2.0 sites spills over into the commons; ie. these sites tend to organize the internet in ways other than keywords.

Del.icio.us is a tool for storing one's bookmarks in the "cloud". I've written before that its best use is actually clipping and sharing news stories -- a sort of live repository of external content related to what you care about (ie. you and five friends agree to store all articles on the business strategy of Furbees in there).

But Del.icio.us also works as a research tool. The site's designers chose to use a logical, word-based hierarchy for their URLs (there's a better name for that?!). Ie. if your name is david11, your del.icio.us account is del.icio.us/david11.

What made Delicious (getting tired of the periods) unique when it emerged was its use of tagging. So, instead of just saving a news story or website to Delicious, you assign a few keywords (or tags) to it as well, allowing you to find this URL easily in time.

So, the spillover effect of most of the internet being tagged is that you can search for content by its tag, and with the logical URL system they use, that's as easy as:

http://del.icio.us/tag/a-word-that-describes-whatever-the-heck-you're-looking-for.

Even better, you can do a keyword search within this tag.

My last post was on Ryanair's business strategy. If you Google that, the results are annoying. Plan B is del.icio.us/tag/ryanair ... and then a keyword search for strategy (there are 11 answers, all of which are interesting).

Furthermore, I not only have 11 answers, but 11 people/accounts, each of which could lead to related ideas ... things I haven't yet thought of. Sort of like, if I like Fiest and RHCP, an algorithm predicts that I may like your cousins weird band from Wisconsin (most likely, I would hate it).

Google, you know algorithms ... get on this Delicious train!

Ryanair -- strategy and operations

2008-11-28T15:53:00.009-05:00

Ryanair is easily my favourite company. For me, business is about strategy and operations.

I don't really care whether BCE is a private company focused on servicing debt, or a public company serving regulators. Their decisions around content, and the pipes (including mobile ones) through which they push that content is most interesting.

Here's a quote about Ryanair:

Geoff Van Klaveren, an analyst in London at Exane BNP Paribas, said Ryanair hauls in more revenue, relatively speaking, from "ancillary" sales than any other airline. In the last financial year, to March 31, 2008, this category was equivalent to 18 per cent of total revenues of €2.7-billion, up from 14 per cent in 2005 and 11 per cent in 2001. "This will keep climbing," he said, which is one of the reasons Ryanair is one of the few airlines that carries an Exane "sector outperform" rating.

When I worked for a gas station company, I learned that their strategy is to effectively break even on the gas (they buy it from people making money on taking it out of the ground), and sell a few $2.75 cokes and maybe a $6.00 bag of milk to everyone who passes through the door.

In fact, if Ryanair trusted the right company, it could sell off its entire aircraft operations division and rent back the flights, then operate solely as an ancillary business. As I said before, their business model is merely to convince a large fraction of Europe to lock themselves inside one of their pressurized, tube-shaped stores for 6 or 8 hours a month.

Conversations with Sean Penn

2008-11-28T10:19:00.005-05:00

This was a much more thorough and interesting (though fawning) foreign policy essay by Sean Penn than I expected; it is based on interviews with two leftists heads of state, who are viewed as (lukewarm) enemies by the U.S.

I've noticed Penn's political activism; certainly his campaign to Iraq immediately before the invasion in 2003 had the potential to end his Hollywood career.

But clearly, based on the quality of this article, and on his friendship with Iraq-war enabler Christopher Hitchens, with whom he and historian Douglas Brinkley travelled to Caracas and Havana, he is likely among the leading foreign policy minds in Hollywood.

Maybe that doesn't say much. But based on the media reverberations of his article in the Nation, he may be among the U.S.'s leading foreign policy instruments in the Americas.

He quotes Joe Biden -- no right wing ideologue -- as calling Chavez a dictator. While Fidel Castro is a dictator, clearly Chavez is no more a dictator than was Bush or Pierre Trudeau for that matter. Penn also appears to be take the most significant step toward resolving US-Cuba relations of anyone in the last 30 years. Fidel is writing his memoirs and Sean Penn is granted the first interview by Cuba's new president, who took office earlier this year. In the interview Raul reveals that the U.S. military itself has long dropped the ideology driven agenda the U.S. formally has held against Cuba. According to Penn, the U.S. State Department and military meet with Cuban officials (not the president) every third Friday, a tradition that began more than a decade ago. According to Penn, the U.S. views Cuba as a key strategic player in their campaign against drugs.

