Relevant History

Off to London

I'm on my way to England for a few days. A bit of a whirlwind trip, but I expect it'll be productive.

Loaded up my Tube map and National Rail schedule on my iPhone. The new travel practice: adjusting your collection of apps.

More from England.

links for 2010-05-28

• Regent University: School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship - Academics - Master of Arts in Strategic Foresight
  The Master of Arts in Strategic Foresight (MSF) exists to help fulfill Regent University's mission to "Develop Globally Competent, Christ-Centered Leaders, Who Make a Difference in the World." The primary world we prepare our graduates for is the world of work, to empower them to help their organization navigate the turbulence waters of the 21st century and create the global enterprises of tomorrow.
  (tags: education foresight)

links for 2010-05-27

• Scenario Planning -- Thomas J. Chermack -- Chermack Scenarios
  Chermack's publications on scenario planning.
  (tags: scenarios planning bibliography GPPAG)
• Bibliography on scenario planning
  Published by the Scenario Planning Institute at Colorado State University.
  (tags: scenarios planning scholarship GPPAG)
• The 'Unconference': Technology Loosens Up the Academic Meeting - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education [sub req]
  "Some humanists have concluded that there is a better way [than the traditional conference, which totally sucks in every way it is possible for something to suck]: the unconference, a meeting style that became popular in the technology world. It is "a lightly organized conference in which the attendees themselves determine the schedule," wrote Ethan Watrall, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, in a recent ProfHacker blog post at chronicle.com on the history of unconferences and how to organize one. Goodbye, program committees and formal presentations; hello, crowdsourcing and workshopping."
  (tags: conference academia)

One of the greatest quotes of all time

Steve Eisman, "the outspoken investor whose huge wager against the subprime mortgage market was chronicled by author Michael Lewis in his bestselling book The Big Short, talking about the for-profit education industry:

Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.

As Mother Jones elaborates,

Driving much of the growth, Eisman explained, was the sector's easy access to federally guaranteed debt through Title IV student loans. In 2009, he said, for-profit educators raked in almost one-quarter of the $89 billion in available Title IV loans and grants, despite having only 10 percent of the nation's postsecondary students.

Eisman attributes the industry's success to a Bush administration that stripped away regulations and increased the private sector's access to public funds. "The government, the students, and the taxpayer bear all the risk and the for-profit industry reaps all the rewards," Eisman said. "This is similar to the subprime mortgage sector in that the subprime originators bore far less risk than the investors in their mortgage paper."...

Another similarity between subprime lending and for-profit education is this, Eisman said: Both push low-income Americans into something they can't afford.... [Finally], the industry's era of massive profits—ITT is more profitable on a margin basis than Apple, he notes—are about to end, thanks to new government regulations in the pipeline.

Wonderful.

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V)," from the album Wish You Were Here (a 4-star song, imo).]

My Hipstamatic obsession

A friend introduced me to Hipstamatic a few days ago, and I've been hooked on it. I've created a Flickr set of Hipstamatic pictures.

via flickr

I'm not sure what's so compelling about the program. I think the ability to play with combinations of lenses and film and flahses (or rather "lenses" and "film" and "flashes") and the clever fake history that they've created around the technology has a lot to do with it.

via flickr

The fact that it's also kind of hard to use at times makes it more interesting. It's not clear what you're going to get when you take a picture.

via flickr

Anyway, I recommend it.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Turn It On Again," from the album Duke (a 3-star song, imo).]

links for 2010-05-26

• STANFORD Magazine: March/April 2007 > Features > Mind-set Research
  (tags: psychology mindset learning)
• Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities | The New York Review of Books
  "British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy."
  (tags: academia uk)
• C19 Index - Home page
  "Welcome to C19: The Nineteenth Century Index – the most comprehensive and dynamic source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. C19 Index draws on the strength of established indexes such as the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.5 million books and official publications, 71,000 archival collections and 18.9 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers. C19 Index now provides integrated access to 12 bibliographic indexes, including almost a million records from the ongoing digitization of British Periodicals Collections I and II, plus the new Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism. See About for more information on coverage, and linking to texts available online."
  (tags: history newspapers databases culture 19c victorian)
• The Unanticipated Consequences of Technology
  "The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ubiquitous phenomenon of unanticipated consequences. We begin with a look at some definitions which shed light on the matter, and then consider the nature of change. This leads to a broadening of the definition of the word 'technology', and a look at what was one of our earliest examples of unanticipated consequences. We then address the crucial question of why we have such consequences. Some additional examples follow, and we then look at what society does in the face of unanticipated consequences. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the ethical implications of acting when we know that there can be unanticipated consequences to our actions."
  (tags: technology sts unintended_consequences)
• Unintended Consequences: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty
  "The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it."
  (tags: unintended_consequences economics politics future)
• JSTOR: American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 894-904 [sub req]
  "In some one of its numerous forms, the problem of the unanticipated consequences of purposive action has been treated by virtually every substantial contributor to the long history of social thought."
  (tags: sociology future unintended_consequences)

Designing events on the academic / real-world boundary

A while ago I wrote about reinventing academic talks. It got me thinking about how to better design workshops or conferences that bring together scholars or scientists (who, broadly speaking, like to think about stuff) with policy people, corporate strategists, and military people (who, broadly speaking, also like to think, but really like to DO).

