Relevant History

Quote of the day

"This is an entire country that thinks of itself as an SUV." (Mark Wigley, Dean, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation)

The Infrastructural City

From Metropolis, an essay on "Tracking the Future" that describes a recent book on new urban infrastructures.

The 50-year arc of engines and batteries puts us right on the cusp of viable clean-power transit. The computation and flexibility necessary to make better use of the energy feeding the electric grid are already available; they’re the same technologies keeping cell phones going for days on a single charge. And telecommunications itself is slowly but steadily having a noticeable effect on how and when we use energy, whether through the reduced need for office space because of flexible work locations, the creeping advance of videoconferencing, or even the use of online social networking to buttress face-to-face interactions. It’s not as if we can’t imagine what a viable future might look like (even if it is just as easy to summon a picture of total collapse).

What’s harder to grasp is the inherent flexibility of this new infrastructure. With The Infrastructural City, Varnelis, an architectural historian and the director of Columbia University’s Network Architecture Lab, set out to update Reyner Banham’s 1971 book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. The major difference is that where Banham saw in Los Angeles’s unplanned urbanism a logic that could be instructive, Varnelis views it as a city in perpetual crisis—a victim of its own infrastructure. The freeways are perpetually clogged. The wildfires burn faster the more they are suppressed. “Infrastructure is no longer a solution,” Varnelis writes. But he really means the old infrastructure, those masterworks built according to a plan....

The emerging infrastructure is different. Varnelis describes it as something multiple and shifting: “networked ecologies,” plural “infrastructures” that are “hypercomplex” and as likely to consist of legal mechanisms and barely visible cell-phone networks as the heavy stuff of tunnels and bridges. Inherently less apparent than the infrastructure that came before, they’re also as likely to be owned by corporations as by governments—meaning these networks can’t really be controlled, only “appropriated” according to their own logic. With traditional planning made impotent by capitalism and NIMBYism, rebuilding the city now requires a “new type of urbanist,” a designer Varnelis compares to a computer hacker who reimagines a new use for the underlying rules and codes.

Remind me to keep an open mind

Again from Metropolis, a good interview with John Bielenberg:

Yesterday at Project M lab you drew a doodle that read, “Remind me to keep an open mind.”

It’s so easy for us to be a victim of our own orthodoxy and synaptic connections. I’ve often thought about giving Project M’ers t-shirts that they have to wear the whole time that reads, “Please remind me to keep an open mind.” That’s why I wear this stupid little bracelet that says, “Live Wrong” because it’s always a reminder to me to think wrong.

How do we actively keep an open mind?

I try to surround myself with people that encourage that. If you’re just sitting in your cabin in the woods, it’s very easy to get wound up in your own thoughts and they reinforce each other.... The biggest thing is having people to play with, who get it, who are challenging and who keep the conversation activated like that.

IDEO on 21st century education

From Metropolis: a nice, short, but provocative list of 10 things to do to create the classroom of the 21st century. A couple of my favorites:

6. Teachers are designers. Let them create. Build an environment where your teachers are actively engaged in learning by doing. Shift the conversation from prescriptive rules to permissive guidance. Even though the resulting environment may be more complicated to manage, the teachers will produce amazing results.

7. Build a learning community. Learning doesn’t happen in the child’s mind alone. It happens through the social interactions with other kids and teachers, parents, the community, and the world at large. It really does take a village. Schools should find new ways to engage parents and build local and national partnerships. This doesn’t just benefit the child—it brings new resources and knowledge to your institution.

8. Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist. An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating its relics and digging for the truth of what was. An anthropologist studies people to understand their values, needs, and desires. If you want to design new solutions for the future, you have to understand what people care about and design for that. Don’t dig for the answer—connect.

Great question

From Matt Yglesias:

Brad DeLong observes “In Agatha Christie’s autobiography, she mentioned how she never thought she would ever be wealthy enough to own a car - nor so poor that she wouldn’t have servants.”

This kind of thing gets a bit hard to get one’s head around when thinking about the future. What do you think will be the equivalent 100 years from now of Agatha Christie’s car and servants?

(via Marginal Revolution)

links for 2009-02-25

• Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models: An Examination of Health Social Networks, Consumer Personalized Medicine and Quantified Self-Tracking - MDPI
  "A new class of patient-driven health care services is emerging to supplement and extend traditional health care delivery models and empower patient self-care. Patient-driven health care can be characterized as having an increased level of information flow, transparency, customization, collaboration and patient choice and responsibility-taking, as well as quantitative, predictive and preventive aspects. The potential exists to both improve traditional health care systems and expand the concept of health care though new services. This paper examines three categories of novel health services: health social networks, consumer personalized medicine and quantified self-tracking."
  (tags: health2.0 collaboration web2.0 research medicine health)

Throwing out the cats: a morning ritual

You can tell if you have this gene by how you react the news that you might not have it

New research suggests that something scientists have dubbed the "brightside gene" is partly responsible for whether we take an optimistic or pessimistic view of life.

