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| "I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
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Know Your Place! Shut Your Face! |
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| Topic: Humor |
12:36 pm EDT, Jul 9, 2002 |
A collection of 40's war posters modified for the present situation. Some of these are great... Know Your Place! Shut Your Face! |
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Buffett part of Level 3 funding. - Jul. 8, 2002 |
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| Topic: Economics |
1:48 pm EDT, Jul 8, 2002 |
In a statement, Buffet said Level 3, whose chairman, Walter Scott, also sits on Berkshire's board, meets his investment criteria. "Liquid resources and strong financial backing are scarce and valuable assets in today's telecommunications world," Buffett said. "Level 3 has both." Buffet likes telecoms? Or is there more to the story here? Buffett part of Level 3 funding. - Jul. 8, 2002 |
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Knowledge@Wharton - Debate over scarcity of IT workers |
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| Topic: Economics |
1:41 pm EDT, Jul 8, 2002 |
"The ITAA's study itself ought to be retooled, suggests Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources. To Cappelli, the study's projected shortage stems from managers who set overly high expectations for job candidates and who are unwilling to cough up higher salaries for so-called qualified workers. "It's very misleading," says Cappelli, who analyzed the IT labor market in a paper published in 2000. "If I can't find a chef at the wage I like, it doesn't mean there's a shortage of chefs."" Knowledge@Wharton - Debate over scarcity of IT workers |
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Ten Lessons from the Dot Com Meltdown |
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| Topic: Economics |
1:32 pm EDT, Jul 8, 2002 |
"The past boom and bust of the Internet sector is one of the biggest business events of the past several decades. In the interest of finding lessons that help us avoid similar debacles in the future, here are ten observations about the dot com shakeout." Ten Lessons from the Dot Com Meltdown |
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FORTUNE - Is There Any Way Out Of the Telecom Mess? |
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| Topic: Miscellaneous |
1:12 pm EDT, Jul 8, 2002 |
"Telecom executives have been rushing to convince investors--and maybe themselves--that everything is going to be all right...
Unfortunately for investors and telecom employees, such thinking may be supremely wishful... Consumers will pay more.
Corporate customers will get red-carpet treatment.
Innovations will get slow-rolled. In other words, the industry might look a lot like it did in 1995--back when telecom was considered a safe, if boring, investment, and almost no one had heard of a little company called WorldCom." Another set of predictions. FORTUNE - Is There Any Way Out Of the Telecom Mess? |
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Merck recorded revenue it never collected - Jul. 8, 2002 |
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| Topic: Economics |
12:21 pm EDT, Jul 8, 2002 |
"NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Merck & Co. shares tumbled Monday after a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by the company revealed that more than $14 billion, or 10 percent, of revenue reported since 1999 was never actually collected by the company. " More, More, More! (What I find most amazing about this is how LITTLE the stock has dropped. Investors are far more interested in punishing tech and telecoms then pharms, even when the fraud is many times greater.) Merck recorded revenue it never collected - Jul. 8, 2002 |
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Telecom Sector May Find Past Is Its Future |
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| Topic: Economics |
2:07 am EDT, Jul 8, 2002 |
About 500,000 people have lost their jobs. Dozens of companies have gone bankrupt. As much as half a trillion dollars in investments have evaporated. An accounting scandal threatens to bring down WorldCom Inc. and federal authorities are investigating the books of other former highfliers. There is another casualty of the implosion of the telecommunications industry: a grand vision of the future. At least 63 telecommunications companies have landed in bankruptcy since 2000, ... [but] the most expensive failures may still be ahead. Former FDIC chairman: "... the largest single meltdown ... I've ever seen." This article is generally a good summary of the events to date. It references 19th century railroad construction and contains the obligatory Reed Hundt quote, of course. But they get some things wrong, IMO. It's suggested that the big legacy telcos (the baby Bells, in the US) are safe investments, out of harm's reach. I'm skeptical. And then, they pose this question: Who needs Internet video when HBO and Showtime seem to add more channels by the minute? It's as if the author has never even used the Internet. And trying to sell broadband on the basis of multimedia content distribution only magnifies such misconceptions. A huge amount of very expensive wiring and electronics is going to rust, waiting for new ideas that can harness it. Maybe waiting forever. Telecom Sector May Find Past Is Its Future |
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| Topic: Society |
1:21 pm EDT, Jul 7, 2002 |
The FBI's investigation into The Farm (Tennessee). An important read for anyone who still thinks that increasing domestic surveillance via the FBI is a good idea. (The Farm's website is interesting in and of itself.) Hoover and The Farm |
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Imitation Is the Mother of Invention |
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| Topic: Society |
1:01 pm EDT, Jul 7, 2002 |
When Fran Lebowitz cracked, at the awards ceremony of the Council of Fashion Designers of America last month, that "homage is French for stealing," her remark got a laugh but also some yawns. That Ms. Lebowitz's quip itself had a shopworn ring might be expected at a time when nearly every aspect of the culture somehow benefits from re-use. The idea is essential to post-modernism. In music it's called sampling. In high culture circles, where it's known as appropriation, it's ancient history. It was two decades ago when the art critic Craig Wright observed that appropriation, accumulation, hybridization and other "diverse strategies" had come to characterize "much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its predecessors." Now, those diverse strategies have become so institutionalized that when Moby turned Alan Lomax's 1930's tapes of Southern spirituals into a best-selling album of ambient music, he won Grammys and made millions. When Paul Thomas Anderson channeled Robert Altman's oeuvre, he was awarded the Palme D'Or at Cannes. When Sherrie Levine made stroke-for-stroke copies of watercolors by Mondrian, postdoctoral students lined up to write dissertations on her attenuated ironies. ... Half of fashion, in fact, seems to owe its professional existence to a single truism: one is as original as the obscurity of one's source. But isn't this as it should be? What is originality, anyhow? In spite of the current embrace of sampling and appropriation, "we persist as a culture in our commitment to the ideal of originality. The artist who admits to working in the manner of another artist will likely stand accused of being second rate." Wouldn't it be better to scrap the originality fetish and treat the creative act as "a combination of copyings, various and multiform"? Pablo Picasso: "Mediocre artists borrow; great artists steal." Copying is for artists, not consumers. Imitation Is the Mother of Invention |
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Jaron Lanier, DJ Spooky and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in 21C Magazine |
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| Topic: Literature |
1:00 pm EDT, Jul 7, 2002 |
Lanier: A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm a science fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick short story "Minority Report". A team of "futurists" would imagine what the world might be like in fifty years, and I would be one of the two scientist/technologists on the team. DJ Spooky: Sonar is one of the largest festivals of electronic music in Europe. Aside from the U.S.'s "Burning Man" Festival that occurs in August, it's one of the main places that international DJ culture can explore the outter limits of mix culture. But that's an understatement. To put it bluntly: it's THE festival that determines the taste and style of the currents of electronic that flow through the world's underground and avant-garde music in the early 21st century. Review of _Linked_: We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we're all coming to realize that it's becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity? Enter Albert-László Barabási and his new book, Linked: The New Science of Networks. Underneath our online world of seemingly random connections, the cells of our bodies and our social ties lies a network of hubs and ever-growing links with surprisingly not-random patterns. On a related note, DJ Spooky has an excellent new CD (released in late May) called "Modern Mantra" that fans of drum and bass, hip-hop, ambient, dub, jazz, and other good music will enjoy. (Spooky has a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_ on his bookshelf!) Jaron Lanier, DJ Spooky and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in 21C Magazine |
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