It's a space I've been exploring in my consulting practice this past year, and I just posted a piece on Future2 on the opportunities we now have to reinvent events on the academic / real-world boundary.

[To the tune of Autour De Lucie, "Sur Tes Pas," from the album Lilith Fair: A Celebration Of Women In Music [Live] [Disc 1] (a 1-star song, imo).]

Life of the mind, Google Scholar edition

I noticed a traffic spike on the blog, thanks to Lexi Lord's essay on post-academic life in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education (thanks, Lexi!). She talks about how she decided to leave a tenure-track position, and her discovery of the fact that you don't have to be an academic to have an interesting intellectual life (and indeed, can have a more interesting one if you're not a professor):

Because I live in a large city, as opposed to the small college towns where I was a professor, I live in a world of museums, lectures, public seminars, extraordinary bookstores, fantastic archives, and libraries. I live in a place that has racial as well as ethnic diversity. All of those factors encourage me to think about historical problems in a rigorous albeit different fashion from how I saw them in academe....

I live where a lot of archives are—which makes research easier than it was in academe. I write and publish. My new book, researched and written completely outside academe, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Since leaving academe, I have continued to endorse the belief that being an intellectual entails analyzing and understanding issues from multiple angles. I hope that in advising their undergraduates, academics will encourage their students to share that view. More important, I hope faculty members will encourage students to do informational interviews and extensive research on career options—before entering a Ph.D. program, which is, after all, only one path to the life of the mind.

This is always good advice, but it's especially timely, given that last night I had an experience that reminded me of the increased feasibility of pursuing academic projects outside the university.

I recently became interested in the concept of unintended consequences, and how the term is used to either describe or excuse the unexpected. It would be obvious to start such an essay with "a Raymond Williams Keywords-like analysis of its history," and last night I decided to poke around a little bit and see if I could find some early uses.

A little time on Google Scholar turned up the fact that Robert Merton wrote an article about the term in 1936, and died with a book on unintended consequences still unfinished-- a warning that I should be very tactical in how I approach the subject. (The fact that Google Scholar has "Stand on the shoulders of giants" as its motto warms my heart, since Merton wrote a book on the phrase.) That took a few minutes.

I then jumped over to the Stanford Library Web site, to see if Poole's Index of 19th Century Periodicals was online. When I was writing my dissertation, I spent a LOT OF TIME with Poole's-- it was an invaluable resource, and I remember many hours in the Penn and UC Berkeley libraries, looking for article citations, then tracking them down in the stacks. Instead, I quickly found the 19C Index, an online repository / directory that includes Poole's, but also a number of other 19th century indexes, publications, scanned magazines, etc.

For the next couple hours, I tracked down various combinations of unintended, unexpected, and unanticipated, and effects or consequences; by bedtime, I had a couple pages' worth of material written (most of it is footnotes and quotations, of course).

All this happened on my couch, with the "Biggest Loser" finale in the background.

I wouldn't give up those days spent in the library for anything; and I still really enjoy going to libraries to read and write. But the point of the story is this: that while fifteen years ago (when I did it) successfully leaving academia but remaining intellectual required geography and attitude-- I could do it because I was living in Chicago, Lexi was in DC, and we both were willing to keep a growth mindset about the next phase of our lives-- today, resources like 19C make it even easier to do serious scholarly work-- at least preliminary scholarly writing-- without being close to libraries. I'm about three miles away from Green Library, but with kids, work, and other stuff, it's hard to get there, and impossible to just dash over to the reference section to check up on something (as I could do when I was single and living a mile from the Berkeley campus).

So what Lexi argues in her recent piece, and what I argued years ago, is more true than ever: the raw resources for pursuing academic projects are more accessible and portable than ever. It still often requires maintaining some kind of connection with an academic institution-- my Stanford affiliation gets me access to the online databases like 19C and JSTOR-- and you still have to manage all the logistical stuff required to carve out time for yourself, but the Web at least seriously lowers the barriers to getting access to the resources necessary to support a real intellectual life.

I know that projects like JSTOR are intended to support academics, but I think it's even more valuable for people who are doing serious intellectual work but who aren't academics. These services were designed to support scholarship is doing that... but the most profound benefits aren't going to the people they were originally designed for.

