Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
A Few Predictions for the Near Future
Topic: High Tech Developments
7:23 am EDT, Apr 17, 2008
This is a five minute video in which I was asked to make some predictions for the next decade about the Semantic Web, search and artificial intelligence.
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Musicians have always had to struggle and make sacrifices for their art. In previous times, commercial and political pressures helped to create a climate of insecurity in the world of music. Today the problem is a little different. Outwardly, music and art are celebrated as never before - but they also face relentless pressure to serve causes that have little to do with their inner meaning. As former UK prime minister Tony Blair said last year, part of his project was to make ‘the arts and culture part of our “core script”’. Music that is composed and played to someone else’s script is unlikely to inspire the kind of inarticulate revelation of Truth that so stirred Browning.
Indeed, the current focus on who sits in the audience and on the therapeutic value of music represents a demotion of music’s status and its truth. That is why the current trend for subordinating music to someone else’s script should be loudly challenged. And that can be done only if we have more confidence in people than those populist snobs do, who imagine that children must make do with second-rate ‘music-making opportunities’. Classical insights into the status of art - beauty is truth and truth is beauty - have long roused the human imagination. They will do so yet again, especially if we have the courage to confront the current obsession with the composition of the audience and instead allow the sound of music to speak for itself.
The Roving Eye: Macroeconomic Clicks, Mobile Web - Immobile Carriers, Cable Scams & Warranties Too!
Topic: Business
7:23 am EDT, Apr 17, 2008
Google as economic indicator. The latest search advertising numbers are out, and while Google continues to bomb their competition, their year on year growth rates are off dramatically for the second month in a row.
I think the most important thing a person in charge of a large company can work on is sociology -- designing the social structure of the company. It's the sociology that determines who gets hired, what their life is like, how much freedom they have, what sorts of things they work on, etc. Clearly these structures determine an enormous amount about the corporation. And yet, strikingly, I've never heard of a single corporation that has a high-level group devoted to studying and improving them.
“Like at the end of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, we are going the other way,” Mr. Gross said. “We are clearly in a period of excess, and we have to swing back to the middle or the center cannot hold."
Current TV presents an exclusive premiere of British trip-hop phenomenon Portishead's studio performance as they unveil seven songs from their new album "Third" in Portishead, England.
