| THE NEW RULERS OF THE WORLD
The book consists of four very substantial essays and an introduction that pulls them all together. The introduction, a scant 14 pages, is a breathtaking and articulate summary, a perfect snapshot, of the political and economic world we find ourselves in right now. Here’s how it begins:
You can read the entire introduction here. But buy the book. The research is impeccable and well-documented, and Pilger has an uncanny ability to bring what look like disparate and unrelated events into blinding focus, and expose the terrifying, systematic and ruthless logic behind the activities of the massively powerful business/political elite, the New Rulers of the World. Last week there was a rash of news stories lamenting an across-the-board disastrous drop in viewership of television. The drop was most marked in young men, a key demographic for advertisers, and in viewership of the season’s new, mostly dirt-cheap ‘reality’ shows. There were dire warnings that if viewers didn’t return soon, huge rebates would be owed to advertisers who had been guaranteed a certain minimum number of passive consumer eyeballs. What’s interesting is that all of these ‘bad news’ stories have disappeared behind the ‘pay-per-view’ archive windows of the newspapers and network websites. All that’s left are choppy abstracts. Are the media prematurely burying stories that threaten to hurt their own advertising revenues?
I’d argue that the best blogs have all this, and more. Maybe Ms. Paglia should look more closely, or at least hire a better researcher. It’s too bad interviewer Kerry Lauermann didn’t show her what some of Salon’s own bloggers have been doing. The annual Tech Museum award winners have been announced. Winners are those that have developed and deployed innovative technology that improves the world: in education, equality & diversity, environmental protection, third world development or health. Read the stories: They’re modest but inspiring successes, and demonstrate that not all businesses are greedy and careless, and not all technology is bad. This multimedia flash presentation is a year old, but still relevant and moving. The MIT Blackjack team’s amazing story is now a best-seller. Wired broke the story last year. Mezrich is an engaging writer, and if you’ve watched the new James Caan series Las Vegas you’ll get a kick out of Mezrich’s view from the other side of the surveillance cameras. |
October 31, 2003
FRIDAY QUICKIES
October 30, 2003
IS THE BLOGOSPHERE SEXIST?
 Researching this article has been a nightmare. The data is suspect and contradictory. There are dozens of explanations for the anomolies, some of them quite absurd. Last fall there was a huge discussion of this issue. But I thought the subject was interesting and I needed something less grim than yesterday’s topic, so here we are. If you want to read what transpired in last year’s exchange (perhaps more heat than light), or how it’s recently started up again, here are the key links:
The now-notorious Perseus blog survey produces some data:
While some of these data are questionable (Radio, Moveable Type and TypePad blogs were not included), it would still seem likely that women do produce more than half the content of the blogosphere, but make up no more than 15% of blogrolls. So is the blogosphere sexist, and if so, how and why? Just a note on methodology: BlogStreet’s Top 100 Most Influential list (the one that has stirred up the latest controversy) is computed formulaically by adding up the total number of ‘inbound blogs’ (blogs that have the target blog on their blogroll) and then weighting each ‘inbound blog’ by the number of ‘inbound blogs’ to it. So if an A-lister blogrolls you that counts for much more in the rankings than being blogrolled by an ‘unknown’. This recursive process reinforces the strength of large cliques and, I would submit, distorts the results. But if you look at the simpler unweighted ‘Top 100′ list, which still uses ‘inbound blogs’ as its measure but weights them all equally, the number of women on the list isn’t significantly higher. Here’s my take on all this:
And finally, once the power curve is established, and male-dominated, it is, as it is in all other spheres, including business, politics, and journalism, self-perpetuating. To break into the A-list you usually need to get noticed and linked to by an A-lister. Guess which gender is more likely to benefit from that? To that extent, the blogosphere becomes unconsciously sexist. But it isn’t to begin with — it’s the seven phenomena above that set the stage. Most importantly, we need better measures of blog popularity and quality, measures that better identify great new bloggers (and great one-off posts) by some electronic analogue of ‘word-of-mouth’. If you can come up with such measures, I guarantee that the people at Technorati and BlogStreet would love to produce the data. And I think many bloggers of both sexes would use them. With time at a premium, the blogosphere would quickly embrace mechanisms that would help us find great writing and bloggers of like minds in ways less serendipitous, and less subject to the vagaries of Shirky’s Law, than the ones we must rely on now. |
October 29, 2003
‘A CRIME OF STUPEFYING PROPORTIONS’
 Yule Heibel put me on to the work of J.M. Coetzee, and specifically his new book Elizabeth Costello. The book is about a writer in her later years taking up the lecture circuit, and espousing an unpopular animal rights viewpoint. It’s a slim volume, one that the critics have not been kind to, consisting of eight ‘lessons’, the longest two of which are transcripts of the title character’s lectures on our ghastly relationship with other animals. My reaction while reading it was similar to my reaction to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael: I was intellectually engaged but felt a bit manipulated by the fraud of hiding a political/philosophical treatise inside a ‘novel’. But when I read the following passage I broke into a cold sweat. Nothing I have ever read has so perfectly captured the essence of how I have come to feel, more and more, as I enter the latter years of my own life: a terrible sense of dread, helplessness, outrage, despair, realization that despite all appearances and cultural propaganda everything in our world is not all right, in fact everything is horribly wrong, ugly, and totally out of control:
At the end of the book, Elizabeth Costello grapples with one of the questions the Internet doesn’t answer: what motivates human cruelty, and whether the writer who writes about cruelty is providing an important lesson in human nature, or instead is in some way complicit in the cruelty and the desensitization of humanity to it, by giving it publicity, new life. This is an issue that is addressed as well in Derrick Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words. We have a legacy of incredible cruelty, violence, terror. Is there a point in rubbing our faces in it, in forcing people to face up to the horror of concentration camps, slaughterhouses, chemical weaponry, mental illness, sexual assault and torture, bullying, spousal and child abuse, animal testing laboratories, political interrogations, what happens behind prison walls, the agony of those in continuous pain not allowed to die and without access to relief, the children whose entire lives are consumed in deprivation and brutality, the suffering of crack babies? Our world, past and present and probably future, is full of these horrors, this massive tide of suffering and blood. When we show pictures of malnourished children, when we give them money and food to prolong their lives until the next famine or crippling disease, when I force you to look at the picture at the top of this post and tell you that all of these horrors happen millions of times every day, in every neighbourhood on Earth, is that a wake-up call, probably repulsive and probably ineffective but an important service nevertheless, or is it an obscenity, something no one wants or needs to see or hear or learn about? Does it serve a purpose to surface, from beneath the thin veneer of civilization and calm, the oceans of blood and the endless crescendo of pain, misery and suffering that our sad, pathetic culture is built on? Why can’t we come to terms with it? How can we come to terms with it? How can we let it go on? And if we can’t stop it, and can’t bear to face it, then what? |
THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
 Lately I’ve been talking to quite a few companies about Social Network Enablement, Social Software, Weblogs, the ineffective use of technology and knowledge by front-line workers (both because these tools are inadequate, and because they’re not used properly), and what this all means for the discipline of Knowledge Management. I’ve blogged about all of these subjects recently, but if anyone is interested, I’ve put together this discussion paper in MS Word that captures it all in one place. I plan to produce a KM Future State Vision paper, as a companion piece, as well. |
October 28, 2003
MAYBE THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT DOESN’T LIKE BUSH EITHER
 Thinking about Bush’s falling popularity and how his gang of extremists has been able to push things through a meek Congress, I began to wonder whether Republicans were in fact gritting their teeth when they voted for his resolutions, much the same way many cowed Democrats have, afraid of voter wrath if they’re seen to oppose a wartime ‘president’ when the country needs solidarity. I remember the way Republicans also supported the last right-wing pyschopathic president, Richard Nixon. When Watergate hit, they rallied ’round the beleaguered president and stuck with him until it became clear that he was a liability to their own political careers rather than an asset, and then they deserted him in droves. The chart above shows just how slow the American public was to respond to Nixon’s excesses, and the Republicans in Congress were, as usual, a short step behind public opinion. There was hardly a peep from Republicans against Nixon until mid-1973, when popular support for Nixon plunged below 50%. By that time at least two dozen senior members of the Administration had been jailed or fired to try to keep Nixon distanced from the events. Nixon was on his third Attorney-General, who would soon also resign, and his VP, the pathetic Spiro Agnew, was under investigation for bribery and extortion. In the meantime, however, despite strong evidence that the Committee to Re-elect the President was implicated in Watergate and other security abuses against Democrats and private individuals, Nixon had won his second-term election by a landslide. Since most of the Republican establishment is certainly old enough to remember Watergate, it seems likely to me that, 32 years later, they’re biding their time and watching two barometers that tend to go in lockstep: the state of the economy and the president’s popularity. The red arrow shows the corresponding point between Bush’s first and second term, exactly 32 years later. The parallels are spooky. Bush’s popularity ratings track very closely those of Nixon 32 years ago. Just like then, there are now concerns about Pentagon and Defense Department activities (just what did Bush know about 9/11, and when), about the Attorney-General’s abuse of security and breach of civil liberties, about the conduct of certain groups supporting the re-election of the president (‘Dirty Tricks’). Most of all, there are concerns about imminent collapse of the economy, disastrous to an incumbent president in an election year. Thirty-two years ago, the recession held off until Nixon was re-elected, and I’m sure the Republicans, who must have known they had a wacko at the head of their party, but one who seemed destined to be re-elected and provide some coat-tails for his supporters, worried and fretted and wrung their hands and supported Nixon anyway. This time around the economy, which the Bush regime has tried to stimulate with reckless tax-cuts so it will hang on until November 2004, is unlikely to cooperate — it’s already teetering and Bush has ruined it beyond short-term repair. So watch the economic indicators for the next eight months, and the popularity ratings for Bush which are likely to track them closely. Then watch the Republican establishment — not only will they abandon Bush in droves if he becomes unpopular, if the economy really gets ugly, watch for them to deny him a second nomination, since he’s leaving the convention very late in a cynical but risky attempt to capitalize on the anniversary of 9/11. Political parties and politicians have strong survival instincts, and tend to nominate moderate presidents because the mood of the electorate tends to prefer them. My bet is that the Republican establishment is at least as uncomfortable with the extremism of the Bush regime as the average voter is, and won’t hesitate to throw him over in favour of a more moderate candidate if it becomes expedient to do so. And my bet is that it will. Sources: NYU Statistics & Social Sciences Group, and Watergate.info |