Hey. That's an unintended consequence.

links for 2010-05-25

• Jürgen Neffe: The disembodied book (14/05/2009) - signandsight
  In the shadows of the global financial crisis of the early 21st century, another revolution is gathering pace, whose repercussions reach far beyond the current correctable economic buckling. It impact on the world will compare with Gutenberg's. And with it, the era of the printed book will come to a close. Dissolved digitally like sound and image beforehand, limitlessly copyable, globally downloadable by the million with the click of a mouse, the book is entering the world of multimedia like its disembodied cousins from film, photography and music. This is the disintegration of the oldest serially produced data carrier in terms of form and content.
  (tags: books publishing culture reading future technology printing)
• Eurozine - Written in the stars? - Brian Holmes Global finance, precarious destinies
  This essay describes the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the centre of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience. It begins not with the azurean blue, but with the curve of a dark horizon.
  (tags: finance globalization technology)
• Eurozine - Can democracies deal with climate change? - Claus Leggewie, Harald Welzer
  Rising energy costs and the eco-social consequences of climate change are causing anxieties about the future to increase, while trust in the ability of political elites to solve these problems is evaporating. Reaching eco-political targets calls for more participation of citizens as active architects of their society, write Claus Leggewie and Harald Welzer.
  (tags: environment climate energy politics citizenscience)
• Harald Welzer, Claus Leggewie: Jolly eschatology (21/10/2009) - signandsight
  "[W]hat they sell us as realpolitik these days is a complete illusion, because it doesn't address any the problems of the future – climate change, dwindling resources, mounting water and food deficits, the escalating global conflict potential, the exploitation of our children's future. If you look at it this way, it's the realpoliticians who seem who have a fondness for crises. Crises also provide an excellent opportunity to score points for tireless crisis management. This is good for distracting from the fact that there is nothing on the political agenda."
  (tags: ecology politics)
• Our Giant Banking Crisis—What to Expect | The New York Review of Books [sub req]
  Important review of a VERY important book. "[W]hat is the message of This Time Is Different? In a nutshell, it is that too much debt is always dangerous.... Yet people—both investors and policymakers—tend to rationalize away these dangers. After any prolonged period of financial calm, they either forget history or invent reasons to believe that historical experience is irrelevant.... There were superficial differences between debt now and debt three generations ago: more elaborate financial instruments, seemingly more sophisticated techniques of assessment, an apparent wider spreading of risks (which turned out to have been an illusion). So financial executives, policymakers, and many economists convinced themselves that the old rules didn’t apply.... Encouraged by these rationalizations, people run up ever more debt—and in so doing set the stage for eventual crisis."
  (tags: economics forecasting psychology future risk)
• How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review
  Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.
  (tags: productivity multitasking management work)
• Mindful Eating is Attention Management | 360 Degrees of Mindful Living
  On mindful eating.
  (tags: mindfulness diet)
• App Choice Fail
  The problem of oversharing in the age of the Internet of Things....
  (tags: endofcyberspace humor internetofthings exercise)

The Internet of Things, amusement edition

This caught on Failbooking.

Two Euro aggregators

Sign and Sight and Eurozine. Both good for those of us whose reading knowledge of German, Norweigian, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, and Polish is rusty. From their about pages:

signandsight.com translates outstanding articles by non-English language authors bringing them to a worldwide audience. signandsight.com gathers voices from across Europe on a variety of topics, aiming to foster trans-European debates and the creation of a European public sphere.

Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up more than 75 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages.

[To the tune of ABBA, "Chiquitita," from the album Gold (a 2-star song, imo).]

Against Multitasking

Peter Bregman reports on multitasking and its perils:

Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

You might think you're different, that you've done it so much you've become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.

But you'd be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.

I decided to do an experiment. For one week I would do no multitasking and see what happened. What techniques would help? Could I sustain a focus on one thing at a time for that long?

For the most part, I succeeded. If I was on the phone, all I did was talk or listen on the phone. In a meeting I did nothing but focus on the meeting. Any interruptions — email, a knock on the door — I held off until I finished what I was working on.

[To the tune of Tabla Beat Science, "Magnetic Dub," from the album Live in San Francisco at Stern Grove (a 3-star song, imo).]

Quote of the Day: from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

I passed into the potter’s house of clay, and saw the craftsman busy at his wheel, turning out pots and jars fashioned from the heads of kings, and the feet of beggars. (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, via 360 Degrees of Mindful Eating)

links for 2010-05-24

• Center for Catastrophic Risk Management
  The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) is part of the University's response to recent disasters—and efforts to anticipate future calamities. CCRM was started by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, and has become part of the Institute of Business and Economic Research to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of its research team.
  (tags: risk catastrophe UCBerkeley)
• Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft’s Main Role - NYTimes.com
  A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.
  (tags: surveillance space amateur)
• Socio-Digital Systems - Microsoft Research
  Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) aims to use an understanding of human values to help to change the technological landscape in the 21st century. Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can build technology to help us be more expressive, creative, and reflective in our daily lives.
  (tags: research microsoft sociology creativity culture design psychology)

links for 2010-05-23

• The Revs Institute
  Welcome to the Revs Institute for Automotive Research, Inc., library and archive Web site. We are an educational organization that advances the scholarly study of automotive history at The Collier Collection in beautiful Naples, Florida. Numbering more than one million items, these distinctive and highly specialized research books, documents and images are collected by Mr. Miles C. Collier to record the history of the automobile and the individuals and organizations associated with it. Scholars, journalists, automotive connoisseurs, hobbyists and preservationists will find our holdings formidable—an automotive history library and archive with few peers.
  (tags: automobile museum history technology)

