Relevant History

Lost in So Cal

Im in southern California. I dont really know where. Normally, you have a sense of where you are that is built up from overlapping kinds of knowledge. You can find your region or country on a globe, your street on a map. Your home sits in the center of a network of places that you go to regularly. Its part of a fabric whose warp and woof are people you see (these are the people in your neighborhood), the routes you take to the store or school or work. Its refined by a sense of the culture and history of the place. Its polished by a knowledge of all kinds of quirky thingswhich restaurants have the nice bathrooms, which parks dont have too rambunctious a crowd of kids playing in the afternoons. Maybe you sense the geomagnetic field, without being aware of it.

Here, in contrast, I have none of that. Once I reached San Jose airport, I entered a world of alternate coordinates: a flight number rather than a sense of a place, a hotel name and street address rather than a distinct point on a map. Theres the occasional bit of local cultureall the food service people at San Jose seem to be Philipino, and the shuttle drivers in Orange County are Iranianbut theyre exceptions. And Im now at an Embassy Suites hotel, which is part of a shopping mall: theres a JC Penneys on one side, a Beverages and More and a Strouds on the other. The logical end-point for a journey into a serial-numbers-filed-off space.

Information that youre not aware you possess until you miss it: the very definition of tacit knowledge.

Actually, the thing isnt just that my mental GPS cant calibrate. There are some recognizable things here, theyre just unexpectedly close together. I got a little tour of the area on the SuperShuttle. We first touched down briefly in Irvine, where I once gave a terrible job talk (but then again, I dont know I would have been happy living down here); we then drove to Anaheim, which I had no idea was so close. We were driving past block after block of hotels, and I wondered what in the world could support so many hotels; I happened to look out the opposite window and saw Disneyland. Duh-oh! Then it was back onto the highway, past Cal State Fullerton (or so said a sign on the roadside, with a Carls Jr.; at least CSU got top billing). Finally we reached Brea, wherever that is.

The first time I came to southern California, I kept having the weirdest dj vu. It all seemed so strangely familiar, even though Id never been here before. I couldnt pin it down; then finally it hit me. Xevious! Id probably spent hundreds of hours flying over that video game landscape of grass, groves of trees, blacktop and sleek buildings and now I was driving through it. Someone at game design company Namco must have had a serious sense of humor. Not having touched that game in a decade, I dont quite have the same double vision. But I still think the mix of palm trees, neon, and concrete is the apex of friendly artificiality. No one does fake like Americans.

But its often an interesting fake. This hotel, for example, is your basic Business Hotel Box, with a central atrium courtyard (a radical architectural move in 1974, thanks if memory servesto John Portmann, who wasif memory serves againwidely reviled among Serious Architects); but for the Hotel Theme, the decorator chose, of course, Ancient Egypt. This might be a politically explosive choice today, but I suspect that when it was made, there was a wax museum or amusement park that was renovating and had some Egyptiana to let go cheap. I especially like the giant sarcophagus outside the King Tut Bar and Grille.

Though I suppose any attempt to give some distinctiveness to a hotel space should be applauded, even if that distinctiveness is imported from a civilization that lived 3000 years ago on a different continent. And to be fair, otherwise sensible nineteenth-century Americans had a mania for Egyptiana, which they used in funerary architecture. You can still run into curious bas reliefs and blocky, winged buildings in Connecticut and Vermont.

I surrender! I surrender! Go away!

I'm heading down to Southern California later today, and may be out of blog range until Wednesday night, but I wanted to make sure that this latest tidbit from the headlines made it to my friends' attention:

US forces 'turn down Sahhaf's surrender overtures':

Iraq's former information minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, who denied to the end the presence of US forces in Baghdad, was turned down by US troops after trying to turn himself in... Sahhaf had been at his aunt's house in Baghdad for the past four days and wanted US troops to arrest him so that "they can protect him" but they refused since he was not on their "most wanted" deck of playing cards.

Boy, those military guys are focused on the mission!