Penn also raises the concern that Columbia is viewed now as the U.S.'s Monroe Doctrine ally -- sort of an Israel in Latin America. So we get into the question of whether rightest human rights violations are better than leftist ones.

Personally, I am very comfortable with the ethics of Canadian business people, so that increased trade with, say, China, will necessarily and almost organically work toward resolving issues of human rights -- though not necessarily democracy itself. I feel the same about Cuba. Though there our only trade barrier is a mass of land, 48 states wide.

At any rate, what a surprise to read that Sean Penn not only has a brain, but is himself acting as a subtle instrument for change.

That said, let me be clear that Cuba is still a dictatorship, though warming under Raul, that it imprisons non-violent political protesters, and that it needs to not be/do both of these things. I love the tale of Che Guevara's youth on a motorbike, but he very clearly murdered many innocent poets and intellectuals -- not in battle but kneeling on the ground. His silk screen is no icon for me.

American Barackracy

2008-11-25T20:18:00.001-05:00

3-second movie review -- Quantum of Solace

2008-11-24T10:47:00.004-05:00

An invincible guy tries to take down a greasy CEO. Beautiful scenery.

A little busy

Media relations should be the absense of bullshit

2008-11-19T17:45:00.002-05:00

Jim Sinegal is the CEO of Costco; despite my knee jerk dislike of big box, I like him.

In this magazine feature, the journalist asks him why he installed skylights in his stores. A thousand media relations professionals would have each said something lie, Because it helps us consume less energy and lighten our environmental footprint.

The answer of this business executive with 140,000 people reporting to him: "There's no sense in me BS-ing you. The reason we did it originally was exactly as you're suggesting -- to save money. We put the skylights in so that we didn't have to turn the lights on. But of course it's also environmentally correct. "

Integrity is everything. Now, I trust him. And so what if his environmental record is 0.4% less impressive than a media relations guy could have presented it (as). He, and his company, have integrity.

The snowball

2008-11-15T22:35:00.003-05:00

I haven't read the new (authorized) bio of Warren Buffet, but I wonder if the author's title, "Snowball" describes the effect I associate with this word.

When you have a lot of things to do, and you're not sure where to start, start with the easy bit. After that, you'll have less to do and I hope a few easy bits left. Do those next. Soon, you'll be at a stage with:

a) less to do than before

b) momentum.

And the snowball rolls along, picking up snow and growing exponentially.

3-second film review -- W (Oliver Stone)

2008-11-14T14:49:00.002-05:00

This film carefully and expertly moves within the vacuum of purpose between satire and historical reality.

Is it illegal to break the law?

2008-11-12T21:54:00.005-05:00

An interesting question will arise between today and Jan. 20 around the semantics of the word "illegal."

This article argues what many suspect; that Mr. Bush and others in his employ broke the laws of the United States hundreds or thousands of times.

Other than the invasion of Iraq itself, we don't really know what if any crimes George Bush committed. But we do know that journalists who attempted to investigate these crimes were themselves victims of threats from the people who currently work for Mr. Bush.

So, if a President commits a crime, is it illegal? If you do commit crimes, and your country's Attorney General sits next to you at work, and you're not in jail, then it is not illegal to break the law.

Power is a funny thing. Mr. Bush is about to lose it, and not in a subtle way. His family name, his ideological partners, his team and much of his party have lost almost everything. They will have no real power, of course -- other than high but not stratospheric personal wealth, and good connections. They will have no coercive power because their people will be out of power. No one associated with Bush who does not repute him will have any statesman-like standing after he leaves office.

Almost like Nixon, he will be completely stripped of everything. And then, two things will happen:

a) he will be powerless against the people he pushed around, and who have been holding in years of disclosure about what he and they did that broke the law but was not illegal.

b) he will be a private citizen in a country with a massively more powerful domestic security apparatus. He created a monster, which is incredibly stupid when you have a term limit.

Should Bush be found to have committed crimes, and those crimes be considered illegal ones, I'm not sure I like the actual optics of Bush going to prison. It's too vindictive, and he's a symbol. But President Obama may just find it nearly impossible to stop the tide of indictments against people who broke the law while serving Bush, thinking somehow that it wasn't illegal.

What Obama's win means for me.

2008-11-10T22:22:00.009-05:00

I wanted Barack Obama to become president from about 2005 or 2006 onward. I think his charisma first caught me, and his single policy decision: to oppose the Iraq war when it was just as wrong as it is today, but when few public people would say so. I responded to that because virtually everyone in my country opposed the war before it began for exactly the reasons that virtually everyone in his country does now.

