Relevant History

Another line on my c.v.: Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, Oxford University

I don't think this was a very well-kept secret, but now it's official: in addition to my day job, and my work on the end of cyberspace book, I'm now officially an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It's a two-year appointment, which runs through the spring of 2010 (through Hilary Term, for those of you keeping track across the pond). I don't teach any courses, but I do work with students, and am on call to do things with SBS groups visiting Silicon Valley.

via flickr

The appointment was initially approved in March, but they only got me up on the Web site this week. Such is the pace of things there. (And as one friend said, "My god, your picture on the SBS website is so Californian!" It was taken in the garden of Howard Rheingold's house. You don't get more California than that.)

I've still got my affiliation with Stanford, and thank heavens for that: having access to the Stanford library has been critical to my continued viability as a thinker. But I've got a couple executive MBAs I'm working with at Oxford, and have had a good time collaborating with people at the James Martin Institute. And in the last few years I've been to more conferences there than Stanford.

Strange to have closer intellectual ties to a university in England than to one three miles away, but such is life these days. Or my life, anyway.

Needless to say, this is a real thrill. Not because it represents some prospective return to academia, but because it's an interesting hybrid position. SBS is one of several business schools that are real intellectual hot-houses these days. Some of the best B-schools are no longer places that just train people to crank out exotic formulas or spout jargon, but are seriously thinking about what it will mean to do business in this century. Oxford the added virtue of having the James Martin Institute, which in the next few years will-- if it has any sense at all-- become the global epicenter for serious futures work. So this is a good time to get connected to this little world.

I've already promised several people that I won't start speaking like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, as tempting as that would be.

[To the tune of Drew Barrymore & Hugh Grant, "Way Back Into Love [Demo Version]," from the album "Music & Lyrics".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Oxford University, postacademic

Something to remember when I go to Germany this summer

Using the title "Dr." if you have a doctorate from the U.S. can get you into trouble:

Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you're a doctor could land you in jail.

At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home.

Under a little-known Nazi-era law, only people who earn PhDs or medical degrees in Germany are allowed to use "Dr." as a courtesy title.

The law was modified in 2001 to extend the privilege to degree-holders from any country in the European Union. But docs from the United States and anywhere else outside Europe are still forbidden to use the honorific. Violators can face a year behind bars.

[To the tune of Blue Öyster Cult, "Godzilla," from the album "Don't Fear the Reaper: The Best of Blue Öyster Cult".]

Technorati Tags: academia, Germany

Spring Fair

At the Peninsula Spring Fair

FREEBIRD!!

Interesting day

This morning, I was at Castilleja, listening to a symposium on power. It was a pretty good time, and a pretty high-powered crowd. Unlike the Tom Friedman talk, this one was for alumni, so the current students were next door in the chapel, listening to the proceedings on closed-circuit TV (like a pay-per-view sports event).

L to R: Laura Tyson, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Pamela Matson, Jimmy Wales, Marissa Meyer, Kavita Ramdas, John Doerr. Not shown: Mark Hurd and Condoleezza Rice. Via flickr

In the afternoon, I watched my daughter play baseball. She got a couple base hits, and did a pretty good job as catcher.

Then we all went to Maker Faire.

via flickr

Tomorrow is the Peninsula Spring Fair. I'm going to miss part of it, as I'm going back to Maker Faire, but I should be able to get there in time to take some pictures.

[To the tune of U2, "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," from the album "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb".]

Technorati Tags: Little League, Maker Faire, Palo Alto, Peninsula School

When did I turn into Ward Cleaver?

Today I took off a little early from work to take my son to his Little League game. As someone who played soccer in high school as an act of defiance against football-addled Southern culture, I find my children's participation in organized sports slightly mystifying. It's not particularly mysterious, though: it's completely my wife's fault, as she's the big baseball fan in the family.