Update, 5/1/2003: Talking Points Memo reports that Sahhaf later "tried, unsuccessfully, to turn himself in to a Portuguese journalist." I assume this means he tried to surrender to a Portuguese journalist, rather than transform himself into one, like Kim Jong Il turning into a giant robot (oh damn, that article from The Onion isn't up any longer). But the journalist wouldn't take him. (Portugal?) Fortunately, a satellite channel in Dubai wants to hire him as an analyst. Or perhaps a stand-up comedian.

iPod and mobile work

One of the unintended consequences of having my iPod is that I find myself quite a bit more willing to work outside the office. Having my Clie and Vaio also help, as does the fact that my work is almost entirely cerebral and literary. And I'm not unfamiliar with working in odd places: when I was at Berkeley I did 80% of my best work at Cafe Milano (the best cafe in the world) and the Bison Brewery (the best pub in the world); and these days I do a fair amount of writing in the car, on nap drives.

But the fact that I can now carry my entire music collection, and in any place can listen to anything from Dexter Gordon's "The Other Side of Round Midnight" to Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat," makes me think I can settle in more deeply at a table at Barrone, and get some serious work done. It's not logical, but it makes me wonder: what's it going to be like in a few years when I can carry around (or access wirelessly) absolutely every Web page I've ever looked at, every document I've downloaded or written, etc., etc.? I think it's going to have a profound effect on how knowledge workers go about their days, and the texture of intellectual work more generally. I don't yet know what it will be like, but I know to keep an eye out for it.

iPod 2

When you buy anything more technically sophisticated than a wool scarf, you have to calculate whether the satisfaction of possession will outweigh the aggravation of seeing a new, significantly more powerful (or cheaper, or bigger, or smaller, or simultaneously bigger and smaller) version of the same thing show up two weeks later. I'm reminded of this because today, along with its new music service, Apple has announced a new version of the iPod, with a 30 GB hard drive.

I seem to have a perverse genius for buying toys nanoseconds before the next verions come out. But this time I don't feel so bad. I've gone on a tear, so to speak, and desperately MP3ed every last CD I can find in my collection, and still have more than 2 GB left on my 20 GB iPod. So aside from basking in the quiet satisfaction of having 12 unused GB of hard drive space, there's nothing I'd get from the new machine that I wouldn't get from the old.

And besides, my iPod was a present, so it has deep sentimental value.

Base of the pyramid

The highlight of the Networked World conference was the discussion of the "base of the pyramid," the notion (which I discussed in a post here) that the poorest four billion people in the world represent the Next Great Market. The panel was the most high-powered of the day: C. K. Prahalad, NASDAQ's Al Diamond, and Jim Moore, the head of Advanced Materials. There were several lessons from the session, and a couple unexpected things.

First, it's clear that in order to succeed in this market, companies will need to rethink their metrics and strategies as profoundly as companies making the move into mass production and markets had to. ("What do you mean, we'll make more money if we lower the price?") High unit profits are out, as are conventional models of pricing.

Second, reading the base of the pyramid will require thinking of the poor differently: not as stupid or the losers in the Great Game of Globalization, but as people who often have demonstrated tremendous creativity in the face of tremendous obstacles and nonexistent opportunities. (The instinct to treat the poor as deserving, not of charity but their fate, is easy to come to when you believe you live in a meritocracy.) Prahalad made the case that we have to go from thinking of the poor as an intractable problem, to thinking of them as an opportunity, and finally to thinking of them as a source of innovation. (Not just as
innovators in products, or uses of products, but also in organizations. As an example of the last, consider the Nutan Tiffin Lunch Box Association. It moves 175,000 homemade lunches per day, picking them up from housewives, carrying them into Mumbai, then returning the boxes. It uses illiterate deliverymen who are taught to read a notation system written on the boxes, and has a near-perfect delivery record: "Better than Six Sigma," Prahalad declared.)

Finally, multinationals have to do this because if they don't, they can look forward to a generation of Indian and Chinese companies growing up in these markets, then moving into advanced nations. If you thought that the Japanese were tough, this reasoning goes, just wait until you've got competition from countries with billions of people. (Clayton Christensen has made precisely this argument, in fact.) This is a global competition version of the fear of ghetto superpredator, an updated, corporate multinational Yellow Peril story-- though I don't think Prahalad, or anyone else working in this space, intends it to sound quite that way.