links for 2010-05-21

• New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
  This pretty much sums up my feeling about Foursquare: "Foursquare is a little bit of everything—a friend-finder, a local city guide, an interactive mobile game," said company cofounder Dennis Crowley, as if reading from the same tired script used by every one of these Web 2.0 or whatever-the-****-they're-called startups. "But more than that, Foursquare is an [endless string of meaningless buzzwords we just couldn't bring ourselves to transcribe]."
  (tags: humor media socialsoftware geoweb)
• Living in denial: When a sceptic isn't a sceptic - opinion - 18 May 2010 - New Scientist
  "WHAT is the difference between a sceptic and a denier? When I call myself a sceptic, I mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims.... Scepticism is integral to the scientific process, because most claims turn out to be false. Weeding out the few kernels of wheat from the large pile of chaff requires extensive observation, careful experimentation and cautious inference. Science is scepticism and good scientists are sceptical. Denial is different. It is the automatic gainsaying of a claim regardless of the evidence for it - sometimes even in the teeth of evidence. Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact."
  (tags: environment psychology science)
• Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth - opinion - 19 May 2010 - New Scientist
  "What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial? Here's a hypothesis: denial is largely a product of the way normal people think. Most denialists are simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right. If this seems discouraging, take heart. There are good reasons for thinking that denialism can be tackled by condemning it a little less and understanding it a little more."
  (tags: science politics psychology)
• Is Wharton Ruining American Business? - Philadelphia Magazine - phillymag.com
  In the wake of Enron and ­other corporate ­scandals, America’s best-known business school, the place that produced Michael Milken and Frank Quattrone, is under siege. Our writer spent a year there figuring out what’s going on
  (tags: business)

links for 2010-05-19

• Carmen M. Reinhart, Eight Hundred Years of Financial Folly [pdf]
  The economics profession has an unfortunate tendency to view recent experience in the narrow window provided by standard datasets. With a few notable exceptions, cross-country empirical studies on financial crises typically begin in 1980 and are limited in other important respects. Yet an event that is rare in a three decade span may not be all that rare when placed in a broader context. In my paper with Kenneth Rogoff we introduce a comprehensive new historical database for studying debt and banking crises, inflation, currency crashes and debasements. The data covers sixty-six countries in across all regions. The range of variables encompasses external and domestic debt, trade, GNP, inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices. The coverage spans eight centuries, going back to the date of independence or well into the colonial period for some countries.
  (tags: economics forecasting foresight finance)
• This Time Is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises
  "This paper offers a “panoramic” analysis of the history of financial crises dating from England’s fourteenth-century default to the current United States sub-prime financial crisis. Our study is based on a new dataset that spans all regions. It incorporates a number of important credit episodes seldom covered in the literature, including for example, defaults and restructurings in India and China..... [O]ur aim is to illustrate some of the broad insights that can be gleaned from such a sweeping historical database. We find that serial default is a nearly universal phenomenon as countries struggle to transform themselves from emerging markets to advanced economies. Major default episodes are typically spaced some years (or decades) apart, creating an illusion that “this time is different” among policymakers and investors. A recent example of the “this time is different” syndrome is the false belief that domestic debt is a novel feature of the modern financial landscape."
  (tags: economics finance history research forecasting foresight)
• Why Snap Decisions Work
  "Intuition, it seems, is not some sort of mystical chemical reaction but a neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma (e.g., fight or flight). Too much data, however, throws a monkey wrench into the process. The more variables we consider, the harder it is to make the "right" decision--as anyone who has faced an aisle full of shampoos knows.

  Our brains have evolved to take the quickest and most efficient route to a decision, based on experience and a set of innate and unconscious rules developed since birth to negotiate our physical and social environment. Start considering lots of other information and variables, and the brain slows down or falters. Simplicity, writes Gigerenzer, is an evolutionary adaptation to uncertainty: "A complex problem demands a complex solution, so we are told. In fact, in unpredictable environments, the opposite is true.""

  
  
  (tags: psychology strategy neuroscience decision-making)
  
  
• 
  
  Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility - New York Times
  
  
  Gerd Gigerenzer on gut feelings. "It comes quickly into a person’s consciousness. The person doesn’t know why they have this feeling. Yet, this is strong enough to make an individual act on it. What a gut instinct is not is a calculation. You do not fully know where it comes from. My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term “heuristics.” These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations, when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues and ignoring other unnecessary information."
  