I'm not American, and I feel it's arrogant or overbearing for me to care too much about U.S. domestic policy. I'm no fan of Quebec separtism, and it annoys me when foreign people delve into that issue with little knowledge of Canada, or of the undercurrents of that failed movement to destroy a country. And so I don't want to tell Americans to support gay marriage. But I do want to tell them to stop locking people in cells on island bases without normal laws. And I want to tell them to not lie to pre-emptively invade a country that poses little threat, when other measures may have come to a similar, less bloody end. I want to tell them to stop picking innocent people off the streets and from their homes in allied countries, taking them to secret places, and torturing them.

Barack Obama was the only person I felt would do this. And it looks like he may follow at least this spirit -- which I feel is a far more American spirit than what America has recently been. I'm not a beliver in American Exceptionalism, but I'm a believer in the power of this idea to do good; I want people around the world, and in my country too, to look at the United States as an almost immutable force for the steady progress of good in the world.

So on Nov. 4, I was almost shocked to realize that Barack Obama is black. I was fixated on his three unusual names -- especially the middle one. But I had hardly reflected on what it means for a black man to be elected by a white electorate in a country still not healed from the legacy of slavery. Barack Obama, and his wife and young girls will inhabit a house built by slaves. A house with an allusive name. I cried when he won, because it shocked me that, in one night, the entire American conversation around race has changed.

It's been six days, and I don't fully believe that it's happened. I said in October that I was waiting for Christmas, and I wasn't sure it would happen. Even when he won Penn. and Ohio I still worked out ways he could lose. But today feels like a continuing Christmas in which the massively wrong trajectory the world's guardian of classical liberalism (despite their brand-based fear of calling it that) had taken, was corrected.

I think, with it going the right way, the all-important long term stability of things in our lives will continue. And, perhaps, the world will be a better place in eight years.

GO(R.I.)P.

2008-10-31T08:35:00.001-05:00

Tagging takes extreme discipline

2008-10-24T09:29:00.002-05:00

But it pays off.

Rather than storing documents in folders, tagging those documents with extreme discipline and using smart folders (and/or quick searches) makes it much easier to findlocate yer stuff.

Cool article on metatagging on OSX; Vista is similar.

Big Box web

2008-10-23T20:09:00.004-05:00

I live in a town that's grown from about 20,000 people to about 65,000 people in six or so years. It's a suburb of Toronto; or, in a sense, a suburb of the Toronto suburbs.

I think, of the 45,000 people who just moved here, most came from the nearby suburbs. One thing you notice about this town is how few people shop on its traditional main street -- it's a pretty street with traditional shops, but at peak times it's dead. My theory is that, these people who came from other suburbs return to those suburbs to shop; they are used to the big box stores with big value. To the locals, it may seem odd to drive for 45 minutes to buy meat, but to suburbanites that's an average Saturday (ie. hell). You could say that main street has been disintermediated by people whose commute has conditioned them to long drives.

I think something similar occurs on the Web. I was listening to Cat Stevens on youtube (ie. the universal juke box) and wanted a listing of tracks on a cassette tape that I likely lost five years ago; I wanted to listen to the songs on YouTube in the same order as the album/cassette.

What did I do? Until recently, I would have gone to hmv.com, because that's a Canadian website at the online source for physical music media. But before I started typing, I realized that Amazon is better than HMV. I don't really care that much that it's in the U.S.

I don't care about the more local option; all that I care about is the one big answer that I can store in my head. I can keep a few dozen URLs in there, and Amazon.com covers off a lot of products.

So, as far as the web goes, maybe things are spiky and not flat. Maybe there's only room for one Amazon, and one eBay and one Google, etc. The Network Effect supports this, too.

But the flat Earth argument would be that sophisticated searches could flatten all of the Amazon competitors and provide me with a list of prices. So Amazon becomes where I research and price determines where I buy. But maybe Joe the plumber/surfer doesn't use that type of thing.

The FridgeBook

2008-10-22T20:01:00.004-05:00

Have you read about the Asus Eee? For well under $500 ($300 on Amazon at the moment), you can get a pretty basic, really small, Linux laptop.

You're not meant to audit GE on it, but by relying a bit on the cloud, you can do quite a bit, for really not very much. Great for students. Good as a "household junker" laptop; I'm sure a few will find their ways to garage workshops or on whatever floor of the house currently lacks a terminal.