The local league is a typical Silicon Valley reinvention of an American institution. Almost all the teams are sponsored by dot-coms, financial services companies, or French restaurants. A couple weeks ago, my son's team, the Astros (sponsored by visual search engine SearchMe.com) played against the Yankees (eHealth.com); last week, they went up against the As (sponsored by Interwoven).

Today, they played the Orioles (sponsored by Left Bank).

After the game, we went back to Peninsula, to the annual student rock concert. The concert is a fun time, as much (or maybe just a tiny bit more) for the atmosphere as for the music. And as one of my fellow parents put it, it's nice for the kids to spend time on campus without all the high-pressure academic stress weighing them down....

Though it can be entertaining to hear the kids.

My daughter is already talking about what songs she wants to sing when she's old enough to perform next year.

So my afternoon and evening were taken up with Little League and a student concert. I truly have been domesticated....

[To the tune of Lucrezio de Seta & His Scurvy Brothers, "Century's End," from the album "The Nightfly Live Show".]

Technorati Tags: children, Little League, Peninsula School

Giving STS a good name...

Wonkette reports that a Dartmouth professor

is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her.

Looking at that academic pedigree, I immediately started to worry. Sure enough, she was teaching STS. Her book, Molecular Biology in Narrative Form "is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study that shows a connection between molecular biology and French narrative theory."

With many new insights on the link between science (in the form of DNA, a set of codes) and literature (in the form of language, another set of codes), this book looks at modern experimental science within the framework of semiotics. Priya Venkatesan reveals the extraordinary parallel between the work of scientists and the work of narratologists who develop narrative paradigms and analyze literary texts. Molecular Biology in Narrative Form will be a useful resource for scientists and literary theorists interested in the epistemological workings of science, as well as, anyone that desires to explore the linkages between scientific theory and literary analysis.

Two things come to mind. First, didn't Lily Kay and Tim Lenoir do exactly this about 15 years ago? Or does the project just bear a strong resemblance to George Landow's Hypertext, with its argument for unexpected parallels between computer science and literary theory?

And... suing her students? Huh?

[To the tune of Times Online, "The Bugle - Episode 16 - Afghanistan in a zen state of chaos," from the album "The Bugle - Audio Newspaper For A Visual World".]

My new favorite writer

Tony Zirkle is a lawyer running for Congress in Indiana. He's got a rhetorical style that-- well, it's hard to describe. Imagine Hunter Thompson on meth, trying to simultaneously channel Buckminster Fuller, Huey Long, and Jerry Falwell, with a little Unity Mitford-level Nazi-loving crazy thrown in for good measure:

What goes around, sometimes comes around, and sometimes a Zulu massacre comes right back in a dot com a few generations later to taunt a people in a new, more efficient destroying form of the same song, different dance hate speech. If addiction prone blanches can’t get their act together, then all of us who have a shred of justice in our spine may one day have to debate the idea of giving them what their ancestors gave to the natives, the author or whom is still honored with placement on the $20 bill…

If history can not produce one mono-syllabic tax cut king to stick his fluking harpoon between the porn Tiamat's oeilles, then perhaps history will one day send a homeless vet to attempt a confoundation of those incognoscenti who think they're wise. I'm starting to feel very strongly that a lot of very bad events are going to happen to me in the very near future for writing this.

The man in running for Congress. Give that a minute to sink in.

Could he even see the keyboard when he wrote that? I wish I could write with that kind of zest.

He also recently gave a speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party. According to the AP, he said "he did not know much about the group [emphasis added] and that 'I'll speak before any group that invites me.'"

Perhaps the fact that it was Hitler's birthday, and that the stage was decorated with a Nazi flag, large portrait of Adolf Hitler, and sparkly cardboard "Happy Birthday" draped across the podium could have provided the smallest of clues? Unless it was also Zirkle's birthday, in which case the confusion is understandable.

Man, I hope he gets elected.

[via Sadly, No]

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: writing

My children are insane

Yes it is hot today, but the pool is 68 degrees!