  
  (tags: cognition neuroscience psychology decision-making)
  
  
• 
  
  Gerd Gigerenzer: I Think, Therefore I Err
  
  
  "Why do we make errors? are they blunders caused by the limitations of our cognitive system? Or are errors indispensable parts of every intelligent system? From the first perspective, all errors are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful.... From the second perspective, there are errors that need to be made—that is, errors that are indispensable and functional.... The characteristic of a good error is that a person is better off making the error than not making it—for reaching a goal more quickly, or attaining it at all. In this view, every intelligent system has to make errors. Making no errors would destroy the intelligence of the system."
  
  
  (tags: cognition intelligence error psychology prediction)
  
  

The housing crisis is only gathering steam

This from Ezra Klein, who is rapidly becoming indispensable, despite just having turned thirteen:

One in every 10 mortgage holders is now officially "delinquent" -- that is to say, late on at least one payment. That's an all-time high. And that's not the only record we're setting: About one in 20 loans is now in foreclosure, which also qualifies as a first. All in all, about 15 percent of mortgage-holders are now delinquent or in foreclosure....

It's a reminder, if nothing else, that the trigger for the financial crisis was the realization that homeowners were going to begin defaulting in record numbers and the assets based on their future payments were not safe. It was not the realization that that had already happened. Instead, it's happening now. So though the financial crisis seems to have largely played itself out, the housing crisis isn't anywhere near its end [emphasis added].

[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "Saturday Night," from the album Hats (a 4-star song, imo).]

links for 2010-05-18

• Second Thoughts About the Autopilot - NYTimes.com
  "[A]re airliners so automated that pilots are becoming complacent? ...'The introduction of automation did good things,' said Key Dismukes, chief scientist for aerospace human factors at NASA. But it changed the essential nature of the pilot’s role in the cockpit. 'Now the pilot is a manager, which is good, and a monitor, which is not so good.' "
  (tags: technology ergonomics interaction_design aviation design psychology attention)
• Fears of brain drain as renowned British scientists move to Canada | Science | guardian.co.uk
  And I thought the Canadians were supposed to be so nice... "Britain is to lose several of its foremost scientists next year following a recruitment drive to attract top brains to Canada. The four researchers will leave their posts at UK universities for better-funded positions in institutions across the country. The British researchers won four C$20m (£13m) awards created by the Canadian government, the most by any country outside the US, which is to lose nine scientists to the scheme."
  (tags: neuroscience science brain_circulation globalization competitiveness)

links for 2010-05-14

• Trend Analysis as Pattern Recognition
  (tags: scanning future methodology)
• S&L Article Dynamic Scenarios
  This article outlines the structure of the Dynamic Scenario Learning Process and then applies it to a composite case in the financial services industry. We will demonstrate how dynamic scenarios yield insights that may be counterintuitive but position the companies to take advantage of trends and uncertainties that competitors may be missing.
  (tags: scenarios methodology)
• Predicting insurgent attacks with a mathematical model
  "We have found a unified model of modern insurgent wars that shows a fundamental pattern in the apparent chaos of wars," says Johnson. "In practical terms, our analysis can be used to create and explore scenarios, make predictions and assess risks, for present and future wars."

  The study finds a common statistical distribution for insurgency attacks that is significantly different to the distribution of attacks in traditional wars. This finding supports the belief that insurgent wars represent "fourth generation warfare" with different dynamics from conventional wars.

  "Despite the many different discussions of various wars, different historical features, tribes, geography and cause, we find that the way humans fight modern (present and probably future) wars is the same," he says. "Just like traffic patterns in Tokyo, London and Miami are pretty much the same."

  
  
  (tags: insurgency warfare modeling simulation science)
  
  

links for 2010-05-13

• Virtual reality used to transfer men's minds into a woman's body | Science | The Guardian
  "Scientists have transferred men's minds into a virtual woman's body in an experiment that could enlighten the prejudiced and shed light on how humans distinguish themselves from others. In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even see their new body and clothes. The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed."
  (tags: science anthropology simulation gender virtual_reality)

links for 2010-05-11

• The Finnish miracle - Academics & Activities | GreatSchools
  Interesting article on what makes the Finnish school system world-class.
  (tags: education finland)
• Journeys: Upcycling, Bricolage and Librarianship
  "Ross Todd speak about "The Essential Pieces" for school librarianship. Dr. Todd emphasized that librarians must rethink, redefine, and recast both their role in, and their vision for, school libraries. He challenged us to discard our dearly-held notion that the library is the hub or heart of a district and to seek ways to enable students to actively engage with learning wherever, whenever, and however that occurs. Another key point that Dr. Todd made was that librarians need to TEACH, to initiate as well as collaborate, to be able to show evidence of the type of quality teaching that has been proven to have a key effect on student learning. The library, he warned us, can't just be about "stuff." To use my new vocabulary, the library has to provide the tools and space to upcycle information, to improve the quality of the original material. It has to facilitate the process of bricolage: creation and invention, through tinkering, without penalty for failure."
  (tags: library library2.0)

Why I like Arnold Schwarzenegger

This line delivered at Emory University's commencement (via Talking Points Memo):

I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me.

I recently watched Pumping Iron-- I checked it out of the library, and meant to watch it in a more ironic spirit, but it turned out to be kind of captivating.

