Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
Something huge is growing in the desert
Topic: Business
10:46 am EDT, Sep 16, 2007
Just today, workers placed the last steel beam atop the Shanghai World Financial Center, the world's third-tallest building. Sure, it doesn't soar quite as high as Taipei 101. But at 492 meters, it's pretty darn tall.
For sheer absurdity, though, nothing tops Burj Dubai, already the world's tallest building at an estimated 545.7 meters. Check out this photo, which was taken last Friday:
Wikipedia has been a resounding success story as a collaborative system with a low cost of online participation.
However, it is an open question whether the success of Wikipedia results from a "wisdom of crowds" type of effect in which a large number of people each make a small number of edits, or whether it is driven by a core group of "elite" users who do the lion's share of the work.
In this study we examined how the influence of "elite" vs. "common" users changed over time in Wikipedia.
The results suggest that although Wikipedia was driven by the influence of "elite" users early on, more recently there has been a dramatic shift in workload to the "common" user. We also show the same shift in del.icio.us, a very different type of social collaborative knowledge system.
We discuss how these results mirror the dynamics found in more traditional social collectives, and how they can influence the design of new collaborative knowledge systems.
Diversity Becomes Its Opposite | Des Moines Register
Topic: Arts
10:46 am EDT, Sep 16, 2007
If there is no common culture, no common standards, then each group becomes an island; metaphorical sharks are perceived to cruise between the islands, so they have less and less to do with one another, and diversity becomes its opposite.
...[T]he rapprochement between kings and the bourgeoisie led to an amalgam of chivalric ideas and mercantile rigor in material things that became the code of civilized manners for 300 years. This code improved the personality of both noble and commoner, making the one considerate instead of arrogant and the other dignified instead of obsequious. The code lasted about halfway into the 20th century.
Mercantile rigor has overpowered the chivalric ideas. Hence we are at sea, unmoored, drifting on a sea of trash.
The crisis that has the greatest potential to undermine what the craft of journalism does best is a quiet one that rarely draws the big headlines: the crisis of paper. Paper’s long career as a medium of human communication, and in particular as a purveyor of news, may be ending.
Paper is an increasingly subordinate medium. Like a brain-dead patient on life support, it lives because other technologies allow it to live. The only question, it seems, is when we will put paper out of its misery.
It just sits there, mute and passive, like a dog that knows one trick, waiting to perform it again.
The pertinent question may be not whether the old medium will survive, but whether the new ones will ever escape paper’s enormous shadow.
In a time of distractibility, a paper also keeps you focused.
What if paper somehow influences or shapes the information that newspapers and other paper media produce? It’s a strange idea, one that requires us to imagine paper not just as a container of content, but part of the content itself.
In Baghdad in the year 1226, there were more than one hundred papermakers and booksellers operating on a single street.
Sunless and airless, with pressures that can exceed a ton per square centimeter, the deep ocean is a forbidding place. But it is also a fascinating one, the Earth's largest living realm. Its novel denizens are the subject of The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss — a coffee-table-sized book edited by French journalist Claire Nouvian. It features 200 gorgeous color photographs and 15 short essays by eminent ocean scientists, on subjects ranging from gelatinous predators, seamounts and deepwater coral reefs to hydrothermal vents, methane seeps and deep trenches (some deeper than the height of Mount Everest). Nouvian took her inspiration from a trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, three of whose experts are contributors to the book. The essays, which are aimed at a lay audience, take a backseat to fantastic images of the inhabitants of this alien world. In the deep, biomass is 5,000 times less dense than at the surface, but the species diversity is great, as the book illustrates. Browsers will undoubtedly find the alluring photographs irresistible.
The Academy of Military-Industrial-Complex Studies
Topic: Society
8:53 pm EDT, Sep 15, 2007
In late August, Maryland's Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.
Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or "homeland security science." David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer "Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language."
"The school's built around the marketplace that surrounds the defense industry, but the program's not involved in war or peace. Still, there are some realities about good guys and bad guys that will surely be discussed."
The program was the "brainchild" of Frank Mezzanotte, magnet programs coordinator of Harford County Public Schools.
Mezzanotte was inspired by the opportunities APG has to offer, and that the project was four years in the making.
John Wallace, a science teacher at Edgewood High School, helped in the development of the curriculum.
Wallace, a former Navy commander, retired from APG’s Chemical Biological Defense Command (now the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center) as a command naval liaison. Wallace said he decided to get involved in the program because of his bio chemical warfare background, and because when he served in the Navy he was trained in "disaster preparedness."
"I believe that military and the civilians that work on APG have a lot to offer this exciting program! We have subject matter experts on Explosive ordnance disposal, security operations both physical and intelligence and incident management and response."
The "very substantial withdrawal" Petraeus outlined Monday would keep the buildup in place for as long as possible without extending the tours of soldiers beyond the current limit of 15 months. Taking into account those tour limits, which were increased to their current level earlier this year, those additional troops would have had to come home anyway by the end of August. In essence, Petraeus was arguing Monday for a continuation of the buildup until virtually no more Army and Marine units were available.
There's less than 50% chance that the United States will exist by the middle of this century. And that is actually good news.
This reminds me of The New Middle Ages, an essay by John Rapley in the May/June 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, which Decius and I recommended. That essay is behind a paywall at Foreign Affairs, but if you disable Javascript, you can read it here (via the Wayback machine). (You must disable Javascript because otherwise the page will immediately redirect you to afr.com.)
Rapley writes:
Often what takes place is not so much collapse as reconfiguration -- what some scholars have described as the emergence of a new Middle Ages. And close study suggests that the power of statelets and other new political actors will be less transitory, more significant, and more resistant to intervention than is usually assumed.
What killed off the European Middle Ages was capitalism. In the last decades of the twentieth century, as capitalism began to operate on an increasingly global scale, the nation-state and the other structures and institutions of the modern era started to fray around the edges, leading scholars to talk of a new medievalism.
Wandering through many cities of the developing world today, one comes up against the limits of modernity. Still, although the weakness of the state today is most pronounced in the developing world, the state's retreat is also a global phenomenon. What is emerging is a global economy increasingly centered on what some theorists have called "global cities" -- major urban centers that are connected less to their hinterlands and more to their counterparts elsewhere.
Today, pundits writing about the future of the US empire tend to adopt an inward-looking approach similar to that of earlier generations of historians of the Roman Empire. For example, scholars debate topics such as whether the US economy can bear the cost of maintaining so many overseas military and diplomatic operations. But they tend to neglect the vast portion of humanity kept at bay beyond the empire's borders, who regard it with the same mixture of awe, longing, and bitterness with which the barbarians once regarded the Eternal City.
As states recede and the new medievalism advances, the outside world is destined to move increasingly beyond the control -- and even the understanding -- of the new Rome. The globe's variegated informal and quasi-informal statelike activities will continue to expand, as will the power and reach of those who live by them. The new Romans, like the old, might not enjoy the consequences.
Six years after the attacks of September 11, FP looks back at some of the critical essays and arguments that shaped the international debate on the war on terror.