But, let's by frank, at 7" the thing's still a clunker. If it were a search engine, it'd be Yahoo, not Google.

I think that, somewhere between the iPhone -- which sits in pockets on street corners, and comes out in meetings and bathrooms -- and the Asus Eee, is an untapped market that I call the FridgeBook (or fridge computer ... whatever).

FridgeBooks would be like iPhones, but with much larger screens. They'd have magnets that would let you stick 'em to your fridge. They'd be always-on and always on wifi. So as families do what families do at home -- more often than not in and around the kitchen -- they have a device so efficient and close, it can tell them:

what to wear outside
what movie to see
family TTD
grocery list
family calendar
a recipe ...
whatever TV has/will become
visual voicemail(R)(C)(A)

I've said before: the difference between getting that type of information in 3 seconds or 10 seconds is critical. Go grab your Vista or OSX laptop and try one of these searches ... walking, booting up, etc ... it's 2 minutes or more. Asus Eee may be closer to 10 seconds. I'm saying, I want 3.

This FridgeBook(D) will be a seamless part of every nuclear family, just like cooking with radiation.

For now, the iPod Touch makes a pretty good substitute. Goods: wifi, Web, touch screen. Bads: small, no frigg'n magnets.

Google automates creativity with Google Sets

2008-10-22T10:52:00.004-05:00

Writing is output, and you need to load up your brain with ideas every so often or your output begins to look like bad copies of your previous output; like the dumber cc's of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity.

I'm a writer and my tool box is a set of bookmarks I drag around from computer to computer, browser to browser. I think I use rhymezone, onelook and a list of idioms the most.

But the ever innovative Google Labs -- in which 1000 PhD's are locked deep within Cheyenne Mountain for 18 months at a time to develop world-changing web tools -- has released a new tool called Google Sets.

It's simple: you think of a few concepts and let Google Sets derive common themes between the concepts. They should have called it Google Triangulation; either way, it does some of the creative thinking for you.

Pink Floyd vigorously defending the introduction of electronics into their music; Geddy Lee had a trite saying about that. In both cases the view was that electronic instruments don't replace the creative process; they're just new tools for a musician to work with.

But I think Google Sets, etc., perhaps does replace a bit of thinking. It obfuscates derivation, but doesn't filter it through the mind. Okay, so is filtered derivation creativity? I think this just got a bit too philosophical.

Google Sets: makes it darn easy to come up with stuff!

If you like your politics with math ...

2008-10-21T23:00:00.001-05:00

The U.S. race doesn't get more quant than:

www.fivethirtyeight.com

Two unlikley Obama supporters.

2008-10-21T10:49:00.004-05:00

In Colin Powell's talk endorsing Obama, I was struck by his credibility; he seemed entirely un-partisan. Entirely objective and paternal, cutting through the partisan swipes with a very decent case for electing Barack Obama.

He's also a conservative. National Security Advisor to Regan, architect of the first Gulf War, and enabler of the second.

Chirstopher Hitchens is also an enabler of the second war, though I'm not quite sure anyone can nail down his small-letter affiliation. He's anti-Clinton (Bill), anti-Bush II, pro-Gulf II, anti-Kissinger, and anti-Mother Teresa. Seriously. The title of his book on her: "The Missionary Position."

Hitchens was, or became, a rampant supporter of Gulf II, based on his liberal fear of totalitarian strains of Islam. But this principle led him to defend neo-cons and oppose those who questioned the war. I think he lost his way quite a bit after 9/11, and that's not forgivable because one should be right, or pretty close to right, in a crisis. He was way off.

But Hitchens all but endorses Obama, albeit in his rambling, Oxford-intellectual prose.

Hitchens first came to me as a sort of un-hippie liberal. He called himself a contrarian, and I've always appreciated his arguments, wrong as they sometimes are.

Ken Adelman is essentially the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld-Nixon you've never heard of. He too endorses Obama in a New Yorker article.

To be fair, both of these men reject McCain's most-recent record as much as they endorse the alternative. But for two men with a seat at the table of neo-conservatism, or a variant thereof, to support one of the most left-wing Presidential candidates in U.S. history is striking. I can't explain it, really: likely these are decisions based on the character of each candidate and not on the policies the country will be under. But I wonder if it's deeper; Buckely's similar statement may allude to an unrecorded undercurrent among conservative intellectuals?