What impressed me was, first, how much Arnold dominated the field; and second, how many of the guys in the documentary talked about being runty little kids. None of the competition-level bodybuilders said, "Yeah, I always huge as a kid, and I loved beating people up, so this seemed like a natural sport for me." Doubtless there are guys who do it for that reason, but that doesn't give you the drive necessary to become really good.

[To the tune of Tabla Beat Science, "Secret Channel," from the album Tala Matrix (a 2-star song, imo).]

links for 2010-05-10

• A Musical Revolution, With a Cost in Fidelity - NYTimes.com
  "The last decade has brought an explosion in dazzling technological advances — including enhancements in surround sound, high definition television and 3-D — that have transformed the fan’s experience. There are improvements in the quality of media everywhere — except in music. In many ways, the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound— has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well. ... In fact, among younger listeners, the lower-quality sound might actually be preferred. Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, said he had conducted an informal study among his students and found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings."
  (tags: media mobile music technology culture digital_culture)
• Crumbs of the future: David Hancock on risk leadership vs risk management
  On the need to replace risk management with risk leadership. "In a complex and dynamic world an increasing number of challenges have the character of wicked problems, i e problems which usually are impossible to formulated in isolation and often without straight forward or verifiable solutions. The problem is that our risk management methods cannot cope with these kinds of problems, sometimes even intertwined with more traditional problems." As David Hancock explains, "What confuses real decision-making is that behavioural and dynamic complexities co-exist and interact in what we call wicked messes. Dynamic complexity requires high level conceptual and systems thinking skills; behavioural complexity requires high levels of relationship and facilitative skills."
  (tags: risk management leadership future)

links for 2010-05-09

• W. Warren Wagar, "Embracing change: futures inquiry as applied history," Futures 25:4 (1993), 449-455. [sub req]
  Most futures research is the work of social, managerial and natural scientists and specialists in technology assessment. Historians are conspicuous by their absence. When they do contribute, they usually limit themselves to studies of the history of futurism itself. It is argued that all inquiry into the future is a species of applied history, in which historians should play a far greater part. Support for the argument is drawn from a new book which attacks the ‘dread of change’ and the ‘closure of the historical mind’ in postmodern thought, Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age, by Frank Füredi.
  (tags: future history methodology)

More than just a calendar

Virginia Heffernan laments the demise of datebooks like the Filofax:

It’s hard to remember, surveying my dull Google version (“parents in town,” “book club”), that a Filofax was also a place for plot arcs, self-invention and self-regulation. It was, in every sense, a diary — a forward-running record, unlike backward-running blogs. The quality of the paper stock, the slot for the pen, the blank but substantial cover, the hints of grand possibilities that came with the inserts — all of these inspired not just introspection but also the joining of history: the mapping of an individual life onto the grand old Gregorian-calendar template....

[N]ow that I’ve shelved my Filofax in favor of a calendar program that seems somehow to flatten existence, I realize that another year is passing without my building up the compact book of a year’s worth of Filofax pages that, every December, I used to wrap in a rubber band and put on a shelf, just as my new refills came in the mail.

If there is one thing we've discovered about print media, especially in the wake of the disappearance of some artifact (card catalogs, the encyclopedia, etc.), is that readers and users don't treat print media merely as inefficient carriers of information that wanted to be digital (or free, or expensive, as Stewart Brand put it), but developed all kinds of other uses for print that increased their utility, were taken for granted, and tended to be overlooked by engineers. Engineers looked at the Filofax and saw a digital calendar-in-waiting; in Heffernan's hands, in contrast, it was "a place for plot arcs, self-invention and self-regulation. It was, in every sense, a diary — a forward-running record, unlike backward-running blogs."

We don't just act on information or media; we interact with it, and the character of those interactions, as much as the information itself, define our relationships with media. One reason I still prefer printed books to digital is that it's difficult to annotate digital books in a way I find satisfactory: when I'm reviewing a book, or using it in my work, I need to be able to underline, annotate, add Post-Its, and make notes-- to document my dialogue with or reflections on the book. (This goes far beyond the kind of annotations you can make on ebooks today, and a world away from leaving comments on blogs, or hitting the "Like" button on a Web page.) This kind of reading is more like a martial art than the quiet, interior activity that many people think of when they think about "reading." And while I don't do it with everything-- I never got the calendar bug, for example-- there are a few activities in which the affordances of print media support practices and interactions that electronic media cannot.

links for 2010-05-06

• Networds: Terra Incognita and the Case for Ethnographic Intelligence
  The proliferation of empowered networks makes "ethnographic intelligence" (EI) more important to the United States than ever before.2 Among networks, al-Qaeda is of course the most infamous, but there are several other examples from the recent past and present, such as blood-diamond and drug cartels, that lead to the conclusion that such networks will be a challenge in the foreseeable future. Given the access these networks have to expanded modern communications and transportation and, potentially, to weapons of mass destruction, they are likely to be more formidable than any adversaries we have ever faced.
  (tags: anthropology ethnography intelligence military networks)
• Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, "Learning From Our Modern Wars: The Imperatives of Preparing for a Dangerous Future"
  "[I]t is time to start looking more broadly at how our experiences in modern warfare should help shape our national security institutions in the years to come. This essay highlights the most significant lessons I have learned in the post-9/11 world and how I think they could be applied to better prepare us for the full range of challenges we will likely encounter in the future.