Networked World @ Santa Clara

Last Thursday I was at Santa Clara University for a conference on "Networked World: Information Technology and Globalization," organized by the SCU Center for Science, Technology and Society. You might not think of a place like Santa Clara as the kind of place that would have a high-octane STS center, but it's quietly becoming a powerhouse in the field. (Maybe the Center's picked up some management lessons from the Jesuits?) They're not going head-to-head against the likes of Stanford and Berkeley, but the strategy they're following offers a couple useful lessons in academic entrepreneurship.

First, the center is virtual. That's hardly a surprise these days, as most centers are; but it means that they're putting fewer resources in brick-and-mortar kinds of things (faculty lines, buildings, etc.) and concentrating on building networks among extant faculty. (These efforts eventually can develop into some influence over new appointments, or at least the ability to nudge them one way or another.)

Second, they're being very aggressive about involving people from across the University. STS programs at other big research universities, can get 90% of its people from one or two big departments (e.g., history, philosophy, maybe anthropology or sociology), and spend vitually no time on outreach to anyone else. (I was always perplexed when I was a postdoc at Berkeley, and living in the OHST program, at how many people there were at Berkeley with interests in the history of science had nothing to do with OHST.)

Third, and this is the really innovative thing, the Santa Clara center appears to have ties to the professional schools and outside community that are at least as close, or closer, as to the humanities. This is extremely unusual: some STS programs are leavened by the occasional cross-appointment with someone in engineering, or very rarely law, but Santa Clara really strikes me as focused more at the worlds of praxis than theoria. This means that they're actually more likely to do the kinds of outreach-to-the-world things that every STS program says it wants to do, but few know how.

If they play their cards right, I think in a few years the Center could establish a niche in the discipline that gives it a lot of visibility, and a great deal of street cred. They're never likely to have Bruno Latour come and speak; but they can already attract the likes of C. K. Prahalad. The rubber of STS is meeting the road in some interesting ways.

Bulletproof Monk

This weekend my wife and I went to see "Bulletproof Monk," the new Chow-Yun Fat movie. I don't think any movie could never possibly live up to the expectations that the title "Bulletproof Monk" create (it would take the combined talents of John Woo, Steven Spielberg, and William Gibson to pull that off), and in a way, that lowered my expectations: it's somehow liberating to know that failure is inevitable. As it was, the movie was all right, and it did nothing to challenge my standing belief that I can watch Chow-Yun Fat in just about anything. "Replacement Killers" remain's Fat's best American film, though. (My stepmother once declared that she'd listen to Patrick Stewart read the phone book. I'm not sure I'd go that far, though there could be some serious comic value in the experience.)

But two things struck me during the film. First, Chow-Yun Fat shouldn't be given scripts in English; he should just get blocking and choreography, and be allowed to say his lines in Chinese. His English is still pretty painful, and a significant portion of his audience in the States won't have to read the subtitles to know what he's saying in Chinese, anyway. Second, an actor of his stature should be playing opposite the likes of Tom Cruise and Nicholas Cage, not this dweeb from "American Pie." This is exactly the same problem that Jackie Chan has had since he came to the States: the most popular movie star in Asia in the twentieth century is cast opposite... Owen Wilson, an actor who makes Eddie Murphy look like Lawrence Olivier. Oh well.

Sugar industry vs. public health

Sometimes you see an article that has it all: greed, junk science, a level of perversity with the facts that would make the former Iraqi information minister say, "Whoa." The Guardian reports that the Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO-- saying it will lobby to cut WHO funding if they release a report saying that a diet with more than 10% sugar is bad for you.

The great thing is that the sugar industry is claiming that a diet of up to 25% sugar is safe. Already, Americans eat an average of half a pound of sugar a day, disguised in drinks, snacks, etc.. Maybe the Sugar Association thinks we're underconsuming.