October 27, 2003
VOTING SYSTEM INTEGRITY: A SIMPLE SOLUTION
 Kriselda at Different Strings, Rob at Emphasis Added and Fiona have been blogging about the threat to democracy posed by new, inadequately tested and suspect electronic voting technologies already adopted in some states and planned for broader use in 2004. This post of Rob’s has a huge comments thread that discusses most of the critical issues. This article from the UK Independent on irregularities in last year’s US midterm elections explains what’s at stake. The Verified Voting website provides detailed background (including an excellent FAQ) and explains HR2239, the Voter Confidence Act, calling for a requirement that voting technologies provide a verifiable paper audit trail. This link at Kriselda’s presents the opinion of independent experts at Johns Hopkins & Rice Universities on the technologies currently offered by the voting machine ‘big 3′ suppliers (all with strong, worrisome connections to the Republican Party). The experts’ troubling conclusion (emphasis mine):
The HR2239 proposal to require that all electronic voting machines provide a voter-verifiable paper audit trail would reassure voters that their vote has been correctly recorded, and provide a mechanism to count paper ballots manually as a back-up and verification of the computer-produced totals. It’s an excellent bill, but is unlikely to succeed because it lacks bi-partisan support. There is a simpler solution, one which would cost less, and take the time pressure off states trying to replace other unreliable voting technologies. This solution is also unarguably non-partisan:
Computer auditing firms are highly experienced at conducting computer security audits, and have well-developed standards for doing so. They are also experienced at supervising and certifying results of voting processes. The alternative of using the Standard Ballot Paper methodology would be extremely appealing for states concerned about the high cost of voting technologies, the risks of new voting technologies, or the shortage of time to introduce and verify new technologies. My bet would be that this simple, manual process would gradually replace more complex technologies, as its reliability, low cost and low risk became apparent. I’m a great believer in technology. In many cases it makes things cheaper, safer, and faster, especially in applications that involve millions of transactions every day. But in voting, a process critical to democracy that occurs only once a year or less, technology offers none of these benefits. In this process, simpler is better.
P.S.: This week’s Tom Tomorrow cartoon is on electronic voting machines. |
October 26, 2003
STAND STILL AND LOOK UNTIL YOU REALLY SEE
 Betty Edwards’ famous book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, contains a wonderful series of exercises for those who are convinced they can’t draw. I only picked it up after I’d read Edward de Bono’s Serious Creativity and discovered that creativity is a learned skill, not something that you’re ‘born with’ (or without). Edwards’ book taught me that drawing is also an acquired skill. Or, to be more precise, it’s an ‘unlearning’ skill, because it requires you to defeat our natural inclination to view objects as series of icons (a left-brain ‘shorthand’), and instead view them as lines, shades and spaces (a right-brain abstraction). The reason we think we can’t draw, says Edwards, is that when we try to draw, our left brain gets in the way, telling us that what we’re drawing when we draw a face is two eyes, a nose, a mouth etc., which our brain symbolizes in certain iconographic ways, so that our drawing turns out to be a drawing of these symbolic icons, rather than what we really see. The most powerful exercise in the book, in my opinion, is the upside-down drawing exercise. Here’s what you do:
Most people are pleasantly surprised with the result. When I did this exercise I was blown away — I had been convinced I couldn’t draw, and immediately did five more upside-down drawings, some of which I still have, and treasure. This exercise alone won’t make you an artist, but it’s a powerful first step. Now when I draw, I ignore the substance of what I’m drawing and focus strictly on lines, shades, spaces and proportions. Sometimes I use software to help defeat my left-brain: I take a photo of something I like, use graphic software (which has an ‘outlining’ feature) to make it into a black-and-white pseudo-line drawing, turn it upside down, and draw what I see. The results are amazing. The book provides some other exercises to improve the strength of your right-brain and apply it to the art of drawing. What’s more important to me, however, is the realization of how the analytic left-brain, which our culture tends to favour and over-exercise, diminishes our awareness of the world around us. I remember in high school a poster with the caption Stand still and look until you really see. When I am trying to get in the frame of mind to draw, or photograph, or write poetry or fiction, I try to do just that. Here are some exercises that I’ve found can help left-brainers to ‘really see’:
In the book Easy Travel to Other Planets, Ted Mooney describes a future world where people are so bombarded with meaningless information, abstract facts that don’t really matter, that they become psychologically paralyzed, unable to focus on anything, and succumb to what Mooney calls ‘information sickness’. In some ways we are already there. The trappings of our society and culture have already separated us from, and deadened us to, most of what is real in this world, and surrounded us instead with artifice — bland, manipulative, numbing ‘entertainment’, office and home lighting (and air conditioning, and jobs) that are artificial, news that shows wars as light-shows instead of people dead and dying, cars that insulate us from any exposure to real people or real weather. Looking until we really see is important, and not only to artists. In a way it’s shock therapy, a test to prove to ourselves we’re still human, still real, still really alive. Drawing above is by Canadian artist Pierre Surtes, from a print in my personal collection. |
October 25, 2003
BUILDING MATERIAL OF THE FUTURE?