  This article began as an effort to identify challenges the U.S. Army must prepare to face, but I soon realized that many of those challenges are connected to the other armed forces, the interagency, and the broader U.S. Government. Therefore, I address elements of our national power beyond just the military. The complexities of today's national security environment demand that we reevaluate missions across the U.S. Government, embrace the requirements for full-spectrum operations, and preserve our most important military principles while adjusting our organizations and values development."

  
  
  (tags: future2 future military strategy)
  
  
• 
  
  Wars of Ideas and The War of Ideas
  
  
  "[A]n analytical study of wars of ideas, to the extent they are wars, would enhance our understanding of such conflicts and how we might approach them. With that in mind, this monograph, which is necessarily limited in scope, does two things. First, it offers a brief examination of what appear to be the four basic types of wars of ideas found in history. Second, it uses that examination as a start point for analyzing the principal approaches in the current war of ideas. Just as we would do well to understand the nature of any armed conflict we intend to fight before embarking upon it, so, too, we ought to appreciate the nature of any war of ideas we might attempt to wage."
  
  
  (tags: warfare philosophy ideology ideas)
  
  
• 
  
  The U.S. Army Professional Writing Collection
  
  
  Applies Karl Weick's concept of "sensemaking", and his classic analysis of the Mann Gulch firejumpers disaster, to the problem of unit cohesion. "Understanding and fostering unit cohesion remain vitally important in today's operating environments, and Army doctrine should reflect that importance. The Army should update its views on unit cohesion, not cast them aside as useless or antiquated. It should incorporate new views, such as Weick's thoughts on sensemaking and structure, to flesh out the topic and restore the Army's traditional emphasis on such a critical subject."
  
  
  (tags: sensemaking psychology sociology military collaboration)
  
  
• 
  
  Strategic Scouts for Strategic Corporals
  
  
  Historically, the Army and other armed forces worldwide have been about the profession of applying extreme pressure or violence to achieve an end, but the warfighter's paradigm has changed because of the effects of mass media and global interconnectivity. Since the Vietnam War, U.S. military operations have largely occurred in full view of the public. As a result, the Army must change if it wishes to maintain strategic legitimacy in faraway lands.... In addition, there can be no tolerance for the cultural ignorance of media-amplified "strategic corporals" (junior officers and soldiers at the forward edge of the battle area) whose words and actions can affect strategic outcomes. The information genie is out of the bottle, and from now and into the future, Army strategic legitimacy will be closely examined.... If there was ever a period in the Army's history to consider the use of foreign area officers (FAOs) at the tactical level, this is it.
  
  
  (tags: strategic_corporal media warfare communication culture)
  
  

links for 2010-05-05

• Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship
  Something mysterious is going on inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over the past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected-cultural knowledge of the adversary. ... Why has cultural knowledge suddenly become such an imperative? Primarily because traditional methods of warfighting have proven inadequate in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. technology, training, and doctrine designed to counter the Soviet threat are not designed for low-intensity counterinsurgency operations where civilians mingle freely with combatants in complex urban terrain.
  (tags: anthropology military history)
• If the TSA Were Running New York - Politics - The Atlantic
  All vans or SUVs headed into Midtown Manhattan would have to stop and have their contents inspected. If any vehicle seemed for any reason to have escaped inspection, Midtown in its entirety would be evacuated; 2) A whole new uniformed force -- the Times Square Security Administration, or TsSA - would be formed for this purpose; 3) The restrictions would never be lifted and the TsSA would have permanent life, because the political incentives here work only one way. A politician who supports more open-ended, more thorough, more intrusive, more expensive inspections can never be proven "wrong." The absence of attacks shows that his measures have "worked"; and a new attack shows that inspections must go further still. A politician who wants to limit the inspections can never be proven "right." An absence of attacks means that nothing has gone wrong -- yet. Any future attack would always and forever be that politician's "fault."
  (tags: terrorism decision-making risk security)
• Jonathan Rauch, "Do 'Family Values' Weaken Families?" National Journal Magazine (May 2010) [sub req, alas]
  "One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved. The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.... Naomi Cahn and June Carbone -- family law professors at George Washington University and the University of Missouri (Kansas City), respectively -- suggest that the apparent paradox is no paradox at all. Rather, it is the natural consequence of a cultural divide that has opened wide over the past few decades and shows no sign of closing. To define the divide in a sentence: In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families."
  (tags: sociology politics media family demography)

Quote of the day

From High Clearing, urging calm about the Times Square bombing attempt:

I’m no explosives expert, but I know that somehow poor and illiterate guerrilla fighters around the globe manage to build improvised bombs that actually work.... In the past, I have wrung my hands in fear of what my countrymen will do if Islamic terrorists ever succeed in setting off a bunch of car bombs. While I still worry about that, I now worry less. It appears that the terrorists we’re facing at home these days are basically the Generation Veal of terrorists.

