Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather. He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Independence was only a few months away, and the communal violence that would accompany the partition was beginning to simmer.
My great-grandfather was attacked because he was mistaken for a Hindu. This was not surprising; as a lawyer, most of his colleagues were Hindus, as were many of his friends. He would shelter some of their families in his home during the murderous riots that were to come.
But my great-grandfather was a Muslim. More than that, he was a member of the Muslim League, which had campaigned for the creation of Pakistan. From the start, Pakistan has been prone to turning its knife upon itself.
... And now Pakistan is once again turning its knife on itself. Pakistanis must realize that we have been our own worst enemies.
When we look at this question of what explains future growth, it doesn't seem to be very closely tied to accumulation of things.
Most of humanity's wealth isn't made of physical stuff. It is intangible.
That encompasses raw labor; human capital, which includes the sum of a population's knowledge and skills; and the level of trust in a society and the quality of its formal and informal institutions.
Worldwide, "natural capital accounts for 5 percent of total wealth, produced capital for 18 percent, and intangible capital 77 percent."
Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style cause-and-effect and cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another.
Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it--thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.
We need more tinkering: Uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination.
The social news aggregator Digg allows users to submit and moderate stories by voting on (digging) them. As is true of most social sites, user participation on Digg is non-uniformly distributed, with few users contributing a disproportionate fraction of content. We studied user participation on Digg, to see whether it is motivated by competition, fueled by user ranking, or social factors, such as community acceptance. For our study we collected activity data of the top users weekly over the course of a year. We computed the number of stories users submitted, dugg or commented on weekly. We report a spike in user activity in September 2006, followed by a gradual decline, which seems unaffected by the elimination of user ranking. The spike can be explained by a controversy that broke out at the beginning of September 2006. We believe that the lasting acrimony that this incident has created led to a decline of top user participation on Digg.
The incident?
On September 5, 2006, a user posted an analysis of the user activity statistics that, similar to our findings, showed that the top 30 users were responsible for a disproportionate fraction of the front page stories. This analysis meant to support the claim that top users conspired to automatically promote each other’s stories, or as a blogger Michael Arrington put the next day, “a small group of powerful Digg users, acting together, control a large percentage of total home page stories”. Needless to say, these accusations incensed both sides: the general Digg population, who felt that Digg’s democratic ideal was compromised by a ’cabal’ of top users, and the top users, who received the brunt of the anger. The escalating war of words was fought on blogs, Digg’s pages (as evidenced by the spike in activity in early September 2006), and it even attracted the attention of mainstream media. Within days, Digg’s management announced changes to the promotion algorithm that devalued “bloc voting” or votes coming from friends. Top users saw this as a repudiation of their contributions to Digg, and at least one top user, who held the No. 1 position at the time, publicly resigned.
The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques
Topic: Technology
6:06 am EDT, Aug 21, 2007
First, a new model of searching in online and other information systems, called "berrypicking," is discussed. This model, it is argued, is much closer to the real behavior of information searchers than the traditional model of information retrieval is, and, consequently, will guide our thinking better in the design of effective interfaces.
Second, the research literature of manual information seeking behavior is drawn on for suggestions of capabilities that users might like to have in online systems.
Third, based on the new model and the research on information seeking, suggestions are made for how new search capabilities could be incorporated into the design of search interfaces. Particular attention is given to the nature and types of browsing that can be facilitated.
Marcus Griffin is not a soldier. He is actually a professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. He is part of a new Pentagon initiative, the Human Terrain System, which embeds social scientists with brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers to brigade commanders.
Griffin believes that by shedding some light on the local culture -- thereby diminishing the risk that US forces unwittingly offend Iraqi sensibilities -- he can improve Iraqi and American lives. He describes his mission as "using knowledge in the service of human freedom."
The Human Terrain System is part of a larger trend: Nearly six years into the war on terror, there is reason to believe that the Vietnam-era legacy of mistrust -- even hostility -- between academe and the military may be eroding.
Technology has always been about hope. As the pace of technological innovation has intensified over the past two decades, businesses have come to expect that the next new thing will inevitably bring them larger market opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a technology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to this kind of open-ended hope.
... Management became accustomed to the idea that buying more computers and more software would continue to cut costs and improve operations. But there are limits, some of which are inherent in the nature of software itself.
The proposed fix for these problems — the next new thing — is service-oriented architecture.
The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite among a generation or more of programmers who grew up with those construction toys. Unfortunately, however, software does not work as Legos do.
The same people who've been saying for weeks that all was well are now the loudest in urging the Fed to reflate the bubble. These pleaders ignore two major risks.
The first is the "moral hazard" problem of rescuing Wall Street banks and hedge fund players that walked too far on the wild side during the boom. They made money then, and they need to absorb the losses now. Without enduring the discipline of losses, the offenders will go even further out on the risk curve next time.
The second problem is that a Fed reflation could lead to even more trouble if it causes a loss of confidence in the dollar.
Many popular ideas about terrorists and why they seek to harm us are fueled by falsehoods and misinformation. Leading politicians and scholars have argued that poverty and lack of education breed terrorism, despite the wealth of evidence showing that most terrorists come from middle-class, and often college-educated, backgrounds. In What Makes a Terrorist, Alan Krueger argues that if we are to correctly assess the root causes of terrorism and successfully address the threat, we must think more like economists do.