3-second film review -- Bella

2008-10-19T22:22:00.003-05:00

A sad man with a long beard is weighted by an old event. He senses an opportunity to do something good; to help a girl who was just fired, and amid Latin culture in NYC he seeks redemption.

Bella.

Ballmer Peak

2008-10-05T12:40:00.003-05:00

The recently named "Ballmer Peak" has been known and exploited for years.

VPN; Green Room; riding the peak.

The all-at-once political platform

2008-09-28T10:52:00.006-05:00

In 2005 Stephen Harper's Tories began the election with the announcement that they would cut the dreaded GST tax to 5 per cent from 7 per cent. This headline-grabbing statement (made in a consumer electronics store), was followed up with almost daily policy announcements. In fact, it soon became clean that the Tories' election strategy was based on releasing their entire platform one trickle at a time, with well-staged photo ops.

This worked brilliantly. And, frankly, I think it's good for democracy. For as long as elections are covered by TV (or its new-media variations) photo-ops will be necessary. For years, these photo ops felt like exactly what they were: bad, vacuous theatre arranged by political handlers. To have a photo-op be tied to a policy statement -- ie. an announcement of a potential change to life in Canada -- provides these photo ops with some meat. And by stretching out these photo-ops over weeks, reporters, intellectuals and the rest of the voting public can digest all of the policy they may or may not vote for.

After Harper beat the unbeatable Martin, I predicted that this would be the status quo for Canadian elections henceforth.

It seems I was wrong. The NDP and the Tories are both set to release their policy books next week. We, the voting public who are influence by policy, who are trying to care about this election, and who are also stretched so many ways, will be asked to vote on fat books of policy presented all at once, and likely poorly read or summarized by time-constrained journalists. Sure, eventually these red books, green books and blue books will be fully digested by policy-minded people, but by then they will not be new and thus not news. And when something isn't news, it doesn't make the news, limiting the number of people who receive digested versions on this policy.

This is bad politics, because we're back to vacuous photo-ops. And this is bad for democracy because we're back to voting for the man or woman we hate least.

Radian6 -- social media monitoring

2008-09-25T20:32:00.002-05:00

I guess they're reading this.

'Cause that's what Radian6 does; it reads tiny little blogs (and big ones), and all other manor of social media, finding what people say about its clients. I would have thought you could just do this with google, technorati and maybe a few phantom flickr and facebook accounts. Maybe they do? But they hint that they have a substantial back end.

This is a nice article as it doubles as both a look at where social media meets PR, and it profiles the unique strategy Radian6 used to launch their start-up. They gave it away for free to a small, local sub of a global PR firm, in exchange for feedback (and cred.) It worked brilliantly.

Link to Globe & Mail.

CIO.com interview on Social Networking for business

2008-09-22T14:18:00.001-05:00

... companies must avoid the "Kumbaya Zone" - the place where social media is ultimately a time-waster and has little business value.

Link.

The album is a mix tape

2008-09-21T11:04:00.002-05:00

I think the first mix tape I made was for myself; maybe some Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin I'd jog to. Then I found out girls liked mix tapes and I started making them with different songs -- each carefully chosen to represent something.

Now it's not just teenagers in love who make playlists in iTunes. Really, these are not songs but lists -- lists that call individual songs from one's harddrive. And it's the individual song that people purchase (or don't purchase) today. Playlists can have hundreds of songs and there can be overlap from one playlist to another. In fact, they can even be random or "smart" -- not pre-set, but based on attributes such as how often songs are listened too, how highly they're ranked, their genre, etc.

But where does all this wizardry leave the 14-song CD sitting at the counter in Starbucks? Given the context of 99 cent songs at the iTunes store, infinite playlists and zero-loss digital copying, I think of that CD as just another playlist.

Like Sheryl Crow just made me a mix tape.

A conservative for Obama

2008-09-18T08:14:00.002-05:00

It's not just the optic of a former publisher of the National Review turning to Obama, it's his clear and plain language description of what conservatisim means for him.

I fear that Bushies have deluded Americans into seeing them as something very far from what they really are; whatever doctrine history ascribes to Bush, it is unlikely to be "conservative." But wrapping yourself in the flag shortcuts the whole question of what is your doctrine.

No one cares anymore what McCain believes: half of America sees this race as about true America versus something else. A flag versus hippie-ideals. And it's not.

Skimbit

2008-09-17T20:23:00.006-05:00

The last time I used this service it was called del.icio.us.

Seriously, I think the functionality is pretty much the same, but it's how Skimbit uses social bookmarking that makes it interesting.