It seems that for some of us, seeing the glass as half full is hardwired into our genetic make-up, helping us shrug off the miseries of life and enjoy the positives.

Research by British psychologists suggests that people who carry the gene pay less attention to negative things going on around them and focus instead on the happier aspects of life. By doing so, they end up being more sociable and are generally in better shape psychologically.

Elaine Fox, head of psychology at Essex University, said the gene seems to underlie some people's ability to deal with daily stresses. Those without it are likely to have a gloomier outlook on life, and suffer more from mental health problems such as depression....

In a study involving more than 100 volunteers, Fox's team checked how long it took people to react to good and bad images that flashed up on a computer screen. Among the positive pictures were a couple hugging and someone sailing along in a boat. The negative images included a photo of someone being mugged....

Genetic tests on the participants showed that a tendency to ignore negative images and dwell on the positive ones was strongly linked to a variation in a gene that controls serotonin, the brain's main feelgood chemical.

Instinct says that if you read about this study and think you probably have the happy version of the gene, you probably do.

A sign of how bad things are getting

This is the second article I've seen recently on pawnshops of the rich and famous:

She is the world's most famous celebrity photographer, whose portfolio contains some of the most iconic images of the past 30 years, not least the glamorous pictures of Michelle Obama on the latest cover of Vanity Fair. As such Annie Leibovitz is hardly the kind of person you would normally associate with going to a pawn-broker.

But it seems that in these unusual times even the likes of Leibovitz need to find cash in unusual places.

The photographer has turned to a company called Art Capital that specialises in lending money with fine art as the collateral. The New York Times disclosed yesterday that Leibovitz has borrowed about $15m (£10m) from the firm in two tranches.

Records show she secured the loan partly against property, but also by putting up as collateral the copyright, negatives and contract rights to every photograph she has ever taken or will take in future until the loans are paid off.

Leibovitz is part of a wider trend that Art Capital and other specialist lending institutions like it say has intensified since the start of the global economic crisis last autumn. Wealthy individuals and institutions have increasingly turned to the firm for help – numbers have risen by 30% to 40% since before the crash.

Still. Trying. To. Leave.

My son on the dinosaur sculpture.

We gotta go, kid!

Still trying to leave...

The only kid I know who would even try to do a cartwheel on muddy ground. The kid loves to cartwheel. I don't really get it.

The kids in the background, she later explained, are "part of her fan club." Apparently she often goes over to the nursery school child care-- in the classroom next door to where she spends her afternoons-- and reads to the little kids. A great example of how the school manages to mix kids from various grades, to everyone's benefit.

They're so anxious to leave school

Most afternoons are like this. My son is on a dinosaur climber (it seems So Big when my daughter was in nursery school here), and my daughter is in the background, swinging.

Writing

I have a day with no meetings. Owing to the combination of the Institute being a pretty meeting-driven place, and my own distracting sociability, this is a rare thing. Not one to be wasted.

via flickr

David Gross on dumb money

From David Gross' latest:

The Dumb Money creed rested on four pillars: perpetually low interest rates, perpetually rising asset prices (especially for housing), borrowers of all types remaining perpetually current, and perpetually strong markets for debt. The high priests of this cult were the nation's central bankers. In the Era of Cheap Money (the fall of 2001 through June 2004), Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan convinced us that we could have low interest rates despite inflationary pressures and global growth. His successor, Ben Bernanke, in 2002 began trying to convince us that we might have as much to fear from deflation as from inflation.

Bernanke also provided intellectual fortification for the argument that one of our greatest vices—a tendency to debt-financed consumption—was actually something of a virtue. He helped popularize the concept of a savings glut, arguing that America's twin budget and trade deficits could be traced not to a dearth of American savings but to a glut of foreign savings.... Economists claimed that the government measures of income used to calculate savings—which includes wages and salaries, interest on bonds, and stock dividends but which excluded capital gains on stocks, profits from selling a house, or withdrawals from 401(k) plans—were hopelessly behind the times. "The structure of the household portfolio has changed over time," said David Malpass, chief economist at Bear Stearns, one of the leading exponents of what might be dubbed the theory of Magical Market Savings. In 2004, Malpass found that, thanks to the booming stock and housing markets, the net worth of U.S. households—their assets minus their liabilities—stood at a record $48.54 trillion, up 9.6 percent from 2003 despite sluggish income growth. Why put money aside for a rainy day when your house and the market were doing it for you?