The impact of the Hajj

In David Lodge's great novel Changing Places, Euphoric State University professor Morris Zapp declared that "travel narrows." He was a world-renowned Jane Austen scholar, he said, precisely because he had never been to England: his lack of interest in the real England let him focus more sharply on the novels, and made him a better critic.

This attitude may hold true for literature (or not), but Slate reports on an interesting recent study (available here) suggesting that Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca "came back with more moderate views on a range of issues, both religious and nonreligious, suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world."

The study looks at a group of 1,600 Pakistanis who applied for visas to go on the Hajj. As Slate explains, Pakistani visa policy creates a group that's a social scientist's dream:

In 2006, nearly 140,000 applicants vied for 80,000 visas through the Pakistan government's Hajj program. In order to decide who gets to go, the government holds a lottery. As a result, among the visa applicants, there's a group of people randomly selected to participate in the Hajj and a comparison group of would-be pilgrims who applied but didn't get to go. The two groups look very similar—the only systematic difference is that applicants in one group won the lottery and those in the other group didn't. If the Hajjis come back from Mecca more tolerant than those who didn't get to go, therefore, we know it's the result of the Hajj, not something else.

So what did the researchers find? As they report,

[P]articipation in the Hajj increases observance of global Islamic practices such as prayer and fasting while decreasing participation in localized practices and beliefs such as the use of amulets and dowry. It increases belief in equality and harmony among ethnic groups and Islamic sects and leads to more favorable attitudes toward women, including greater acceptance of female education and employment. Increased unity within the Islamic world is not accompanied by antipathy toward non-Muslims. Instead, Hajjis show increased belief in peace, and in equality and harmony among adherents of different religions. The evidence suggests that these changes are more a result of exposure to and interaction with Hajjis from around the world, rather than religious instruction or a changed social role of pilgrims upon return....

Our results tend to support the idea that the Hajj helps to integrate the Muslim world, leading to a strengthening of global Islamic beliefs, a weakened attachment to localized religious customs, and a sense of unity and equality with others who are ordinarily separated in everyday life by sect, ethnicity, nationality, or gender, but who are brought together during the Hajj. While the Hajj may help forge a common Islamic identity, there is no evidence that this is defined in opposition to non-Muslims. On the contrary, the notions of equality and harmony tend to extend to adherents of other religions as well.

Why is this?

While it is difficult to isolate what drives the impact of the Hajj, the evidence suggests that exposure to Muslims from around the world during the Hajj is important. While we find that Hajjis do not acquire greater formal religious knowledge, they do gain experiential knowledge of the diversity of Islamic practices and beliefs, gender roles within Islam, and, more broadly, the world beyond Pakistan. The Hajj’s impact on such knowledge and on some of the tolerant attitudes toward other groups tends to be larger for those traveling in smaller groups, who are more likely to have a broad range of social interactions with people from different backgrounds during the Hajj. Hajjis also show the largest positive gain in their views of other nationalities for Indonesians, the group they are most likely to observe during the Hajj other than Saudis. Hajjis’ changed views toward women also reflect the exposure channel since the Hajj offers Pakistani pilgrims a novel opportunity to interact with members of the opposite gender in a religious setting, and to observe interactions across the sexes among Muslims from nations which are more accepting of such interactions.

As with computers, so with religion: user experience and interaction is everything.

Technorati Tags: religion, sociology

Workplace this morning

All I'll say is, Tom Friedman got a more polite reception at Castilleja

Two protesters threw pies at Tom Friedman during a speech at Brown University:

The incredible thing is, the guys missed. So much for smashing global capitalism, dudes. (The girls at Castillja would have nailed it. They would have practiced. Of course, they also would have been expelled in a nanosecond, but at least they wouldn't have the shame of being tossed out of school for attempted pie-throwing.)

The other thing is that this gesture, while perhaps entertaining, and enough to earn you honors marks if you're a performance art major at Yale, isn't nearly as powerful, as, say, Matt Taibbi's takedown of The Earth is Flat, the best piece of snarky criticism this side of Adam Gopnik's review of Matrix Reoladed. A sample:

It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today."... Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Unlike the pie guys, Taibbi hits his target.