Key phrases for this site are: collaboration, decision-making, web-clipping, social bookmarking.

Okay, say you need to decide what hotel you and four lads will stay in in Paris. So you set up a Skimbit account, create a project called Paris Hotel, and invite everyone to join the project. Then each member can go off and clip suggestions from web searches at the leisure with a handy little button on their browser. Each suggestion is ranked by the critieria you set at the outset (price, location, near a bar). After a week or two, you have loads of options and a good point from which you can decide.

That's the collaborative part -- you can do it in Google Docs and it's only a little more ugly.

But I think the social part -- the ability to view some of the other users' decisions -- that will provide the web2.0 value; it'll play a role in organizing the web's content.

http://skimbit.com

YouTube as iTunes

2008-09-17T20:23:00.005-05:00

Ever dug into iTunes with a tune in your head, only to find you can't buy it on iTunes?

Ever used iTunes like an LP player ... one song at a time?

YouTube is basically a P2P music service, with every song I've ever wanted to hear in video format. Content owners likely allow YouTube to host music videos for the same reason they let radio play songs. But if they knew I used YouTube like a kind of infinite LP player, maybe they wouldn't.

TechCrunch 50 review

2008-09-15T21:23:00.008-05:00

Okay, I've read through the 50 profiles and a few look cool. That said, anything around developer's tools, gambling or video games aren't interesting to me.

Also, I think the point of this post is not to highlight an angel investment opportunity, but to show a few directions the web is going in (that's the kind of grammar up with which I will not put!).

http://www.dotspots.com/

This enriches news stories. For bloggers, etc, you annotate a block of text and that annotation is shared in some way with others. So, say there's a CNN story on something like "McCain apologizes for pig ad," a million people could annotate that "meme" and come to some wisdom-of-the-crowds solution for what it means.

Applied to all web content, it could be interesting.

Revenue stream: not obvious.

www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

Yammar. It's like twitter, but for colleagues. It looks like there is a single webpage with status updates for everyone. Ie. "finishing the headline; mocking up the icons; testing the mail lists; brainstorming"; etc.

http://www.copyboxapp.com/

Mass customization of interactive content, for the non-technical writer. (ie. if it's raining today in the home city of the web-site visitor, a cute joke about that is the headline.) I think this will feel weird and forced at first, much like those animated paintings must have seemed odd when Hogwarts first got them. But, seriously, how much more rich can you make media?

On the other hand, there's a small chance you'll visit this website on an iPhone and it will advise you to flush.

http://tingz.net/whats-this-ting/

This gets a gold star. Widgets are sorta neat, but tingz are widgets built specifically for mobile computers, and which are meant to work across platforms. In my future, people will have screens with magnets stuck to their fridge. They yank them off, add a few items to the grocery list, and check out their schedule for the weekend. Ten minutes later, the husband goes into the grocery store and sees a his updated list on his iPhone. (Or robots just anticipate and fulfil our needs; it depends on the time frame).

http://beta.me-trics.com/

I don't know what this is, but it caught my eye. I think you enter a track a wide range of personal metrics (weight, HR, $ life savings, weekly run mileage, avg. commuting time) and then do something with it.

http://www.fitbit.com/

You wear a thingy that tracks all your personal health activity and then it wifi's it up to a site that analyzes and reports the exact minute of your death (I made the last bit up.)

http://www.forwordinput.com/

Swype.

This gets my second gold star. It could totally fail, like the guy who invented a keyboard that was better than QWERTY like a century after every secretary learned QWERTY. Or it could succeed like the BlackBerry's little buttons.

It's a better way to enter text on tiny keyboards. The company is really just an algorithm that forms words based, not on tapping keys, but on swiping a pen over a flat screen image of keys. So it's still QWERTY, but much more fluid. A small change, but if you can go from 10 WPM to 50 WPM on your iPhone/BlackBerry, it's good.

What caught my eye is that the co-founder invented T9; that predictive typing app. for SMS that's on like 2.5 billion or so phones.

http://www.getdropbox.com/

Turns your desktop into a wormhole. Except instead of sending documents to a universe where Sarah Palin is POTUSA, it goes to another desktop. Like your home one when you're at work. Coolest part is that it appears to work without you having to do anything special. Just put a doc in a folder (a magic folder).

Web 2.0 in 1.0 years

2008-09-15T20:23:00.001-05:00

You could read a bunch of stuff about where the web is going. Or you could just go there: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/

(is 1.0 plural; technically, no. but it sounds wrong the other way.)

