Pakistan's tourism ministry designated 2007 as "Destination Pakistan", the year when tourists were urged to discover the country's sights and delights. Their timing couldn't have been worse. A military ruler clinging to power, al-Qaida fanatics hiding in the mountains, suicide bombings booming across the cities - in 2007, Pakistan has become a byword for peril and turmoil.

But there is another Pakistan, one the majority of its 165 million people are more familiar with. It is the thrusting software entrepreneurs and brash new television stations. It is the kite flyers and partygoers and the strangers who insist you sit for a cup of tea. And it is Sehwan Sharif.

The greatest party on earth?

São Paulo is a great city, but not a beautiful city. The ­soot-­darkened buildings of its old business center resist all claims of glamour or novelty. Its periphery is an oceanic sprawl, bursting with gaudy commerce and neighborhoods where many thousands of shacks have become, within a generation, sturdy but nondescript houses of brick and concrete. Its residents are regularly shocked by corruption, prison revolts, failing public education, truck hijackings, armed robberies, and murders at traffic lights.

Yet for all that, São Paulo is a complicated, qualified success. Because of the dynamism and diversity of its economy, and despite its many contradictions, it now may be the most successful “megacity” in the developing world.

..

Great cities have always been hard to manage. Like other complex systems, they grow spontaneously but then demand more management and investment if they are to avoid decay and disintegration. A time comes in the lives of big cities when the need for regulation and rational allocation of space, money, and other resources prevails over impulsive processes. For São Paulo, the beneficiary of so much good fortune, that time is now.

Mending Brazil's Megacity

"Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things."

A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime

Say goodbye to the Information Age. It’s already over.

Ok, not over, completely. These things take time. You don’t just end an “Age” in an instant. But take a look around you and you’ll start to see the beginnings of the end, just about everywhere.

...

Take a look around you, in your own life and work. You might be surprised how often you find yourself craving less information and culling the dead bits from your data (can you say “Spam Filter?” I knew you could.). As you do, savor the end of the Information Age and the beginning of something new…

This is rather anecdotal and trendy, but whatever...

Leaving the Information Age

Automatic Bob Herbert:

According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. “For several months now,” Kruh writes, “as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon.”

What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert’s columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column is just a random recombination of wording from earlier columns.

I spent about fifteen minutes writing software that can generate Bob Herbert columns while using a minimal amount of our Earth’s precious resources.

Behold “Automatic Bob,” the Bob Herbert column generator.

Why Is Bob Herbert Boring?:

The first thing you need to know about New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is that he's always right. No, not in the way a drunk in a bar is always right—Herbert's genuinely right, or at least close enough that it'd be petty to look for exceptions. When the majority loses its bearings, Herbert sticks with the sane minority.

He reports on the disadvantaged and disenfranchised of America, about whom he will tell you things you didn't expect.

Bob Herbert is a sensible person who usually assesses things more accurately than his colleagues, regularly hits the streets to report on the world outside, shines a light on people and issues that deserve far more attention than they usually get, and tells you things you really ought to know but don't. But here's the catch: you don't read Bob Herbert. Or, if you say you do, I don't believe you.

Bob Herbert is the only national columnist at a major newspaper who consistently writes about the issues in our country that matter most yet seem to be covered least.

But, honestly, I don't read him either.

The point is that some columnists are influential because they're interesting, while others are interesting because they're influential.

I asked Herbert why he thinks his columns draw less attention in blogs and other media outlets than those of his colleagues. "The media tends to be drawn like a magnet to power," Herbert said. "Stories about power will generate more chatter." He added: "I think people who are in privileged positions either don't think a lot about people who are not, or don't care about them."

Clearly, then, Bob Herbert is at a disadvantage before he even puts pen to paper. Poor people plus statistics equals boring—we've got the science to prove it.

...

There’s an element of enigma in our relations with animals, even the most familiar. The diamond-collared pug being toted in a Louis Vuitton bag is still, in the end, a beast, as inscrutable to humans as a giant squid. Yet a human takes that pug into her home, feeds him, perhaps lets him sleep in her bed. He will never unfold the secrets of his heart; he will die, in some sense, a mystery. That mystery trumps every anthropomorphizing human accessory, every impulse to interpret or explain. It locks us out.

That may be their highest use, in the end. The pug’s diminutive size and bugged-out, injury-prone eyes are signs of years of human tampering, his plaid coat and booties tokens of the human drive to humanize everything. But the love heaped—even lavished in commodity form—on his warm animal body suggests a human attitude toward the nonhuman world that, for once, is not about mastery. Even in its consumerist drift, it short-circuits market logic by giving without a guaranteed return. There must be some real value in that.

What’s the Use of Pets?

One way that architects determine the livability of a house or office building is through post-occupancy evaluation (Brand 1994, 65-66). Once the new owners have moved in, representatives from the architect, builder, or developer ask a series of questions. Does the roof leak? Is there enough parking? Is the kitchen big enough? Are there enough electrical outlets? Is there room for expansion or reconfiguration to meet changing needs? What do those who live and work in the building like and not like about it? Which design features work well, and which don't? What could have been done better? Are the occupants happy or unhappy with the structure?

Such evaluations are rare enough in the building trade, since architectural artistes would rather move on to new challenges than learn from their past mistakes; but they are unknown when it comes to worldviews. What would a philosophical post-occupancy evaluation look like?

When faced with change, it is better to bend before you break. The best buildings learn. So do the best philosophies. It remains to be seen whether Objectivism can be taught to learn.

The House That Rand Built

Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of sites like MemeStreams: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong?

... In investing so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we missing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism

This is more a political op-ed than a book review, but there are some interesting ideas in play.

In today's splintered society, if you want to operate successfully, you have to understand the intense identity groups that are growing and moving, fast and furious in crisscrossing directions. That is microtrends.

... "the niching of America" : microtrends have replaced macrotrends.

The book is "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes," by Mark J. Penn.

Publishers Weekly says:

Culture buffs, retailers and especially businesspeople for whom "small is the new big" will value this exercise in nano-sociology.

Kirkus says:

will undoubtedly appeal to marketing analysts and armchair sociologists, as well as fans of Megatrends and Malcolm Gladwell.

The Trend in Trends

This is a follow-up to Rising Above The Gathering Storm.

The aviation and telecommunication revolutions have conspired to make distance increasingly irrelevant. An important consequence of this is that US citizens, accustomed to competing with their neighbors for jobs, now must compete with candidates from all around the world. These candidates are numerous, highly motivated, increasingly well educated, and willing to work for a fraction of the compensation traditionally expected by US workers.

If the United States is to offset the latter disadvantage and provide its citizens with the opportunity for high-quality jobs, it will require the nation to excel at innovation -- that is, to be first to market new products and services based on new knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge. This capacity to discover, create and market will continue to be heavily dependent on the nation’s prowess in science and technology.

Indicators of trends in these fields are, at best, highly disconcerting. While many factors warrant urgent attention, the two most critical are these: (1) America must repair its failing K-12 educational system, particularly in mathematics and science, in part by providing more teachers qualified to teach those subjects, and (2) the federal government must markedly increase its investment in basic research, that is, in the creation of new knowledge.

Only by providing leading-edge human capital and knowledge capital can America continue to maintain a high standard of living -- including providing national security -- for its citizens.

Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?