Banker to the Poor

I just finished reading Muhammad Yunus' Banker to the Poor, his autobiography and personal history of the Grameen Bank and affiliated projects. For those who haven't heard of it, the Grameen Bank pioneered the concept (and a lot of the practice) of micro-credit, the practice of loaning astonishingly small sums of money to poor people, to let them do things like buy raw materials or tools for their work, build a house (defined as a structure with a tin roof), or sink a well. More recently, they've gotten attention for their village cell phone program, in which they give cell phones to women who are Grameen veterans, and they basically act as a kind of human pay phone.

For me, it's a fascinating story a couple levels. Grameen is a good example of a phenomenon that fascinates me: the notion that markets or market mechanisms can be employed to achieve virtuous social, economic, or environmental ends. This is something underlying some of the most promising and effective environmental efforts of the last twenty years. The American cap-and-trade market for sulfur dioxide is probably the most famous example of such a market, as it helped bring down acid rain levels pretty substantially, and at a lower cost than government regulation. The Kyoto Protocol had important provisions for such markets for greenhouse gases; in fact some nations and large companies are creating such markets themselves, though it's generally slower going than anyone would like. These sorts of efforts are criticized both by the left (who see them as providing a cover for rapacious capitalist exploitation of the world and its resources) and right (who see them as meddling with markets), and indeed they cross conventional ideological boundaries in ways that can create a significant amount of cognitive dissonance: Yunus at one point declares that governments should get out of social services, dismantle their welfare states, and turn over those sectors to socially conscious market-based efforts-- the sort of thing that you normally expect to hear from the Cato Institute, or the wackier sides of the Republican party.

Banker to the Poor also has some vivid descriptions of what life is like for people at the "base of the pyramid," as C. K. Prahalad, Clayton Christensen, Stuart Hall, and others call the 4 billion or so people who earn less than $2 a day. (There are days when I spend more in coffee than a family in the Third World will make in a week. It's a sobering thought.) What struck me most is how these people live with virtually nothing protecting them from complete disaster: a single storm, an injury at work, a death in the family can mean destitution when you have so little to begin with. (And I worry about my 401k not being big enough. I really live in a completely different kind of world.)

One last thing. Yunus started out as an economics professor-- he got his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt in the mid-1970s (coincidentally when my dad was a member of the History department faculty there)-- which suggests that there's hope for all of us ex-academics.

Keychain drive

I bought a small, 128 MB keychain hard drive before going to Korea. I figured it could be a useful little gadget-- all the clients I'd spent time with seemed to have them-- and its platform agnosticism also made it appealing.

It proved plenty useful on that trip. And since I returned a month ago, it's become my favorite way to carry around data. Better than Zip disks, CDs, or any other media: just plug it into the USB port, download away, clip it to the keychain (yes, I actually DO have it on my keychain), and I'm outta here. Extremely convenient, especially for someone who lives in both the Windows and Mac worlds.

I suspect that the next great hardware battle is going to take place not on the desktop, but on our keychains. More later.

Putting away childish things

Yesterday I boxed up my CDs, and carried them out to the garage. I've listen to music most often when I'm working, and over the last year I've created MP3s of my entire music collection on my iMac. I just don't listen to CDs any more at home: I tend to have the TV on, the CD player is hard to get to (it's protected from Daniel by a childproof lock, which means if I want to listen to anything I have to undo the lock, turn the stereo on, etc., usually while trying to keep Daniel from crawling into the armoire), and as time has passed, the CDs themselves have gotten scattered between the stereo and my desk. Now that I have the iPod, it seemed a good time to move the CDs out of the living room, and harm's way.

I have no plans to get rid of them, nor am I to be getting my music exclusively from Gnutella from now on. CDs are still valuable as an archival medium, they're just not something I use on a daily basis any more. After years of avid collecting, CDs are no longer the key-- medium? technology?-- for my musical listening. They still have a role to play, but when I want sounds to come out of headphones, I reach for the MP3s.