Getting things done.

2008-09-14T19:10:00.002-05:00

I've always been pretty unorganized; coming from an initially "creative" career, it seemed appropriate. But I don't think I can cope with the complexity of 30-something life (career, commuting, home, money, parenthood, husband hood, school, sports ...) without getting my shit together.

I spent this weekend doing just that -- electronically. It's funny, but I didn't buy a new suit or a new briefcase; I downloaded Google Chrome, re-started my Remember The Milk account, and created a bunch of new folders. Lame, maybe, but it feels good on a Sunday night. Here's what I picked up:

I think there should be a constitutionally enshrined law that no folder can contain more than 7 items, and no more than two of those can be other folders. Ideally, bookmark bars should have folders with 3-5 items; you should be able see the contents of every folder at once, not by reading.
When you're trying to get organized, I think it's helpful to have an "all the stuff I have to do eventually" list, and then ... in some totally different application (RTM?) your top 5. Give each of the top 5 a fair time estimate. Look at your week; do you have five, 30-hour days?
Create a minutiae list: don't cram your top 5 list with junk. Everyone has points in the day where they feel like doing nothing (ie. engaging in flame wars on digg). Working through your minutiae is only a bit more taxing.
I swear this is the nerdiest thing ever. And not in a cool-but-geeky way; like in a pocket protector way. But if you're part of the creative economy, you probably need David Allen. I read about him on a flight two years ago; read his first book. It helped a lot. (10 second take away: purge your brain of Things To Do by itemizing them all [like all!] and scheduling each one)
After downloading Chrome, I set up a series of web applications "on" my desktop. Google Docs is neat, but it was also a few clicks to get into something (say I've got a page of jokes I think up randomly ... okay, I have a page of jokes I think up randomly). A theme that drives Google, I think, is that 0.5 seconds is much much better than 3.5 seconds. If you want to do something on a computer, and you click, 3.5 seconds can be extremely annoying, so much so it becomes a barrier. Frankly, I store random thoughts in txt files, because they seem to open instantly. Chrome is quick, and my jokes list is up in ... about 1 second even.

Be afraid of Finland

2008-09-14T11:30:00.001-05:00

WWII

Google Chrome

2008-09-13T13:41:00.001-05:00

Had it for 10 min.

Hooked.

the long tail

2008-09-10T15:54:00.004-05:00

This is to the Internet what "The Making of the President" was to the making of the President (after 1960).

FTA: "Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.... Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are ... In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. ). "

Republican brand is "trash"?

2008-09-02T11:58:00.003-05:00

Jack Cafferty's column is helpful.

Things in the U.S. have gone so far under Bush that I was actually underwhelmed by Cafferty's statement, "[Bush is] arguably the worst president in the nation's history."

Without reflecting much on it, I've come to view Bush not as a bad president of an otherwise great country, but as the first leader of an un-American country. Maybe I'm apocalyptic, but I've come to view the U.S.'s future under a series of Republican leaders, starting with Bush, as a move toward permanent religious war, fanaticism, Orwellian control of communication and ultimately dictatorship.

The alternative is that the 2006 rejection of the Republicans would be just the beginning of a pendulum shift back to a fairly decent country. Cafferty seems to think that just this will occur. That it will be a landslide in all three houses.

The doomed Bush-McCain legacy.

2008-08-28T14:01:00.002-05:00

Framing is an important element of communication.

If I was writing scripts for the current Dems in Denver convention, I think I'd using a phrase like "The doomed Bush-McCain legacy" to describe what is in opposition to Obama.

Obviously it frames McCain and Bush together, but also frames McCain's possible loss in November as a foregone conclusion, rooted in what are generally accepted as Bush's failed policies.

It's sort of like: Because Bush didn't fit, McCain ain't it.

McKinsey on Enterprise 2.0

2008-08-12T14:55:00.001-05:00

Services (transactional) above wikis blogs, videos
Internal above external.
Asia & Europe above NA.

PR case study -- when your client is a website

2008-07-30T14:53:00.001-05:00

Article is dead-right. Test and re-test your product in an interative soft-launch mode ...
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3630382

Web2.0 for enterprise

2008-07-30T14:38:00.000-05:00

McKinsey gets into the game. Key finding: Companies use Web 2.0 technologies more frequently for internal than for external purposes

However, I may have missed the whole point of the article, given I read it in Spreeder (see below)?!