The power and fragility of groups

Everyone loves groups. What's better (in America at least) than being part of a "team"? Collaboration is cool. (Is there a word that's been rehabilitated more completely than "collaboration"? Fifty years ago, someone who "collaborated" wasn't a good person, but a traitor.) Collective intelligence is the solution to the world's problems. Smart mobs are... mobbish, perhaps, but also smart, and that's what matters.

Groups are powerful... but for all their power, they're also fragile. University of Washington academics Will Felps and Terence Mitchell constructed a very interesting experiment to show just how fragile they are, by demonstrating the effect of "bad apples" on the effectiveness of small groups.

As Coding Horror summarizes their work and findings,

Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the teams, they're told that whichever team performs best will be awarded $100 per person. What they don't know, however, is that in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn't a student. He's an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types:

• The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed.
• The Jerk will say that other people's ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert: me."
• The Slacker will say "whatever", and "I really don't care."

The conventional wisdom in the research on this sort of thing is that none of this should have had much effect on the group at all. Groups are powerful. Group dynamics are powerful. And so groups dominate individuals, not the other way around. There's tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms.

But Will found the opposite.

Invariably, groups that had the bad apple would perform worse. And this despite the fact that were people in some groups that were very talented, very smart, very likeable. Felps found that the bad apple's behavior had a profound effect -- groups with bad apples performed 30 to 40 percent worse than other groups.

A paper describing the experiment, "How, when, and why bad apples spoil the barrel: Negative Members and Dysfunctional Groups," is available as a PDF.

Thanks to Mathias for the link.

links for 2009-02-23

• Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison
  On Will Felps' work on collaboration and the effect of bad actors on group effectiveness. "[T]he worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to what your worst team member is like. The teams with the worst person performed the poorest."
  (tags: psychology business groups leadership collaboration management productivity)
• Robert Hahn and Paul Tetlock, "Making Development Work," Policy Review
  "[T]here is a way to substantially improve on the basic model for economic development — using a new kind of market and paying for performance." Outlines arguments for using information or prediction markets to increase the efficiacy of development investments and aid.
  (tags: decisionmarkets development experts economics)
• (Not) predicting the future - PSD Blog - The World Bank Group
  On Philip Tetlock's work and the potential for prediction markets. "This is exactly why I am interested in prediction markets - and those of you who dream of effective bottom-up approaches to development should also be. (Same goes for us working on scenarios and macro predictions.) This is especially true since diversity is so important to accurate decision making, as Scott Page and Lu Hung tell us."
  (tags: prediction psychology philiptetlock decisionmarkets markets" future2)

This afternoon's workplace

Sequestered myself in Cafe Zoë in an attempt to make some more progress on a report I need to get to clients.

Write write write write....

My corner pub

Last night, as I was having an exceptional second beer in 24 hours (I'd had the first with dinner, and then went to the gym and sauna, so I thought I could risk it), I briefly lamented the fact that when I lived in Berkeley, I had a corner pub-- the wonderful, loud, and interesting Bison Brewery, where I'd go, have a pint or two, and write. I wasn't exactly a regular-- the bartenders and I didn't know each others' names-- but I still enjoyed the place. I don't have a pub here. I drink so little it would hardly be possible. Still, it seemed a bit of a shame.

Today, as my wife took the kids and their friends to the movies, I headed over to Cafe Zoë, to do some work. (I'm now at that age-- or maturity-- where I see that solitude is an opportunity, not the absence of others.) I've been coming here for years, when it was under different ownership. As I was ordering my chai latte, I read a sign they'd just put up announcing a loyalty program. Visit ten times, your next coffee is free-- a deal I'll be able to take advantage of approximately every four days, even when I'm not running a tab. "I should sign up for that," I said.

via flickr

The owner-- Zoë's mother-- said, "Oh, we'll give you this drink for free. You've been here a lot more than ten times. You're a regular."

I guess I am.

Break for dinner

Wandered over to Bangkok Garden, a Thai restaurant on Lytton, for dinner and a break from a piece I'm writing on the future of blogging. Think I'll follow it up with a quick trip to the gym.

Then and now

A friend of mine-- a fellow STS person, now living in China-- and I were talking about losing weight. He dropped about 100 pounds in the last two years, which given my own recent experience, I find extremely impressive.