I confess there's something VERY cool about having all the music I own, and a lot of the music I've listened to over the years, in this little white-and-chrome box the size of a large wallet. I don't know if the availability of 20 GB will change my listening habits-- that Pharoah Sanders CD that I got as a present years ago isn't now immensely more appealing than it was, and the third Asia album isn't getting better with age-- but at least I'll always have them with me, no matter where I go.

On the other hand, the process of going through my CD collection, sorting out the CDs I hadn't burned yet, and getting them into the iMac and iPod has reintroduced me to some music that I haven't listened to in a long time. I have a lot of Miles Davis, for example, that turns out to be REALLY GOOD, and I never paid it much attention in the CD Years: it never got very high in the rotation.

The iPod also drives home how, in the world of portable, ubiquitous, blobject devices, small differences can make a huge difference in convenience and use. I already have a pretty good MP3 player, a Nomad Jukebox: it's 5 GB, the size of a CD player, and works quite well. It carries more music I could hope to listen to in a month. But the iPod is half the size, which means I can put it in my pocket, which means I can carry it around EVERYWHERE. That's a dealmaker: the iPod is going to get constant use, whereas the Nomad was a cool thing that I occasionally thought to toss in my backpack.

Markoff and Zachary on Google

John Markoff and Gregg Zachary, two of the leading lights of Silicon Valley technology journalism (and tech journalism generally) have a very interesting article on Google in the Sunday New York Times (registration required). Among the fun facts they unearth:

• The Google technical infrastructure "consists of more than 54,000 servers designed by Google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks... making it what many consider the largest computing system in the world." It turns out that this i snow a big competitive advantage for Google, as it moves from what analysts once dismissed as a commodity business (Web searching) into serving as an advertising platform as well. (Personally, I always ignore the ads, but apparently they work for some.)
• CEO Eric Schmidt stood out because he "was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man."

Update, 11 August 2005: It's astounding how much traffic I've gotten since the whole dust-up about the Eric Schmidt article (the July 14th article by Elinor Mills) and Google's somewhat petulant response. My hit rate has gone up exponentially, and it just stays there. This story won't die.

Update, 31 August 2005: Turns out Business Week reported an Eric Schmidt-at-Burning Man anecdote on September 29, 2003:

When Eric E. Schmidt, the 48-year-old veteran of Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) and Novell (NOVL ), took over at Google Inc. two years ago, it was trial by fire. One of the first orders of business was joining his new 20-something colleagues at Burning Man, a free-form festival of artistic self-expression held in a Nevada desert lake bed. Sitting in his office shortly after his return, tanned and slightly weary, Schmidt couldn't have been happier. "They're keeping me young," he declared.

Technorati Tags: Google, Internet, Burning Man, Silicon Valley

Studying Iranian blogs

Persian Blogger Chronicles describes itself as "an ethnographic journal on the world of Persian blogs." Apparently the Iranians are nuts for blogs, and there's a particular site (www.persianblog.com) that is especially active. Here's a bit of an overview:

The blogger community I'm interested in reportedly had 8,000 active bloggers as of last month, and 38,000 blogs total. The members write about everything from literature and music to movies, religion, and of course, politics. What I find fascinating about this virtual space is the diversity of the bloggers, which aptly reflects the diversity of Iranians themselves... but never before had I seen so many different and opposing views in Farsi (yes the language is for the most part, Farsi) crammed into such a small space. The only space that comes close to this blog webspace, in my opinion, is the Tehran taxicab.

There's a tradition of cross-cultural studies of technology diffusion and use that this could plug right into: off the top of my head, I think of Sadie Plant's work on cell phone use, Mimi Ito's work on Japanese "youth, mobile phones, and place." For futurists, the value of such work is twofold: it helps us appreciate the varieties of ways in which technologies are assimilated and used; and it sometimes alerts us to edgy practices to keep an eye on. For the Iranian context, this is especially interesting, given the role that cassette tapes played as an underground communications medium in the 1979 revolution (detailed in the book Small Media, Big Revolution).

[Discovered via Scripting News.]