 BusinessWeek TV has an ‘Innovation’ feature which this week described a futuristic building material called SmartWrap that, inventors say, could replace all existing interior and exterior wall materials, and might have other applications (e.g. ‘smart’ clothing) as well. A prototype, pictured at right, is apparently on display now in NYC at the Smithsonian’s National Design Museum. The ultrathin, ultralight material consists of 6 layers — an applied layer of carbon nanotubes that gives it rigidity, four ‘smart’ layers that can actually be ‘printed’ in rolls, and a PEN/PET substrate that holds them all together and protects them from the elements.
The four smart layers are:
If you know anything about these technologies and want to see specs and production process information, they’re in this chart. More details are available here. Announcements like this both excite me and bring out the skeptic in me. The potential technology applications are fascinating: They could:
The potential applications for clothing and recreation are equally interesting. But this has to be enormously expensive, and the software needed to make it work sounds horrendously complex. And what happens when it ‘goes down’? Any engineers, architects or advanced materials experts out there tell me whether this is really possible or just a pipedream? Also, if anyone in NYC has seen this, I’d like to know what you thought. |
October 24, 2003
FROM PILLAR TO POST: INCARCERATING AND ABANDONING THE MENTALLY ILL
 Quite a few news sources are covering the recent Human Rights Watch report on the incarceration of the mentally ill. Key data in the report:
Put this data together with data on the number of mentally ill on the streets, and you get the sorry picture shown in the above chart. It’s a picture of neglect, heartlessness and false economy. Human Rights Watch calls for more money for treatment and therapy of mentally ill prisoners. With the skyrocketing cost of the epidemic of incarceration (quadruple the number of thirty years ago), and a right-wing Attorney-General with an extraordinary taste for blood, don’t hold your breath. Whatever happened to the concept of ‘not guilty by reason of mental defect’? The right-wing Supreme Court recently upheld a ruling that forces inmates to take medication so that they can be certified sane enough to execute. With 95% of prison suicides committed by the mentally ill, I guess this is what they mean by ‘compassionate conservatism.’ Reader Caveat: The numbers in the chart above are approximations. Some sources put the proportion of mentally ill in prison or on the streets significantly higher or lower than shown; rough average has been used. There is also no universal agreement on definition or diagnosis of ‘severe’ mental illness. The scale on the chart has been ‘broken’ to display the total number of mentally ill while still showing detail of those incarcerated or homeless on one small chart. |
October 23, 2003
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
 Sea-Creature, by Dave Pollard
The site was the Kabalarian Philosophy, an unusual secular society that originated more than a century ago in Vancouver, Canada. I looked at their site, and though most of what they said was, IMO, just silly, the analysis of my name was uncannily accurate:
If you’ve read my About The Author bio, you’ll know why I was spooked by this. If you’re curious enough to try it out (use the name you normally use — full or shortened — when introducing yourself), you can find the analysis ‘form’ right on the home page link above — tell me if it was as good for you as it was for me. My ‘sea creature’ above was constructed using one of the Java creativity tools from by Austrian web designer, artist and photographer Paul Schmidinger. The tools, available free, are at this site, and the artwork and photos are at this one. I recommend especially the Java ‘visual effect’ called ‘Tree’ on the first site. And the photo ‘snow and green and brown grass’ on the second site is stunning (click ‘gallery’ to get there from Paul’s DeviantArt home page). This guy’s brilliant. |