[To the tune of Bee Gees, "Nights on Broadway," from the album The Bee Gees: Their Greatest Hits - The Record (a 5-star song, imo).]

links for 2010-05-04

• Prizes, Challenges and Government Innovation: The Trimtab Solution? | techPresident
  I attended an all-day meeting at HUD organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Case Foundation on "Promoting Innovation: Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking." Some 200 people representing more than 30 government departments and agencies were in attendance to hear from and brainstorm with some of the world's most successful proponents of disruptive, transformational approaches to public and private innovation.
  (tags: prizes science innovation science2.0)
• Why we're so bad at dealing with unlikely disasters like the Louisiana oil spill. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
  But the real lesson of the oil spill may be how bad we are at dealing with unlikely but disastrous events. "We deal with them by ignoring them until they happen, and then overreacting," says John Harrald, a professor at George Washington University's Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management. It's one thing to look back and figure out how the oil spill could have been prevented. It's another to grapple with the combination of poor foresight and 20/20 hindsight that makes preventing these meltdowns so difficult.... The problem begins with the way we assess risk. The less likely an event, the less a company—or a government, or an individual—feels the need to guard against it.... Another problem is that some precautions only make sense hindsight.... Then there's the difficulty of cost-benefit analysis when it comes to low-probability, high-consequence events. The full costs of an oil spill are difficult to estimate—even decades later."
  (tags: catastrophe risk psychology decision-making)

Scale, orientation, simplication, and ruthless editing: the keys to great homemade maps

Julia Turner has an excellent article in Slate about hand-drawn maps:

Homemade maps also play with scale in fascinating ways. Paul Stiff, a professor of information design who's been collecting hand-drawn maps for decades, reviewed all the submitted maps for Slate, and he was intrigued by the one below, which was drawn by an Australian architect to direct his daughter from Brisbane to his farm. Stiff notes: "If you compare this with a topographical map, you'll see that he's compressed the scale astonishingly." There's less detail closer to home, where roads are familiar, Stiff says, "but the scale expands the nearer we get to the destination because we need more information in places that are new to us."

Good hand-drawn maps do more than edit out useless details. They often ignore the mapmaking convention that puts north at the top.

Handmade maps also tend toward straight lines and right angles, a phenomenon spatial psychologists refer to as "rectilinear normalization." The world is full of squiggly roads that intersect at oblique angles. When we envision space, though, we tend to reduce such complexities to relatively simple geometric forms.

[H]omemade maps can be better than professional ones at eliminating extraneous detail, playing with scale, simplifying complex forms, and mapping remote terrain or interiors. Indeed, some computer scientists have examined whether professional route-mapping algorithms could produce maps more like the ones we draw. MacArthur grant winner Maneesh Agrawala developed software called Line Drive that works along these lines, making computer maps more legible by distorting scale and straightening out bendy roads. Like Paul Stiff, Agrawala studies information display, and he became interested in Web-based driving directions when he noticed the limitations of their maps: "They almost never produce a map that I can actually use to get to the destination," Agrawala told me. "Really the text directions are what I end up using."

[To the tune of Alanis Morissette, "Uninvited," from the album City of Angels (a 4-star song, imo).]

links for 2010-05-03

• It’s Complicated - Making Sense of Complexity - NYTimes.com
  the march toward complexity has turned into a sprint in the debate about health care reform and even the gargantuan oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, challenges so baroque, and with so many disparate and moving parts, the best you can do is hope that someone in charge understands them. Complexity used to signify progress — it was the frisson of a new gadget, the riddle of some advance in technology. Now complexity lurks behind the most expensive and intractable issues of our age.
  (tags: complexity future2 future)

I told them I wanted to be Avatar Aang! DAMN YOU JAMES CAMERON!

Face painting at the Spring Fair!

links for 2010-05-01

• [1004.4969] The FuturIcT Knowledge Accelerator: Unleashing the Power of Information for a Sustainable Future
  With our knowledge of the universe, we have sent men to the moon. We know microscopic details of objects around us and within us. And yet we know relatively little about how our society works and how it reacts to changes brought upon it. Humankind is now facing serious crises for which we must develop new ways to tackle the global challenges of humanity in the 21st century. With connectivity between people rapidly increasing, we are now able to exploit information and communication technologies to achieve major breakthroughs that go beyond the step-wise improvements in other areas.... [M]any scientists have called for a large-scale ICT-based research initiative on techno-socialeconomic- environmental issues, sometimes phrased as a Manhattan-, Apollo-, or CERN-like project to study the way our living planet works in a social dimension. Due to the connotations, we use the term knowledge accelerator, here.
  (tags: simulation modeling sustainability)