In 1876, a man named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England’s most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. Those seeds, planted around the world in England’s colonial outposts, gave rise to the great rubber boom of the early twentieth century -- an explosion of entrepreneurial and scientific industry that would change the world. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds -- a sought-after prize for which many suffered and died -- is the stuff of legend. In this utterly engaging account of obsession, greed, bravery, and betrayal, author and journalist Joe Jackson brings to life a classic Victorian fortune hunter and the empire that fueled, then abandoned, him.

In his single-minded pursuit of glory, Wickham faced deadly insects, poisonous snakes, horrific illnesses, and, ultimately, the neglect and contempt of the very government he wished to serve. His idealism and determination, as well as his outright thievery, perfectly encapsulate the essential nature of Great Britain’s colonial adventure in South America. The Thief at the End of the World is a thrilling true story of reckless courage and ambition.

Have you seen Fitzcarraldo?

The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire

There are a number of well-known systems for classifying people's personalities according to various measures such as introversion-extroversion, and organisations often use these schemes to categorize their staff. Unfortunately, such methods do not capture a number of the most important aspects of an individual within an organisation; any corporate employee knows that whether someone is (for example) extroverted or introverted is much less critical than (say) how important they are. The Lipson-Shiu test attempts to remedy this and other oversights by classifying along four alternative axes:

* Intelligent-Stupid
* Lawful-Chaotic
* Important-Unimportant
* Good-Evil

The Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test

Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Paul Graham:

The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy.

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.

Six Principles for Making New Things

“Don’t be evil,” the motto of Google, is tailored to the popular image of the company -- and the information economy itself -- as a clean, green twenty-first-century antidote to the toxic excesses of the past century’s industries. The firm’s plan to develop a gigawatt of new renewable energy recently caused a blip in its stock price and was greeted by the press as a curious act of benevolence. But the move is part of a campaign to compensate for the company’s own excesses, which can be observed on the banks of the Columbia River, where Google and its rivals are raising server farms to tap into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. The blueprints depicting Google’s data center at The Dalles, Oregon, are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.

Keyword: Evil

Guy: Your most sensitive materials should always be sent in an interoffice envelope marked "Top Secret."

Dilbert: Are you a moron who works in our security department, or an industrial spy who is too lazy to look through lots of envelopes?

[Dilbert, looking dazed]

PHB: Our security guys don't slap that hard or run that fast.

On the Security of Interoffice Mail

Jason Pontin, of MIT Technology Review, on The Great Hollowing Out.

From the archive:

We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

'Google is Like a Gigantic Parasite'

James Surowiecki:

Today, as financial markets become ever more complex, unanticipated ripple effects are more common—think of the havoc wrought a couple of weeks ago when the activities of one rogue French trader came to light. In the past thirty years, thanks to the combination of globalization, deregulation, and the increase in computing power, we have seen an explosion in financial innovation. This innovation has had all kinds of benefits—making cheap capital available to companies and individuals who previously couldn’t get it, allowing risk to be more efficiently allocated, and widening the range of potential investments. On a day-to-day level, it may even have lowered volatility in the markets and helped make the real economy more stable. The problem is that these improvements have been accompanied by more frequent systemic breakdowns. It may be that investors accept periodic disasters as a price worth paying for the innovations of modern finance, but now is probably not the best time to ask them about it.

Live with it!

Bonds Unbound

As other high-tech companies cut back on their research labs, Microsoft continues to increase its ranks of free-rein thinkers.

“The outcome of basic research is insights, and what development people do is take those insights and create products with them,” Dr. Chayes said. “The two things are very different.”

Microsoft Adds Research Lab in East as Others Cut Back

The U is for You.

Now that Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have finished congratulating themselves for not having been alarmists–in other words, for failing to recognize that a recession was looming–they are now facing up to the onset of a U.S. recession and a rapidly spreading financial crisis. Having been late to reach that conclusion, they now grudgingly admit that we may have a brief “V-shaped” recession and are apparently hoping that Fed rate cuts and a fiscal stimulus package will quickly solve the economy’s problems.

The more likely situation, however, is that the recession of 2008 will be a longer, “U-shaped” affair, driven by an unusual, persistent drop in consumption and investment. Underlying the intensity and persistence of the cyclical weakness emerging in the U.S. economy and manifest in weaker investment and consumption spending is an “endogenous” risk appetite cycle, one that is tied to the fundamental problem facing the U.S. economy: the build-up and subsequent implosion of the housing bubble.

See also, Housing Meltdown: Why home prices could drop 25% more on average before the market finally hits bottom, from a recent issue of Business Week. The full text spends a lot of time hedging, taking a he-said, she-said approach to coverage so as to avoid being called out as 'wrong' down the road. Still, the simple act of repeating the 25% figure lends more credence to it.

The Risk Cycle