Blogging for Milk

Slate has an article on a viral marketing campaign built around six teenagers blogging for milk. That's right, milk. According to the New York Times, this is part of a bigger marketing phenomenon.

This is a very interesting phenomenon. If nothing else, attempts by marketing and advertising people to manipulate the blogosphere are eloquent testaments to its importance.

Forsaking the Laptop for a Can-Do Palmtop

What a coincidence: The New York Times (subscription required) has a piece on Forsaking the Laptop for a Can-Do Palmtop today.

Dan Gillmor on ZUIs on PDA

Dan Gillmor has an interesting report about a demo he recently saw of a zooming user interface-- or ZUI-- calendar (Datelens, developed by a U. of Maryland group led by Ben Bederson) for Pocket PCs. It seems to me that the number of zooming UI companies and products is growing rapidly: the number of attempts to bring ZUIs out of the lab have multiplied greatly in the last 12 months. So Groxis isn't an outlier in its essential technical vision, though their sense of what Groxis will be able to do-- in terms of helping users see the connections between things we usually compartmentalize-- is unusual.

Will the appearance of more and more ZUI products in the marketplace be a good thing, or a bad one? Will they compete with each other, the way Apple and its clones did, giving customers more choice in the short run but leaving the market more vulnerable to Wintel in the long run? Or will they help each other?

I think a comparison to cities and industrial regions (like Silicon Valley) offers a useful lesson here. (What follows draws a lot on Steven Johnson's Emergence and AnnaLee Saxenian's work.) Why do specialized businesses tend to cluster together? Sometimes there are highly functional reasons: warehouse districts often are along rivers. But what accounts for a Jeweler's Row or Restaurant Row, the concentration of galleries in SoHo, the Akihabara, the under 25-only bars stacked three high in Seoul's Kangman area? On the face of it, it would seem that if you aren't tied to a specific place, you'd want to locate away from competitors, because you don't want to, well, compete with them. But it turns out that clustering makes sense because it means bigger crowds; because while you're competing with the place next door, you also get extra business when they don't have something and you do; because in large markets it allows for greater specialization; and because it generates a substrate of collective wisdom and experienced labor that benefits everyone. (You have to cooperate successfully to compete successfully.)

The ZUI world is more like a city or high-tech region. Here's my guess about how it'll unfold. Specific products doubtless will compete with each other: sooner or later, Apple or Microsoft will go head-to-head with Grokker. But most of the time, you'll see zoomer-enabled software competing against non-zoomers: iPhoto versus whatever, GeoPhoenix versus whatever. The two really important things that will happen are 1) users will become familiar with the zooming paradigm, and 2) a body of expertise in designing, programming, and productizing ZUI products will grow. The user familiarity is important because it means that once I "get" a ZUI on my PDA, I'm more likely to use it in my Web browser, photo storage software, or desktop; my experience with iPhoto will make it easier for me to figure out a ZUI on a Linux box. Think of how keyboards have morphed into thumbboards, how cell phones use the same number pads found on regular phones. A familiar interface is a very powerful thing, and not just for psychological reasons: it breeds physical skills and pattern-recognition abilities as well. (This is one reason digital cameras so often borrow the form factor and control placement of film cameras. We know how to hold those kinds of cameras steady, to frame shots, to get predictable and satisfactory results.)

In other words, in the long run, a proliferation of ZUI products will be good for all ZUI products.

Clie vs. laptop

One reason I bought my Clie was that I had hoped it could substitute for my laptop. In many circumstances, it's pretty close; but there are a couple functions that will have to change before I can forget about my Vaio.

For one, the clipboard has got to get bigger. It currently maxes out a a couple hundred characters, which means it's hard to move data from one application to another: to copy a document from my e-mail and paste it into Word, for example. Effectively, this means that data is trapped in whatever application it was created in.

Another problem is that it's hard to move between applications in quite the way you do with a PC. Some programs save states when you exit (i.e., the MP3 player remembers what song you were last listening to; Docs to Go remembers your open document); others don't. And excepting the programs you have programmed in the buttons (which are kind of like a permanent taskbar), to move between preograms you have to go through the home screen-- no small inconvenience if you're multitasking.