This exchange, and a friend's recent remark that I've shed a roly-poly, Buddha-like personality for something more Trotskyite, made me go back and look at pictures from a couple years ago. This was in London, June 2005, at about 240:

via flickr

And Denver, December 2008 (and about 10 pounds ago), with my dad:

via flickr

Yeah, that's different. Don't know about Trotskyite, but definitely not the same.

It's really interesting how much losing this weight has made me feel like a different person. Not just healthier, but fundamentally different.

The end of privacy

Enabled by a combination of Bluetooth and incredible stupidity.

This afternoon I boarded a train from Washington bound for Penn Station.... I, along with all of the other passengers, were sitting quietly when the man directly behind me decided to make a phone call using his bluetooth. He was talking so loudly that I think most people in the car were able to hear him.

His conversation, though he stressed how necessary it was to be kept secret (ah, the irony), detailed the current plans of Pillsbury to lay off somewhere in the range of 15-20 attorneys from four offices by the end of March, including a few senior associates with low billable hours and two or three first-year associates. I wouldn't have believed it except for the fact that he identified himself to the call as Bob Robbins, who I learned is the leader of the firm's Corporate & Securities practice section, and was talking to Rick Donaldson, who I learned was COO. What's more, he was NAMING NAMES over the phone!

The first rule of Fight Club, people....

Newsweek on Facebook and Baby Boomers

I've said before that for people my age (I'm 44), Web 2.0 is a time machine. So it's nice to see that Newsweek has caught onto the idea (though why they had to title the article "Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies" is beyond me. Excuse me!).

• Facebook is about finding people you've lost track of. [This is so true. In fact, I found the article on a college classmate's Facebook page. We'd been out of touch for about 20 years before I friended her (though she insists she friended me first... yeah, right). Which just proves the article's point.]
• We're no longer bitter about high school. [How can I be bitter about it? I can hardly remember it.]
• We never get drunk at parties and get photographed holding beer bottles in suggestive positions. [Don't I wish....]
• Facebook isn't just a social network; it's a business network.
• We're lazy. [True that.]
  
• We're old enough that pictures from grade school or summer camp look nothing like us.
  
• We have children.
  
• We're too old to remember e-mail addresses. [But we're smart enough to know that we don't have to. Our address books sync with our iPhones, we import them into Gmail, etc.]
  
• We don't understand Twitter. [We do. We just think harder about using it.]
  
• We're not cool, and we don't care. [Well, that's a pose.]

Cat and mouse

For the last couple days the cats have been inside, as it's been raining like crazy and their usual outdoor hangouts have been flooded. This morning I saw this.

One of the cats had a pipe-cleaner mouse on his bed. I think my daughter made it.

And does anyone use pipe cleaners to clean pipes any longer? Or to put it another way, what percentage of pipe cleaner sales are to people who actually have pipes, rather than children?

Why I might be forgiven for thinking my daughter is perfect

Anyone this amazingly photogenic, this good at fitting into her environment. How can one think of her as anything else....

via flickr

via flickr

My daughter signals UFOs

She's written "Hi, up there!?#"

Breakaway above San Gregorio

San Gregorio State Beach

Next stop for the Tour de California!

More peleton at Tunitas Creek Road

Kids photographing the race

They were done drawing with the yellow Lance Armstrong chalk.

The peleton turns on Tunitas Creek

Hello from Hwy 1 and Tunitas Creek

At the Tour de California

Dinner

Somen noodle salad at Sprouts, with a side of the latest draft of my article on reinventing futures for the current century.

Yum.

Generations

The challenge of working with twenty-somethings....

Timing is everything

More from the Scientific American article, "The Expert Mind:"

A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.

The Drosophila of cognitive science

From Scientific American's 2006 article on "The Expert Mind:"

Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists--as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.

Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.

My collaborators

The Signtific group. We all got lab coats yesterday, and that inspired the picture.

Standing: Cesar, me, Mathias, Nathan; seated: Natalie; via flickr

The war on irony

John Cole:

Of all the wars the Republicans have launched, the War on Irony is the only one they have a clear shot at winning.

Working from home

I'm at home today, as my daughter came down with strep. When I picked her up from school yesterday afternoon, she was on the couch in child care, looking pretty drained. We spent part of last night at the pediatrician's, getting her and her brother swabbed, and dosed up with amoxicillin.

She woke up today and was pretty out of it. Her brother insisted that he was at death's door, until he remembered that his class was going ice skating today. Then all of a sudden: Miracle Recovery!