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=2174&pagenum=1

Spreeder -- reading on a computer

2008-07-30T14:35:00.001-05:00

This isn't really a web technology ... it could have been invented 25 years ago.

When you read a physical newspaper or magazine, the whole theory is that you move your eyes left to right and they encounter new words in a particular order to create meaning.

Spreeder flashes 1 or a few words at a time, and then takes it/them away and shows you the next word in the sentence. I guess the idea is that people who mentally sound out words learn not to. I do it for sure; am now.

I like having 2 words on the screen at once, and I like pauses after comma's, etc. These can all be set in the advanced settings. 650 wpm is a little fast, but doable at these settings.

http://www.spreeder.com/

Using del.icio.us as an edited news reader

2008-07-24T08:25:00.002-05:00

When newspapers go online, they tend to use a content management system (CMS); no one "hard-codes" the home page. An RSS news feed can also be viewed as a CMS, albeit one you have only sky-level control over. However, when all news exists in a CMS, and RSS abounds, it begs the question, what exactly is the meaning or relevance of a media title.

I want news by topic, relevance, popularity or author. I'm not sure the name on the journalist's paycheque is relevant to me.

That said, I've stumpled upon an interesting use for del.icio.us -- the "social bookmarking" website famous for inventing (or popularizing) the use of tags. I wrote an earlier post here about my mis-use of tagging, when I first joined del.icio.us -- spasmodically, I tagged every bookmark with a cathartic splurge of verbage. Any and all words that I associated with that website, or the unerlying concept, found their way into the tag line. In theory, a year or a decade down the road, your brain would not have changed so much than a slightly more restrained splurge of verbage, in a search, would not return the saught-for bookmark.

This was all stupid. Tags are not psycho-analysis. They are categories. They are an improvement on the Mac/Windows "folder" concept in that, though they still are folders,
there can be multiple folders for one bookmark.

I don't have much use for the "social" aspect of del.icio.us. I don't care what's "hot" there. Digg does that better. And I have even less use for it as an alternative to my browser's favourites feature. I do use del.icio.us as a very functional storage vehicle for news and other "thought leadership." My job requires me to know a lot about what's going on ... not just what news stories "have legs," but what smart people are saying about the economy and business, etc. Since I spend a lot of time each day reading original news (and thought leadership) sources, I take the opportunity to save interesting articles in del.icio.us. By tagging, I can look back over categories, which could equate with industries or clients, etc. Furthermore, since del.icio.us' URL conventions are logical (ie. a list of all posts you've tagged "IFRS" can be found at del.icio.us/your_name/IFRS), it is extremely easy to share segregated news feeds with others.

The nebulous 90th percentile

2008-07-09T14:05:00.005-05:00

As a writer, most of career has been made up of discrete projects with fixed deadlines. Even when managing a lot of projects at once, I have to set deadlines and allot a set amount of time to each one ... or else i. will. go. mad!

But as another deadline flies by, I noticed something about project-work (at least writing project-work). When I have written a "pretty much done" piece, and I'd be just about happy showing it around internally, I've usually invested about half the hours I ultimately do. In other words, when I'm 90 per cent finished, I've done 50 per cent of the work.

There are a lot of good explanations for this. Writing, like programming, has bugs. If you call concepts by different names through your document, you have to streamline that before submitting the work. Streamlining can ruin your flow, because maybe a sentence required that three-syllable word, or a certain rhyme or rhythm to sound great, and now that sentence has to be re-written. Sometimes paragraphs repeat themselves, or worse, almost repeat themselves. Again, these must be re-written. And when they are re-written, you've likely fudged your segues.

Every first draft has at least two motifs, one of which must be killed. Which one? How will it flow when the dropped ones are replaced?

I can't say I've ever thought all this through before, but I know shit writing from good writing, and trying to never submit the former, I think I follow a process much like this; a process that means a 90 per cent finished work is half way there.

Network effect

2008-07-03T13:06:00.004-05:00

I used to call this the "fax machine effect" ... then I googled it. (you could also call it the inverted hockey stick __________] ... there's a long tail before explosive growth.)

It explains a lot in business and economics. The effect drives the growth of the Internet, many consumer electronics, stock markets, English ...

Bumper Twitters

2008-07-02T13:57:00.002-05:00

Bumper stickers are personal expressions made to those in your vicinity -- really just retro versions of twittering.

So, will people affix little screens to their bumpers to convey to commuters all that is inessential to them? It could go too far very very quickly.