I suspect that neither of these is an insurmountable technical challenge. It's just that as uses evolve, so should interfaces and features.

On Being Postacademic

The last postacademic posting of the day. Kenny Mostern has an interesting piece "On Being Postacademic" (which I found via Long Pauses). It has some nice observations about academic life as seen from below:

The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the "need to produce"... [but] the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship.... The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department.

The essay's more substantive points-- that academic careers are highly disruptive to relationships; that location really does matter, even if you think you live mostly in the world of ideas; that academia doesn't provide the degree of community that generally idealistic people need-- are even more on-target and important.

Adjunct as entrepreneur / activist

Invisible Adjunct comments on two models of adjunct teaching: the adjunct as activist, and the adjunct as entrepreneur.

This is a really interesting sign of how permanent a feature of academic life temporary labor now is. When people try to come up with more positive metaphors for being flexible, temporary labor, you know something is going on. My own feeling is that while it's better to see yourself in positive rather than negative terms (i.e., an entrepreneur rather than not-a-tenure-track-professor), the basic fact is that you can't be an entrepreneur in an economy that doesn't recognize or reward such behavior. There are benefits to being active rather than passive, and thinking tactically about how to get more money and reach your goals; but that's different from real entrepreneurship.

Unfortunately, it now seems that for once academia is on the cutting edge of organizational practice. A good friend of mine argues that white collar workers in America are now going through what blue collar workers went through in the 1970s and 1980s: the security of their world is being undermined by global competition.

A Tale of Graduate School Burnout

I suspect-- actually, I'm pretty certain-- that of all the pieces I've written, "Journeyman" -- my essay on leaving academia for the business world-- is the one that is most widely-read. When it first came out, in the late 1996, I got several hundred e-mails about it (all but one of them positive); and while the volume has died down to a manageable, endemic level, it still prompts one or two messages a month. This morning I heard from someone named Dorothea Salo, who has her own harrowing Tale of Graduate School Burnout. (To her credit, she was modest enough not to mention it to me; I found it on my own.) She admits that "I wrote it because I was angry and mournful and hurting" after leaving graduate school (right before the Ph.D. exams); nonetheless, her story of bad (or merely absent) advising, hostile bureaucracies, indifferent teachers, and exploitative research advisors rings all too true. Reading it reminded me of the high level of anxiety that graduate students and budding academics live with, often for years on end (I wonder what academic life would be like if people didn't go through that; I suspect some of the ridiculous behavior that gives us such a bad name in places like The National Review would evaporate). It also points out something that I was always aware but never quite conscious of: during my graduate career, I was lucky to have a few, critical people on my side-- and that made all the difference. My advisors, Rob Kohler and Riki Kuklick, actually tried to teach me things, and read my work; our department administrators, Pat Johnson and Joyce Roselle, were masters of the labyrinth of rules that traps too many graduate students; and I had several fellow students with whom I learned a great deal. The lesson is that the difference between success and failure as a scholar can come down to the good work of just a couple people.

Buy those books!

The hardcover edition of my book Empire and the Sun is ranked 2,243,493 on Amazon today. The paperback is doing better: it's soared to 895,175. I notice that if they'll give you a deal if you buy it with Alan Hirshfeld's Parallax, and that in the "Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought" list, there are actual books listed, suggesting that someone did in fact buy it.

Not like I'm at all interested in how the book is doing, of course.

Quoted in the New York Times

I got quoted in a New York Times article on the Xerox Alto: John Markoff's "How Digital Pioneers Put the 'Personal' in PC's," which like all of John's work is great (even when, or alas perhaps especially when, I'm not in it).

Another cool Clie feature

I didn't notice this-- consciously anyway-- until last night, but: the word "Clie" is stamped on the front of the device. When you hold it up to the light in just the right way, it becomes a prism: it turns deep red, then moves through the spectrum to violet. You have to play with it for a while to get the effect, but it's VERY striking once you notice it.

I find this immensely charming: it's one of those details that says that some very smart people really cared about the product.