[via Gawker]

[To the tune of Willie Nelson, "Always On My Mind," from the album "Always On My Mind".]

From My Life as a Quant

Whenever I have a new problem to work on-- in physics or options theory-- the first major struggle is to gain some intuition about how to proceed; the second struggle is to transform this intuition into something more formulaic, a set of rules anyone can follow, rules that no longer require the original insight itself. In this way, one person's breakthrough becomes everybody's possession. (Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, p. 48)

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "The Mighty Quinn," from the album "1991-04-05 - The Omni".]

Technorati Tags: physics

On NPR

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier."

In my sound bite, I reveal that I like paper because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

I played the piece for my kids this morning before I took them to school. At the end of it, my son came up to me and said, "You know, Dad, you really do drop your stuff a lot." Gee, thanks kid.

[To the tune of Handsome Boy Modeling School, "The Projects (PJays)," from the album "So...How's Your Girl?".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, media

I'm back

Made it home safely. I left Changi Airport at 6 pm Singapore time on Sunday, and arrived in SFO at 8 pm PST. So that's about 17 hours' travel time, I think.

Since everyone put their windowshade down right after takeoff, I was in darkness the whole flight. So in a sense I missed a day. Kind of strange, but probably not as dislocating as having seven hours of daylight.

Technorati Tags: Malaysia, SQ002, Singapore

Giant baby at Changi Airport

For some reason, this giant screen with an photo advertisement featuring a baby really captivated me.

The baby sees all!

Okay, they're calling my row. Gotta go!

Technorati Tags: airport, Changi, Singapore

The "free wireless" at Changi Airport

I finally got onto the free wireless here at the airport, though it's what you might think of as a typically Singaporean process. You have to create an account first, which involves (among other things) giving them your name, address, and passport number. Once you've done that, they send a text message to your cell phone-- forget giving you your account information on the computer, much less just letting you start using the network.

After you've got your username and password, you log in. What the instructions don't tell you is that your username isn't just whatever name you've got-- joebob123-- but it's joebob123@qmax.com.sg. If you don't include the @qmax.com.sg, it doesn't work. Obviously.

Also, they send you an e-mail with information about how to change your password to something you can remember-- but so far as I can tell, there's nothing on the Web site it self that tells you how to do that. No "My Account" button, no "Change password" link, nothing. You have to refer to the e-mail... if you've gotten online and been able to read it, that is.

So I figured this out just in time to pack up and go catch my flight. More from Hong Kong, perhaps.

[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "Let's Go Out Tonight," from the album "Hats".]

Technorati Tags: airport, Changi, Singapore, wireless

Quick note from Changi

I'm at Changi Airport, wandering around Terminal 3. My flight leaves in a couple hours, so I've got lots of time to do stuff-- mainly take pictures and draft e-mails to people.

This has been a very good trip, quite eye-opening.

Spent the morning at the Asian Civilizations Museum, which is a remarkable, jewel-like place. Really fantasic. And only $5 SG on Sundays.

Sunrise this morning

I woke up this morning just before 7, read a few pages of Accelerando (which is quite a good book), and soon will start getting organized to pack. I need to send a few more messages first, though: I find if I don't send out thank-you notes as soon as possible, they drift down to the bottom of my queue, and it's weeks-- or never-- before I get to them. And when this means when it looks like you're ignoring people who've put time and effort into helping you, it's a Bad Thing.

via flickr

My flight leaves this afternoon around 5:30 or 6, so I've got a full day to do things. I doubt I'm going to be very ambitious, though I do feel like I should get out somewhere new. I feel a bit like I've been spending all my time in malls and other air-conditioned spaces, like I was in a tropical version of New Jersey. Which might not be the worst comparison for Singapore, come to think of it.

[To the tune of The Eagles, "I Can't Tell You Why," from the album "Greatest Hits Volume 2".]

Technorati Tags: Singapore