He tested negative last night, seemed no worse than usual. Since I know Elizabeth will rest better if she's alone (obviously I'm here; she's alone in the same way nobility are alone when servants are still in the room), I decided to take him into school.

Elizabeth is now on the couch. She watched Nausicaä: Valley of the West Wind this morning, and is now on to The Cat Returns. She likes Hayao Miyazaki under normal times, but for some reason, when she's under the weather, escapist movies featuring young female heroines especially appeal to her. Just one of those inexplicable girl things.

Fortunately, she's old enough, and independent enough, and also not sick enough, for me to actually be able to work.

Shoes off, please!

Favicon

I finally got the favicon working for this blog. In case you're wondering,

=

Sometimes I think the more pixellated one more accurately represents me.

One of these things is not like the other!

On Saturday I took my son to buy a new bike. Across the street from the bike store I saw this apartment building.

via flickr

Earlier this year he and I had been at the original.

via flickr

How, I wonder, did the first come to be named after the second?

Woody Allen on talent

"Talent is luck. The most important thing in the world is courage."

Breakfast theory

One of my favorite cartoons ever: Jeff Reid's 1989 cartoon, "Breakfast Theory: A Morning Methodology."

via flickr

Charlotte Martin

Whatever you're doing, stop it, and go listen to this Internet Archive concert by singer Charlotte Martin. Her version of the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" (mp3) is extraordinary.

Many of her other songs sound (in a good way) like Kate Bush or Tori Amos, but her straightforward delivery makes "Wild Horses" her own. As unexpected as Dar Williams' blow-off-the-doors version of "Comfortably Numb."

"Four Walls" is really terrific, too.

links for 2009-02-06

• Logistics: The Factory WIthout Walls (Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net)
  "A team of researchers from the Cardiff Business School studied the chain of actions required to make a can of cola. The whole process, starting at the Bauxite mine in Australia, and passing through the various smelting and rolling processes to the manufacture of the can itself, printing its label, filling it with the cola and finally getting it into somebody’s refrigerator, took no less than 319 days. Only three hours were spent on manufacturing, the rest of the time was spent in storage and transport, as many as 14 storage lots and warehouses were involved."
  (tags: environment economics sustainability food security logistics)
• Chinese Academy of Sciences: International Young Researchers
  (tags: china science signtific)

My new cafe... and bank

I'm spending the morning at Cafe Zoë, writing to a lot of people. I never expected, when I started working as a futurist, that I would have to calculate what time it was in Beijing and Budapest, and make sure to get some e-mails out while people are still in their offices or awake. But that's my life these days.

I've been coming to this cafe for a couple years now (actually, a quick check of my external memory-- aka the blog archive-- reveals its been four years and one month), and this morning I discovered a new function. I got to the counter, realized I didn't have any money, and apologized and told them I'd be back.

"It's okay," the owner said. "You can owe us. It's not the first time you're here." She pulled out a book with IOU on the front-- I guess there are plenty of people who come here a little absent-minded-- and wrote down my order.

It makes perfect sense. Unless I want to never come back here, I'm good for the $3.60. And they want to keep me as a regular customer, so it's a reasonable risk for them.

Fortunately they seem to be doing pretty well, despite the downturn: there are a core group of us who are here regularly, and they seem now to have multiple clienteles at different times of day: stroller jogger moms in the morning, people coming in for lunch, freelancers or people who aren't working and home and don't want to work in the office (hello!), and people from nearby businesses, popping in for a cup of coffee. It's a real slice of the neighborhood, and very nice to see.

The next trend in outsourcing: Relocating U.S. workers overseas?

From Information Week:

The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries.

Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil.... [and] a number of other developing markets, including Mexico, the Czech Republic, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates.

Some of those places are pretty interesting, and working abroad can be a broadening experience. Yet my first thought is, eeeww.

[Via Marginal Revolution]

links for 2009-02-05

• Richard Seaford - Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy - Reviewed by Joshua Reynolds, Northwestern University - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame
  "Seaford’s book deals with the origins of Greek philosophy. According to the author, its purpose is to explain “the advent of the idea of the universe as an intelligible order subject to the uniformity of impersonal power. More specifically… [to explain] the counter-intuitive idea of a single substance underlying the plurality of things manifest to the senses” (175, emphasis in original). The author thus intends to focus not on explicating the beliefs and arguments of early Greek philosophers, but rather on ascertaining “why… they [held] those extraordinary fundamental beliefs about the world” (10, emphasis in original). Seaford finds his explanation in the rapid development and pervasive use of coined money in Greece during the sixth century B.C."
  (tags: money history history_of_science philosophy)

Nursery Blue gate