There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Fans Await Closure of 'The Wire'
Topic: TV
9:25 am EST, Nov 10, 2007
"What this season is about is just how far you can go on a lie," Simon says. The lie Simon is referring to is what deteriorating cities tell themselves: Everything is going to be all right.
A: Well, I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I'm pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.
Everybody is still banging rocks together, while bragging about the colors. Meanwhile, half of the tricks that human beings normally use, in real world conversation, have never even been tried online. In my book Earth, I forecast a near future when people are empowered by their tools to learn rapidly from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. It could still happen.
The question is not whether or not a surveillance society will occur, particularly in Western societies like the United States and the United Kingdom. The question is more what the unavoidable ubiquity of surveillance will mean to the individual and the collective. The question is how society should deal — how society will deal — with routine, widespread, nearly constant surveillance, not just by government but by private entities as well, now that surveillance technology is quite clearly not only common but also here to stay.
This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.
Bits, Bytes, and Balance Sheets: The New Economic Rules of Engagement in a Wireless World
Topic: Economics
9:25 am EST, Nov 10, 2007
Walter Wriston died in 2005, but his new book ships at the end of this month.
The Internet has changed everything.
It is altering the way institutions, both public and private, are managed, and the way individuals react to one another, their workplace, and their government. From an economic and business perspective, the race to win is between those who "get it" and those who don't.
In Bits, Bytes, and Balance Sheets, Walter Wriston explores the consequences of the changes produced by the new economy of the Internet, defining the new rules and examining some of the promising initiatives under way to create a system of measuring and valuing assets that reflects our new economic realities.
A long-awaited follow-up to the author's Twilight of Sovereignty, this book shows that, in today's economy, intellectual capital is more important than physical capital -- and in fact, the very source of wealth and how it is created has changed -- and that businesses must adapt to this change or perish. Although he acknowledges that some of the "old" rules -- those based on human nature rather than economic dogma -- still apply today, Wriston also shows how the information revolution has radically affected business and government practices, as well as political policymaking throughout the world.
Despite the sweeping changes brought about by the "wireless revolution," the author argues against increased government regulation, instead making the case that we must count on a society of trustworthy people, and that it is not more laws that should form the basis for regulating the new economy but the personal ethics of good people.
One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.
Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy ...
The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’
The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.
In other words, stop talking about "energy independence".
Photographer Andrew Zuckerman's strikingly detailed images of animals from around the world are as delightful as they are inspiring. This collection of astonishing studio portraits of 175 wild creatures from baby leopards to parrots, bears, mandrills, and many more are stunningly foregrounded against white backgrounds, depicting their subjects with rare sensitivity, insight, humor, and wonder. Zuckerman, an up-and-coming filmmaker whose first short film, High Falls, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, has created a volume perfect for animal lovers, photography fans, and anyone fascinated by the world around us. Creature is a beautiful and thought-provoking look at the fragile wonders of the natural world.
... 300 pages of arrestingly detailed photographs of wild animals -- from a dramatic African crested porcupine and a playful Asian elephant to the elegant timber wolf and the smiling wild boar ...
If you like Zuckerman's work, you may also like Jill Greenberg.
We present an analytically tractable model of Internet evolution at the level of Autonomous Systems (ASs). We call our model the Multiclass Attraction (MA) model. All of its parameters are measurable based on available Internet topology data. Given the estimated values of these parameters, our analytic results accurately predict a definitive set of statistics characterizing the AS topology structure. These statistics are not parts of model formulation. The MA model thus closes the measure-model-validate-predict loop. We develop our model in stages adding increasing detail characterizing dynamic interaction between Internet ecosystem players. We validate each stage using recent results in Internet topology data analysis. We describe the emergence of ASs, peering links formation, bankruptcies and multihoming. Our model also explains how certain circumstances naturally lead to consolidation of providers over time, unless some exogenous force interferes.
